Strategy Begins with Community.
De Vera Consulting was founded on a simple belief: the people closest to a challenge are often closest to the solution. We help organizations transform community wisdom into strategy, align values with action, and create lasting change by centering lived experience in decision-making.
Our mission is to help organizations transform community wisdom into stronger systems, shared leadership, and sustainable change. Through strategic planning, facilitation, project management, and lived experience engagement, we help organizations build futures rooted in the communities they serve.
Our Mission
We envision a human services sector where community wisdom is valued as expertise, leadership is shared, and the people most impacted by social challenges play a central role in designing and delivering solutions. Through intentional pathways from lived experience engagement to nonprofit leadership, we believe organizations can become more equitable, effective, and responsive to the communities they serve.
Our Vision
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Mumbai Pride, 2016
A Note from Jake
I am a facilitator, strategist, and nonprofit leader with over a decade of experience in housing, shelter, and social change work. My path began in academia, where I spent five years conducting grassroots research with LGBTQ+ activist communities in India. Living and working alongside organizers fighting to overturn anti-gay laws fundamentally shaped how I understand power, community, and resistance. When I returned to the United States, I knew I couldn’t replicate that sense of community in academia—I wanted to be part of building it.
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Over the past ten years, I have worked in nonprofit leadership roles focused on domestic violence and housing stability. I have spearheaded two capital campaigns, grown grant fundraising programs at multiple organizations, and helped raise more than $60 million to support housing and shelter initiatives.
I currently serve as Co-Executive Director of Women’s Advocates, the first domestic violence shelter in the country. I believe in models of shared power and in including people with lived experience at every level of an organization’s work—from strategy to decision-making to implementation.
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My work is grounded in my own lived experience of domestic violence, substance use disorder, housing instability, and recovery. These experiences inform how I approach leadership, facilitation, and strategy—with a focus on clarity, accountability, and building systems that actually work for the people they are meant to serve.
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I am a creative thinker and a pragmatic problem-solver. I’m particularly drawn to the challenge of building sustainable organizations—figuring out how to navigate the ebb and flow of grant funding and individual giving to meet community needs while supporting staff and maintaining financial stability.
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Through De Vera Consulting, I support organizations navigating growth, transition, and complexity with facilitation, strategy, and organizational development grounded in both lived experience and real-world execution.
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Let's connect,
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Our Values
Share Power.
Embrace Complexity.
We resist false binaries and easy answers. Real work lives in contradiction—urgency and sustainability, care and accountability, vision and constraint.
Lived Experience Is Expertise.
The people closest to the work understand it best. We treat lived experience not as input, but as authority in decision-making.
Strategy Is Practice.
Values are only real if they show up in decisions—budgets, timelines, staffing, and tradeoffs. We focus on what organizations do, not just what they say.
We name, examine, and redistribute power in every room. Strategy is never neutral—it reflects who decides, who benefits, and who is left out.