Twelve months inside a $26M arts center in transition.
An interim Head of People & Culture engagement that expanded well beyond the title: stabilizing operations, rebuilding hybrid culture, and running a values-centered executive search whose full playbook is now public.
Half the staff had never met the other half.
YBCA came out of the pandemic with roughly 50% of its staff hired remotely. The organization was navigating a leadership transition, a newly hybrid workplace with no established norms, and silos that had hardened between teams who had never been in a room together. A 300+ person unionized workforce needed steadiness, and the executive team needed a partner who could hold People & Culture while the organization figured out its next chapter.
The engagement was scoped as interim Head of People & Culture. Within months it expanded to include operations, board relations, and budget transparency work, because that's where the actual constraints were.
Listen, map, then move.
The first weeks were spent understanding the history without being trapped by it: which systems were load-bearing, which were workarounds that had become the operating model, and where staff experience diverged from what leadership believed was happening.
From there, the work was practical. Establishing hybrid workplace norms people could actually follow. Breaking down the silos between pre-pandemic and pandemic-era hires. Building communication rhythms so a distributed, unionized staff could understand decisions and how they got made. Bringing transparency to the budget process so teams could see the constraints they were operating within.
A hiring process designed like it mattered.
Midway through the engagement, YBCA needed to hire a Head of External Relations: a new executive role knitting together fundraising, marketing, and communications teams that had operated separately for years.
Co-led with search partner Katrina Donald, the process was built around a commitment: be as curious, consistent, and transparent with every candidate as the organization would want its future colleagues treated. Candidates received honoraria for interview pre-work. Scenarios came from real staff input. Every stage was designed against the specific knowledge, skills, and abilities the role required, and the committee's reasoning was documented as it went.
When the search concluded, the entire process was published: a 100-page playbook covering every email template, interview design, rubric, and decision point, so other organizations could borrow what worked.
The measure of interim work is what's still standing.
Every email template, interview design, rubric, honorarium decision, and committee debrief from the YBCA Head of External Relations search. Published with YBCA's blessing as a resource for organizations that want to hire differently.