Services & Work Examples | Patelana Group

Services

Primary & Secondary Research

Grant Scouting & Writing

Advocacy Strategy Planning

Health Policy & Partnerships

Strategic Communications

Meeting Facilitation

Alabama Food Policy Council

The Alabama Food Policy Council was a loose coalition, with many priorities and stakeholders but no coherent vision other than there was a lot of work to be done.

Together with stakeholders across the State, we managed this loose coalition in conjunction with Auburn University and AARP Foundation. We created a participatory, qualitative and quantitative survey instrument outlining policy priorities and areas for engagement that provided direction and focus.

See our Participatory Research Framework and Final White Paper below:

AARP Foundation

AARP Foundation wanted to play ball in the food policy arena, but internal constraints and conflict held them back. Different divisions weren't working together well because there was no clear Enterprise-wide strategy for food & nutrition policy work despite being critically important for Americans 50+. The task was akin to herding cats, except all the cats were mountain lions.

So, we found a way to collaborate and communicate across the Enterprise, making sure business units were in sync and moving together to achieve mutually-shared and individual goals.

The result? AARP's first ever testimony in front of the House Agriculture Committee, a stronger public voice on the issue of senior nutrition, and a revamped internal strategy around nutrition advocacy. See some of the results below:

Meals on Wheels America

In 2013, Meals on Wheels America had a big problem, a $51 million problem in the form of Sequestration cuts that impacted their member programs' ability to meet the rising tide of senior hunger in America.

So, we got to work. We revamped the Advocacy strategy to leverage their volunteer Board of Directors, comprised of program leaders from across the country. We adjusted our messaging to highlight the human and financial impacts of these cuts and took these messages to the exact stakeholders that needed to hear them using new, creative tactics. The result? $46 million in funding restored, and consistent funding growth since.

We also worked to improve awareness of senior hunger in the broader anti-hunger movement by focusing on telling intergenerational stories and finding ways to collaborate with other anti-hunger organizations.

See some of examples of the work done below:

Op-Eds

Over the years, I've been tapped to write op-eds, both in my own voice and as a ghostwriter in outlets such as The Hill, AL.com, and The Crimson White. Here are some examples:

Alabama LGBTQ Alumni Association

Together with friends, we helped establish the Alabama LGBTQ Alumni Association, a Chapter of The University of Alabama National Alumni Association. Creating a list of names and e-mails from scratch based on word of mouth and social media outreach, it was founded in 2018 and has since leveraged creative grassroots & planned giving, events, and creative brand partnerships to:

Establish two perpetually endowed scholarships for LGBTQIA+ and ally students at The University of Alabama, the Elliott Jackson Jones Memorial Endowed Scholarship and The 1983 Alumni Scholarship Fund (approximately $70,000 in endowment corpus to date),
Administer nearly $4,400 in COVID-19 emergency grants in Spring 2020, and
Establish a permanent emergency fund for students facing crisis, including lost work, housing, or healthcare due to being LGBTQIA+.

Food & Friends

Food & Friends is Washington, D.C.'s medically-tailored meal agency, specializing in providing specific nutrition and nutrition counseling to individuals living with HIV/AIDS, cancer, diabetes, and other diet-related illnesses. As a CBO, they were always searching for new, consistent and innovative revenue streams, and then the COVID-19 pandemic happened, revving up demand and introducing even more operational difficulties.

In conjunction with the team, we helped secure over $5 million in annual and emergency grants (at the time, nearly half the budget), expanded operational capacity around evaluation (when a funder asks you to throw together an evaluation plan in three business days, you do it), expanded partnerships with healthcare providers including improving access to and use of clinical data, expanded our policy partnerships by participating in campaigns such as #GiveSNAPARaise and the Food Is Medicine Coalition, and created opportunities for elected officials to be visible in their communities.

Double Up Food Bucks Mississippi

Erin W. Smith knew she had to keep the energy going around her SNAP Incentive program serving farmers markets and retailers throughout some of the most food insecure counties in Mississippi, but when a major funder pulled out, she found herself with a large GusNIP grant application in her lap. Thanks to Fair Food Network she knew she had the matching funds to make it work, but the application was daunting.

Together, we worked with Erin to complete her first GusNIP application, ultimately receiving $841,000 for a multi-year GusNIP grant, which now carries on and has expanded as Double Up Food Bucks Mississippi.

Black Film Archive

After the acclaimed 2021 launch of her pandemic passion project, Black Film Archive's founder Maya Cade found herself wondering what was next for both herself and the project. Then she saw funding was available to become a Scholar In Residence at the Library of Congress, and that the application was due in a week.

We rolled up our sleeves, talked to Maya about her vision and refined her ideas around how she hoped to contribute to scholarship and share her work interactively with the American Public. Maya not only received $100,000 in funding over two years, she continues to expand her work across several domains.

Check out tenderness.blackfilmarchive.com to see the culmination of her initial work with the Library.