About Human+Kind, LLC
My team offers consulting services to nonprofit organizations, governmental entities, and individuals. We prioritize the needs, desires, and potential of the people we serve. Our consulting services are dedicated to strengthening people, processes, and resources to achieve sustained success by collaborating directly with individuals, nonprofit staff, leaders, and communities to understand their distinct needs, challenges, and objectives.
We collaboratively design solutions that cultivate leadership and management competencies, thereby enhancing operational effectiveness and establishing long-term organizational capacity and sustainability. Our methodology ensures that resources are judiciously invested in solutions that directly support the organization’s mission and goals. We integrate human-centered design (HCD) with nonprofit capacity building, utilizing HCD principles such as empathy and collaborative problem-solving to develop and refine organizational talent, processes, and operations, ensuring solutions are created in partnership with and for the constituents they are intended to serve.
Peggy Fiedler
Peggy Fiedler, M.S., Principal of Human+Kind, established her consulting business following over 20 years in the field of capacity building. This experience includes more than two decades dedicated to nonprofit organizational development, where she served as a Program Manager for the Program to Aid Citizen Enterprise’s (PACE) Intensive Services Program. In this role, she provided capacity-building programming, grants management and communications. Ms. Fiedler also contributed to event planning and fundraising for PACE and participated in external capacity-building consulting as a member of the PACE consulting team.
Prior to her tenure at PACE, Ms. Fiedler held positions as a Development Officer and Director of Marketing within the St. Francis Health System. She holds a Master of Science degree in Professional Leadership from Carlow University, as well as certificates in Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution and Professional Coaching from Duquesne University. Furthermore, she has served as adjunct faculty at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, teaching in the graduate Leadership Program.
Lucille E. Dabney
Lucille E. Dabney, MBA, Senior Consultant, upon retirement in the field of nonprofit capacity-building, enjoys a practice as an executive leadership coach and consultant. She served for 20 years as the President & CEO of Program to Aid Citizen Enterprise (PACE). PACE, with a mission to advance a more equitable community by increasing the capacity of individuals, groups and organizations that challenge injustice.
Luci has over thirty years’ experience in the nonprofit, corporate, small business, and higher education fields. Prior to moving to Pittsburgh, she consulted nationally as Dabney and Associates. She was the Executive Director of the then Cultural Arts Council of Houston/ Harris County (CACHH) supervising a $7 million grants program that annually awarded funds to 140 arts and non-arts organizations and 40 individual artists.
Luci is a founder and past chairperson of the board of the Alliance for Nonprofit Management, a national organization with a mission to increase the effectiveness of individuals and organizations that help nonprofits build their power and impact. She currently serves as: a board member of the POISE Foundation and an advisory board member of Crossroads Foundation, a founding member of The Sankofa Fund of Southwestern Pennsylvania, a giving circle and a member of the International Coaching Federation.
An alumnus of the Amherst Wilder Foundation’s James P. Shannon Leadership Institute, she is passionate about the role that community-based nonprofit organizations and their leaders play in building livable communities through increasing social justice, educational and economic opportunities, safety, cultural awareness and participation, health and democracy.
She earned her Bachelor’s in Business Administration from the University of Michigan and a Masters Degree in Business Administration from the University of Houston. She also holds a certification in Professional Coaching from Duquesne University’s Palumbo Donahue School of Business.
Permission to Live
ABOUT MY BOOK
After investing the better part of a decade caring for dying parents, then a dying husband, Peggy Fiedler learns three weeks after being widowed that she has life-threatening cancer. Like many caregivers emerging from a long season of investing in everyone but herself, Peggy was depleted. But she chooses differently: She chooses to walk through the experience with dignity, receiving back in in joyful community that care she had distributed into every nook and cranny of her life. Through that experience, she emerges with a triumphant lesson in what it means to give oneself permission to live.
Journey through My Garden
COMING SOON
These images from my garden provide the perfect symbols and metaphoric language as an introduction to me, Peggy Fiedler, and my upcoming book Permission to Live.
When I think about how to explain what I mean about our interdependence as vital for healing—about the importance of self-care and reliance on a network of love around you—all I need to do is turn to my garden.
A garden is a place that reminds us to cultivate our sacred values. We must tend to these as much as we would attend to the hurts of physical body. We must remember, too, that any time something threatens the physical body, it affects us emotionally and spiritually as well.
The news that you are facing a life-threatening illness can be such an emotional blow that we are thrown off balance. Our sense of self-reliance is shattered, and in our culture that’s a double blow, because self-sufficiency seems to be the medal of achievement, the pinnacle of worthiness. Our sense of self-reliance, then, must be reconstituted in a new way that installs us into a framework that includes resourceful, knowledgeable and kind allies in healing.
Gardens hold spiritual space for us. They create a certain sanctuary that protects us as well as an invitation to open our hearts. They remind us of the healing power of the aesthetic. In a beautiful garden, we can bathe in appreciation and know we are accompanied.