About Us
Why We Started
Adaptive Ascent Group exists because the nonprofit sector is full of talented, mission-driven people working in systems that were never designed to support them.
Resource depletion, leadership turnover, reactive decision-making, and the pressure to do more with less — these are not signs of a broken workforce. They are signs of a broken model. And that model is now absorbing new shocks: the fracture of federal funding, generational shifts in fundraising, breakneck AI integration, and the dismantling of programs that took decades to build.
Nonprofits don’t need consultants who show up with a framework and leave a binder. They need experienced, practical partners who have actually done this work. That’s us.
Our North Star
We call it death by a thousand paper cuts. It’s what happens when operational gaps accumulate: unclear roles, inconsistent processes, fragile knowledge management, and leadership turnover without transition plans. Each thing is manageable on its own. Together, they create chaos and grind organizations down.
We built AAG to address that at its root. Not with a pep talk. With practical, embedded operational support that leaves the organization stronger when we’re gone.
What We Value
We work with employees first. If the people delivering the services aren’t trained, supported, and operating in systems that work for them, nothing else holds. When teams are cared for, service quality improves. When service quality improves, community trust follows. When community trust builds, the story tells itself — to funders, to partners, to the next generation of leadership.
We are AI-forward and tech-literate, but we never lose the human thread. Technology is a tool. Your people are the strategy.
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Safety & Security
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Team Work
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Meet The Team
Principal & Founder
Melanie Fisk
Melanie grew up working in her father’s small business alongside employees from a prison release program. Long before ‘socially responsible business’ was a phrase anyone used, her father built his company on trust, service, and second chances. That was the education that mattered most.
Since then, she's spent 20+ years in the nonprofit sector as a frontline worker, a startup executive, a turnaround CEO, and a senior director. She has led agency mergers, managed COVID emergency response for a 400,000-person service organization, launched adult education divisions from zero, and directed national-scale technical assistance for B in federal environmental justice programming.
She holds a BS in Sociology, an MBA in Leadership, an MSW in Administration and Policy, and certifications in Prosci Change Management and IDEO Design Thinking. More importantly, she has been the scrappy ED, the person building the plane while flying it. She consults from that place.
She founded AAG because small and mid-size nonprofits deserve the same caliber of senior-level operational expertise that large organizations hire full-time.
When she’s not in a workshop or buried in a client’s org chart, she’s cooking something elaborate, walking her two rescue dogs, or having the kind of conversation that starts with a hard question and ends three hours later.
L&D & Change Management Advisor
Erik Fullerton
Erik has spent the last 20 years designing and implementing change management and learning programs in both the public and private sectors. He believes in creating education and technical assistance programs that respect the learner's time and focus on building actionable skills as quickly as possible. Currently, he's leading change management for a large federal agency as it transitions its work processes to incorporate AI.
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He brings expertise in learning program design and management, change management, communications, and video production. Erik has an MSEd. in Learning Design and holds PMP, CSM, and Prosci Change Management certifications.
Specialist
Sarah Swain
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Specialist
Kathryn Hatfield Bauchelle
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