Four Years of Evenings & Weekends: A Note from the Co-Founders

There’s a unique kind of trust that builds when you’ve worked alongside someone across chapters of your life—through different roles, different pressures, different kinds of wins and setbacks.

Before Evenings & Weekends Consulting, we worked together in the nonprofit sector as leaders. We worked together on political campaigns. And now, for the past four years, we’ve built this organization side by side.

Somewhere along the way, something quietly remarkable happened: we became the person each of us has worked with longer than anyone else.

That feels worth pausing on.

Where It All Began

Evenings & Weekends Consulting didn’t start with a business plan. It started with a shared belief that we could leverage our experience and that of the communities we would collaborate with, to make important change happen. Change that was more grounded in relationships and aligned with the values we were trying to advance.

Our very first client was the Parkdale Community Food Bank.

That partnership set the tone for everything that followed. It reminded us that the work we care about most is relational and rooted in trust. It showed us that good work happens when people come together with honesty, clarity, and a shared commitment to doing better.

From there, things grew.

Over the past four years, we’ve had the privilege of working on projects that stretch across the sector, from strategic planning with organizations like The Walrus, to developing organizational values for George Brown College, and matching several executive directors & CEOS to incredible organizations, to research, equity audits, and campaigns with partners like the Canadian Women’s Foundation and the Canadian Association of Midwives.

We’ll still never forget the say we opened our inbox to an email from the United Nations Refugee Agency wanting to collaborate on the development of their fundraising guidelines, which gave us the opportunity to work with refugees from various parts of the world.

Each project has been different. Each has mattered.

To Our Clients and Partners

Thank you for trusting us, not just with your work, but with your curiosity and willingness to dream in colour.

You’ve invited us into complex moments: periods of growth, uncertainty, transition, struggle, and ambition. You’ve been willing to engage deeply, to challenge assumptions, and to imagine new possibilities.

We’ve never seen our role as “experts with answers.” The most meaningful work we’ve done has been alongside you: listening, facilitating, building, and sometimes sitting in the discomfort that real change requires.

The outcomes matter. But the relationships have mattered too.

To Our Team and Collaborators

Evenings & Weekends has never just been the two of us.

Our core team and extended network of collaborators have shaped every piece of this work. The care, skill, and thoughtfulness you bring to facilitation, analysis, storytelling, strategy, and community engagement are what make this work what it is.

You’ve helped build a culture that reflects what we believe in:

• That joy belongs in this work

• That people deserve to thrive, not just survive or produce

• That curiosity and courage can coexist

To the Leaders and Communities We Work Alongside

We’ve had the privilege of working with emerging leaders, under-resourced organizations, and communities navigating complex systems with incredible determination.

Through our commitments, like dedicating time to pro bono projects and through our collaboration with the Circle on Philanthropy, we have been able to help advance Indigenous-led solutions. We’ve tried to ensure that our work stays connected to the broader purpose that brought us here in the first place.

You continue to challenge and inspire us.

What Has Guided Us

From the beginning, we’ve tried to build this work on a set of values that feel both grounding and demanding:

A commitment to equity and justice.

A responsibility to reconciliation.

A belief in joy.

A practice of learning and unlearning.

A willingness to be courageous.

These aren’t things we’ve “figured out.” They’re things we keep returning to.

Looking Ahead

Four years in, we don’t feel like we’ve arrived anywhere in particular.

If anything, we feel more curious. More committed. More aware of both the possibilities and the responsibilities of this work.

We’re excited to keep building:

• Deeper relationships

• Stronger organizations

• More thoughtful, community-rooted approaches to change

And to keep doing it in a way that feels aligned with our values, with each other, and with the people we work alongside.

Thank You

To everyone who has been part of Evenings & Weekends Consulting so far: the team, our friends & families, clients and collaborators:

Thank you for trusting us.

Thank you for working alongside us.

Thank you for helping shape what this has become.

And to each other, thank you for the partnership, the honesty, the shared commitment, the willingness to try, and the many, many conversations (and belly laughs) that got us here.

We’re proud of what we’ve built. And we’re grateful to keep building it together, and with all of you.

Laëtitia & Paul

Good Friends + Co-Founders, Evenings & Weekends Consulting