Bayleaf Consulting serves executive directors, senior leaders, and foundation program officers at civic, arts, and culture organizations. Clients are typically respected leaders with high community trust who are not navigating legal or crisis situations but want to do better, grow more intentional, and build infrastructure that lasts.
Organizations typically operate with annual budgets of $1 million or more. Board members and governance leaders engaged in planning processes are also part of the core audience. Bayleaf is based in St. Louis and actively seeks relationships with regional and national foundations interested in systems-level organizational development work. The practice has full capacity for national and international engagements.
Founder Ellie Scott brings nearly ten years of experience across nonprofit, civic, arts, and corporate contexts. She is a certified facilitator and a certified Strategic Doing practitioner. Her academic background includes a Master of Arts in History with a public history focus, grounded in how communities relate to place and how that shapes what people expect from the world around them, and a Bachelor of Arts with a focus on post-pandemic societies and how communities rebuild after collapse. Both are integrated directly into the consulting practice.
Bayleaf has served organizations including Forward Through Ferguson, Great Rivers Greenway, and Missouri Foundation for Health. All services are structured for grant eligibility under capacity building, leadership development, and organizational development categories.
Bayleaf Consulting was founded because the same problem kept showing up: organizations offering things people did not ask for and wondering why the programs were not working. The answer, almost always, was that the people the program was designed for had never been part of building it. Ellie Scott started Bayleaf to fix that.
The practice is rooted in a project management discipline built over nearly a decade, combined with a historian's ability to take complex, competing perspectives and translate them into a narrative that reflects as many voices as possible. The core belief is that when communities are part of building something, they are more likely to show up for it, defend it when it struggles, and tell others about it.