Community Engagement
Planning
Understand how you engage community today and choose a practical path forward.
Community-centered strategy & learning
Bring community insight
into the decisions
that shape your funding.
Amaya Consulting & Advisory LLC helps foundations turn what they hear from communities into strategy, grantmaking, and learning.
Find your starting point15+ years across the social impact fieldImmigrant & refugee community expertiseExperience as a funder, direct service provider & intermediary
Ways to work together
A thoughtful place to start.
Room to go deeper.
For small, mid-sized, and family foundations. Each offering stands on its own, with scope shaped to your goals and capacity.
Community Engagement
Listening & Learning
Hear candidly from grantees and community partners, then turn their experiences into recommendations you can use.
Grantmaking Strategy
& Design
Bring community priorities into your funding goals, criteria, and learning agenda.
Participatory
Grantmaking
Build a clear, supported process for community members to shape funding decisions.
Areas of expertise
The expertise behind the work.
These strengths shape how I approach every engagement.
Immigrant & refugee communities
Apply an immigrant lens to your grantmaking and strengthen how you reach immigrant-led organizations.
Trust-based & equity-centered grantmaking
Design processes that reduce grantee burden and make shared decision-making practical.
Inclusive facilitation & consensus building
Facilitation for convenings, retreats, advisory committees, and board sessions, with different ways to take part.
Research & analysis
Stakeholder interviews, focus groups, surveys, and clear findings briefs your team can use.
Project management
Hands-on support for grantmaking cycles, initiative launches, and projects involving multiple partners.
These areas can also be scoped as standalone support, on a limited basis as my schedule allows.
Karla Gregorio · Founder & Principal
Meet Karla
A perspective from
every side of the work.
I’ve been a funder, a direct service provider, and an intermediary. Over 15+ years, I’ve seen how decisions move inside a foundation—and how they’re experienced by the people and organizations receiving funding.
Immigrant and refugee communities are my specialization, and immigrant communities are my own. That lived experience shapes how I build relationships and design every process.
Through Amaya, I work alongside your team to build the structures that turn listening into decisions you can act on.
Karla Gregorio
FOUNDER & PRINCIPAL
Experience inside foundations
I’ve led participatory grantmaking in practice, with the governance and follow-through needed to make it work.
Space for candid conversations
As an independent facilitator, I help surface perspectives partners may hesitate to share directly with a funder.
Clear findings. Practical next steps.
Careful research, inclusive facilitation, and disciplined project management connect insight to action.
Selected experience
Commitments made practical.
Community-shaped grantmaking
Led a participatory grantmaking initiative centered on immigrant leadership, with community participants shaping the process.
Advisory bodies with influence
Designed and facilitated community advisory bodies that embedded community expertise in funding strategy.
Learning that informs decisions
Co-developed learning and accountability systems with community partners, connecting feedback to strategy and program refinement.
Start a conversation
What are you hoping
to learn or change?
You don’t need a fully formed project. We can start with where you are, what you’re trying to achieve, and what your team has capacity for.
From there, I’ll shape a proposal with clear deliverables, timing, and fees.