OUR MISSION IS TO HELP ELEVATE THE PERFORMANCE OF ORGANIZATIONS

The Riven Company works in four areas: Arts & Culture, Education, Social Services and Community Development. We help elevate the performance of organizations working in these fields by offering a range of services including Capacity Building, Board Development, Leadership Development (Coaching) and Fundraising. The Riven Company tailors its services to the needs of each client, but all of our work is informed by an understanding of the developmental cycle of organizations and a belief in the value of relationship building and adaptive leadership. Our team brings many decades of experience. We have gained insight over the years in working with a variety of organizations, and we have seen what works and what does not.

We work with you to:

  • Grow a relevant and dynamic organization that serves your vision, mission and goals.
  • Develop an organizational presence that is exciting and attractive.
  • Manage persistent problems of funding.
  • Improve your ability to tell powerful stories and presentations that link your vision with possibilities for growth.
  • In the field of education, create and manage reform initiatives.
  • In the arts, expand your audience, even in communities saturated with cultural options.

Our role is to serve as counsel. We raise questions, provide different points of view and present options that you may not have considered. We work with you to build impact and sustainability.

The company is led by Stephanie Riven, who has worked for more than 35 years to build institutions and teams in a wide variety of nonprofits. For each client, she assembles a team of professionals – whether they be strategic planners, programmers, writers or researchers – to best meet that client’s specific needs and goals.

Before establishing her own company, Stephanie was an affiliated consultant with David Bury & Associates, a New York-based arts management consulting firm.  She also served as a Visiting Practitioner at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and served as a member of the Arts In Education Advisory Council based at Harvard.

Stephanie is most prominently associated with the Center of Creative Arts (COCA) in St. Louis.  As COCA’s founding executive director, she conceptualized, managed and supervised the organization’s growth from a startup with an annual budget of $80,000 to the fifth largest multi-disciplinary community arts center in the country with a budget of $5 million and $16 million in assets. In 1987, the year of its founding, COCA served 40 children.  Today it serves 50,000 people annually.

Over the course of her tenure at COCA, Stephanie led the organization in raising over $60 million to build operational, capital and programmatic capacity.   The organization received many honors including an Excellence in the Arts Award from the Arts and Education Council and a Coming Up Taller Award from the President’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities.  COCA was also included as one of 12 exemplary organizations in the country in a publication commissioned by the Wallace Foundation and written by Project Zero and the Harvard Graduate School of Education: Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education.  She has received a number of awards including the YWCA Leader Award, the Visionary Arts Award as well as a Distinguished Alumna Award from Washington University in St. Louis and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Arts and Education Council of St. Louis.