Different Perspectives. One Shared Purpose.
At the Center for Coaching Strategies, we know that the right coaching relationship matters. No single coach, approach, or area of expertise fits every person or organization. That is why we created the Coaching Core, a carefully selected network of professional coaches who expand the depth, expertise, and reach of Coaching Strategies. Each member of the Coaching Core brings a distinct coaching practice, professional background, and area of specialization. Together, their experience spans executive and organizational leadership, career and life transitions, resilience, neurodiversity, cognition and learning, nonprofit leadership, business, organizational change, and complex systems. What connects them is a shared commitment to coaching that recognizes the person behind the role and creates the conditions for meaningful, sustainable growth.
Explore each coach's profile. Visit their website. Learn about their approach and areas of expertise. Then connect directly with the coach you believe is best positioned to support what you need right now.
A Coaching Strategies Trusted Network
Coaching Strategies provides the platform for the Coaching Core, while each coach maintains their own independent coaching practice, services, availability, and rates. Clients interested in working with an individual coach will connect directly with that coach to discuss services and establish a coaching relationship. For organizations, community partners, and funders, the Coaching Core also represents something larger: capacity. Coaching Strategies has developed a multidisciplinary coaching team with ICF-credentialed professionals and expertise across multiple sectors, allowing us to assemble coaching support around the needs of a project, organization, workforce, or funded initiative.
One shared purpose: developing people, strengthening organizations, and creating the human conditions that allow individuals and systems to thrive.
Rachael Young - ACC, Simple Patterns Coaching
My name is Rachael, and I've worked in education and youth empowerment services for over a decade. I hold a Bachelor of Education from the University of British Columbia and am an Associate Certified Coach (ACC) with the International Coach Federation. I have professional training and experience working with neurodivergent youth, as well as lived experience with disability and neurodevelopmental disorders. My coaching specialization is in working with teens and families with ADHD, with an additional focus of supporting girls, women, and 2e youth. I respect the challenges faced by young people, families, and girls & women with ADHD, and believe that harnessing the inherent inventiveness & creativity of ADHD is the foundation for growth. It's an honor to be part of the journey with people and to witness and celebrate their effort and successes along the way. I grew up in the Canadian Pacific Northwest, traveled and moved around a whole lot after university, and then immigrated to the USA with my family to settle in Eugene, Oregon, in 2012. I like chickens, playing Irish folk music, and cracking eye-wateringly bad jokes.
Peter Dudley - PCC, Gray Bear Advisors
Life has thrown me a lot of challenges (the kind we don’t post on Facebook), and if there’s one true thing I’ve learned, it’s that a new life lesson is always just around the corner. I’m a Gen Xer. My parents divorced when I was too young to understand. I grew up in suburban Connecticut with summers in Las Vegas two very different worlds and worldviews, both of which left their imprint on me. I got my degree in Electrical Engineering at UC Berkeley and then kicked off a career that has wound its way through technical writing, marketing, product management, communications, human resources, employee engagement, corporate responsibility, and nonprofit leadership. I’ve worked in startups, nonprofits, and Fortune 100 companies. I’ve started a few companies, including this Gray Bear brand.
Executive and Leadership Coaching
I help effective managers grow into extraordinary leaders. I’ve built and led high-performing and highly engaged teams for over 30 years in startups, nonprofits, and huge companies. With over 20 years in social impact and employee engagement, and another decade in tech startups, I’ve been through almost every business situation you can throw at me. Go ahead. Bring it.
Life Coaching
Who doesn’t want to live a fulfilling life with courage and intention? You don’t know how long you’ll live, but you know it won’t be forever. Live life the way you truly want, in a way that honors your core values, enhances the relationships that are most important, and sets future-you up for fulfillment and contentment. There’s no better day than today to start.
Keven Renner, MBA - Executive Coaching
Kevin Renner brings significant executive and organizational leadership experience to the Coaching Strategies team. His work spans healthcare, technology, government, higher education, nonprofit organizations, entrepreneurship, and global business environments. As a transformation and leadership coach, he supports purpose-driven executives, managers, and organizations through growth and transition and has worked with C-suite and emerging leaders associated with organizations including Microsoft, Barclays, Kaiser Permanente, The World Bank, Daimler, CIBC, Stanford Business School, the University of California, and the Oregon Executive MBA Program.
Kevin adds valuable firsthand understanding of what leadership looks like from inside complex organizations. Early in his career he helped found the Portland Business Journal, and then went on to receive his MBA at Berkeley. His career has included general management, responsibility, strategic planning, marketing, product leadership, organizational growth, business development, innovation, global team leadership, and board-facing responsibilities. He has led organizations and business units through significant growth, helped scale companies and products, managed multimillion dollar operations and budgets, and worked across global technology, healthcare, government technology, and entrepreneurial environments including eight Inc.-5000 firms. The companies he has helped grow to record revenue include ventures funded by prominent private equity and venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Highland Capital Partners, Dell Ventures, Claritas Capital, Bridge Builders Collaborative, Peloton Equity, Trident Capital Cybersecurity, and Quad Partners. Kevin serves as a board member with a large regional nonprofit, and teaches on the business school faculties at Washington State University and Pacific University.
Leilani Sáez, PhD, ACC - Natural Capacities, LLC
Originally trained through the Life Purpose Institute, as a former learning disabilities researcher, my coaching is grounded in a deep understanding of brain/cognitive functioning. I use a mental resilience approach that helps clients identify and address (often hidden) sources of cognitive overload that undermine thinking and performance. After years of addressing working memory processing, I understand how specific demands create obstacles to clear thinking, focus, remembering, and work completion. Clients include individuals with ADD/ADHD or anxiety, brain fog sufferers, and stressed-out midlife adults. Often, they feel like their brains are broken when really, the breakdown is in the context (the unseen factors restricting their ability to think well in a particular system).
My work creates practical insights, structures, and habits that are especially beneficial when thinking is most effortful: newly onboarded staff learning key skills and knowledge, managers overwhelmed by role responsibilities, and seasoned employees experiencing shifts in their cognitive functioning (due to brain-based changes or chronic high stress). Clients say I combine science with heart. Together, we redesign their approach to mental management to better tap into their natural capacities..
Joan Flora, EdD, PCC- Inner Sage: Lead With Confidence
The habits that make you successful can also become the habits that hold you back. Under pressure, you may overuse what you’re already good at. Decisiveness becomes impatience. Responsibility becomes taking over. High standards become control. Confidence makes it harder to listen. I know the pattern. As a leader, my instinct in conflict was to explain, justify, and defend. It projected competence and left me depleted. Eventually, I realized that conflict wasn’t the problem. Getting emotionally hooked was. The work is learning to recognize when a trusted leadership strength has gone on autopilot and choosing what the moment actually requires. From there, you can choose wise action. Leadership development isn’t always about adding another skill. Sometimes it’s about using the strengths you already have more skillfully. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s to notice sooner, recover faster, and choose what happens next.
Danielle Cunningham, ACC - Leadership & Innovation
Danielle Cunningham is the Founder, Executive Director, and CEO of the Center for Coaching Strategies, where she brings together coaching, leadership development, program design, and collaborative strategy to turn ideas into meaningful, sustainable initiatives. Danielle is particularly skilled at taking an emerging concept sometimes beginning with little more than a need, a question, or a vision and helping shape it into a structured model with clear objectives, partnerships, implementation strategies, and opportunities for growth. Her professional experience includes developing scalable program systems, leading strategic planning, designing leadership and business cohorts, coordinating cross-organizational initiatives, and building programs that respond to real workforce and community needs.
An ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC), Danielle brings a coaching mindset to program development and collaboration. Her approach is grounded in curiosity, trust, reflection, and the belief that people already hold valuable knowledge and capacity that can be uncovered and developed through the right questions, relationships, and opportunities. Whether she is developing a new initiative, supporting an entrepreneur, convening partners, or helping an organization think differently about a workforce challenge, Danielle's work centers on one question: How do we take a meaningful idea and build the relationships, structure, resources, and strategy needed to make it possible?