Cary has three decades of experience in building and nurturing strategic alliances. In the seventies he orchestrated an alliance responding to NYC`s fiscal crisis. In the eighties, he led religious organizations and civil rights groups opposing apartheid. He created an alliance for the NFL Players Association, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the National Conference of Black Lawyers on behalf of athletes' rights. Recently, Cary launched the Dropout Summit which included the United Way, America`s Promise, the UFT, State Farm, and others combating the dropout epidemic. Finally, he built a partnership between the City and the UN to celebrate International Youth Day. In his current position, Cary is creating an alliance of small businesses, nonprofits, elected officials and the Yankees. Cary attended Colgate University, received a Masters from TC-Columbia University, and obtained a Ph.D. from Union Institute.

Shelly has been involved in nonprofit strategy consulting for 10 years. In her current position, she is responsible for the nonprofit and international practices at TCC Group in addition to being the CFO for the firm. Over the past ten years she has consulted with dozens of nonprofits ranging from start-up organizations, to mature national nonprofits in a variety of fields. In addition she has done significant work with a variety of foundations, particularly health care foundations, and conversion foundations. Her focus has been strategy, building strategic alliances, organizational development, governance and leadership development. Previously, as Deputy Executive Director at The International Clinical Epidemiology Network, Shelly was responsible for oversight of a 24-country network of medical schools. In addition to overall program management, Kessler’s responsibilities included strategic planning, new initiative development, and fund diversification. She earned her MA in International relations from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a BA in History from Brown University.

John has a long history in capacity building for nonprofit and HIV/AIDS organizations, having served as the Director of Technical Assistance Programs for the NY AIDS Coalition where he also served as Project Director of The Collaboration Project. He has since worked for other capacity-building technical assistance and as an independent consultant. He has also presented workshops and trainings on collaboration, including at the national conference of the Alliance for Nonprofit Management. He has worked on the whole range of organizational collaboration from program linkage agreements to strategic alliances to mergers. His expertise is program design and evaluation, collaboration and strategic alliances. An ordained minister, John holds a Master of Divinity from New York Theological Seminary, and serves as a part-time pastor.