Scott Schaffer
Senior Associate
Scott Schaffer is a Senior Associate with La Piana Consulting. With over 20 years in the nonprofit sector, he brings expertise in organizational development, strategic restructuring, business planning, and financial analysis.
Scott held three chief executive positions prior to joining the firm. He led Philabundance, Philadelphia’s major food relief organization, NPower, a national nonprofit technology resource, and Olympic Park Institute, an innovative environmental learning center in Washington state. He also served as Executive VP of NatureBridge, the largest provider of residential environmental education in the U.S. He has a track record of transforming nonprofits into efficient, sustainable, high-impact operations.
He believes partnerships between organizations and fresh approaches to management are two keys to building effective organizations, and he has put these principles into practice throughout his career. He has forged diverse alliances between nonprofits and across sectors to improve services, build the scale of programs, and secure new and stable funding sources. In 2000, he played an instrumental role in the merger of two national hunger relief networks, America’s Second Harvest and Foodchain.
Over the years he has also initiated new organizations focused on housing advocacy, science education, and nonprofit capacity-building. Most recently, Scott has co-led the development of a new La Piana Consulting methodology that applies economic analysis to the tasks of testing and defining sustainable nonprofit business models.
Scott holds an MPP degree from the Harvard Kennedy School, a BS from Carnegie Mellon University, and a nonprofit executive management certificate from Columbia Business School.
Off the clock, he is a guitarist, an avid hiker in the Pacific Northwest, and an occasional author on topics ranging from management to public policy to baseball history.
