Today we’d like to introduce you to Dr. Chantelle George.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My story starts in Louisiana, but Houston is where I became who I am.
I grew up in a state that taught me early that community is everything — that the people around you either open doors or help you find them. That belief carried me west on I-10 to the University of Houston, where I earned my Master’s in Higher Education Administration, and where Houston quickly stopped feeling like a destination and started feeling like home.
My roots in this city run deep. I spent years inside the University of Houston system — advising students, building community partnerships, learning what it really means to walk alongside someone who isn’t sure they belong in higher education. Those years shaped everything that came after.
From UH, I moved into some of Houston’s most important education ecosystems. At YES Prep Public Schools, I directed transition and alumni support, working to ensure students didn’t just graduate — they landed. Through College Possible Texas and the Greater Houston Opportunity Youth Coalition, I deepened my understanding of what opportunity gaps really look like for Houston’s young people, and what it takes to close them. At OneGoal, I grew into a national leadership role — securing $13M in philanthropic capital, building 30+ institutional partnerships, and expanding across seven regional markets — but Houston was always the heartbeat of that work.
My client work with Houston Independent School District and Bottom Line has continued through my consulting practice. These aren’t just client relationships — they’re part of a long-term commitment to making sure Houston students have real, sustained pathways into and through college and careers.
In 2021, in the midst of the pandemic, I took a leap of faith and launched CG Consulting while working on my doctorate degree at LSU. During these four years, I found myself still very connected to Houston. The city has always embraced me both personally and professionally. I’m back and forth consistently, and the work I do here — with HISD, University of Houston, Bottom Line, and community partners across the city — is some of the work I’m most proud of.
I’m a Louisiana girl who grew up professionally in Houston, built a national practice, and now split my time coming back because this city gave me so much. Now I’m here to give it back.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Smooth? No. Worth it? Absolutely.
I think anyone who tells you entrepreneurship and social impact work is a smooth road is either very lucky or not being fully honest. Mine has been neither smooth nor straight — and I’ve made peace with that.
The first real struggle was internal. When you spend your career inside institutions — universities, school districts, nonprofits — you have structure, a title, a team, a paycheck every two weeks. The moment I launched CG Consulting, all of that disappeared. Just me, my expertise, and the belief that it was enough. Those early days of building a client base from scratch, writing proposals into the unknown, wondering if the next contract would come — that tests you in ways a job never does.
Being a Black woman building a consulting practice in education and social impact adds another layer entirely. I’ve sat in rooms where my credentials were questioned before I finished a sentence. I’ve had to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously. I’ve watched opportunities go to people with less experience and more familiarity — and had to decide, every single time, whether I was going to shrink or stand firm. I chose to stand firm. Every time.
There’s also the particular weight of doing this work in communities you genuinely love. When you care deeply about students and families, the young people moving through these systems — it’s not a job you leave at the office. The wins feel enormous and the gaps feel personal. Learning to carry that without being consumed by it has been its own ongoing practice.
And then there’s the season I’m in right now — managing a growing portfolio of organizations and engagements while also showing up for my family in ways I didn’t anticipate. Life has a way of reminding you that you are a whole person, not just a professional. Learning to lead through personal weight while still delivering for clients and scholars — that’s the work no one puts on a resume, but it’s some of the most important work I’ve done.
What’s kept me going is simple: I know why I’m doing this. And that why is always bigger than whatever obstacle is in front of me.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
At the core of everything I do is one belief: community-centered strategy isn’t a slide deck. It’s relationships built over time, partnerships that actually hold, and work honest enough to outlast the engagement.
I started CG Consulting because I wanted to build what I didn’t see. In my years moving through the education and nonprofit sector, I rarely encountered consultants of color — and almost never Black women. And to be completely frank, the consultants I did encounter often left me underwhelmed. The advice felt disconnected from reality. The frameworks felt borrowed. The lived experience felt absent. I sat in enough rooms to know that I understood these communities, these challenges, and these systems as well as — if not better than — the people being paid to advise on them. So I stopped waiting for someone else to show up and decided to show up myself.
That decision became CG Consulting.
At the core of everything I do is one belief: community-centered strategy isn’t a slide deck. It’s relationships built over time, partnerships that actually hold, and work honest enough to outlast the engagement.
CG Consulting is a nationally recognized and certified strategic consulting firm built for mission-driven organizations navigating defining moments. New markets. New leadership. New revenue models. That’s exactly where we do our best work — and where the stakes are highest for the communities our clients serve.
Our mission is simple: we turn bold ideas into sustainable action. We strengthen strategy, operations, and partnerships so that leaders can operate with clarity and drive measurable, lasting impact.
What we do lives across four areas of service.
Program Strategy — execution-focused roadmaps that align programs to revenue and long-term growth. Executive Coaching — leadership development that builds management culture, accountability, and strategic clarity, including 1:1 C-suite coaching and high-stakes group facilitation. Partnership Engagement — strategic partnership development that drives growth through high-leverage collaborations, including cultivation, evaluation, and contract development. And Fractional C-Suite Support — senior capacity embedded inside your organization without a full-time hire. We step in as Chief of Staff, Chief Growth Officer, Chief Program Officer, or Chief Partnerships Officer — and we hit the ground running.
Our four pillars of excellence define how we create impact:
We unlock institutional revenue — building enterprise-level partnerships with funders, corporations, and public institutions including the NFL, Amazon Career Choice, the Gates Foundation, HISD, Apple Music, and FIFA. We help organizations enter new markets with confidence — leading end-to-end market entry through stakeholder mapping, MOU negotiation, partnership pipelines, and launch strategy, most recently guiding Bottom Line’s expansion into Houston ISD. We build the leadership infrastructure that scale requires — coaching executive teams through inflection moments using KPI frameworks, leadership scorecards, and growth playbooks tested across OneGoal, Healthy Gulf, and the Children’s Bureau of New Orleans. And we convene the right rooms — bringing together cohorts of CEOs, funders, and field experts to solve shared challenges, including most recently facilitating five national nonprofits through New Profit’s post-grant sustainability cohort alongside funders like the Gates Foundation and Blue Meridian Partners.
The numbers tell part of the story: $13M+ in funding raised, 50+ partnerships built, 7+ new sites launched, 15+ C-suite leaders coached, 20+ organizations served across 10+ states — and a 90% referral rate that speaks louder than any marketing.
But perhaps the most honest summary of what CG Consulting delivers comes from a client. Abby Marquand, Managing Partner at New Profit, said it this way: CG Consulting quickly builds trust, shapes programming that meets a wide range of needs, brings a strong network and deep knowledge of current nonprofit and philanthropic trends — and delivers a level of professionalism and credibility that inspires real confidence across stakeholders.
That’s the standard we hold ourselves to in every engagement.
But what truly sets CG Consulting apart isn’t just our methodology — it’s our people. Our team is 90% people of color, and that is not incidental. It is intentional. We have lived inside the communities and systems our clients are trying to serve. We have been the first-generation student, the under-resourced program director, the leader trying to do more with less. When we walk into a room with a nonprofit CEO navigating a leadership transition or a foundation trying to understand why their investments aren’t landing — we don’t just bring frameworks. We bring lived understanding that no credential alone can teach.
We partner with foundations and nonprofit leaders at inflection moments — new markets, new leadership, new revenue models — combining executive coaching with the strategic frameworks and institutional relationships built scaling organizations like OneGoal, New Profit, Bottom Line, and Healthy Gulf. Our clients don’t just get a consultant. They get a team that has been in their shoes — and knows exactly what it takes to move forward.
What I want Houston readers to know is this: CG Consulting is not a firm that tells you what you want to hear. We tell you what you need to hear — with care, with evidence, and with a clear path forward. In a sector full of yes, we’ve built our reputation on honest, high-quality strategic counsel.
That reputation is the brand. And we protect it in every room we enter.
Learn more at chantellegeorge.org or reach us at [email protected].
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
I’ll be transparent — I don’t really operate in the language of luck. I’m a woman of faith, and my framework is different. What others might call a lucky break, I call a blessing that met years of hard, unglamorous, relentless work. Entrepreneurship didn’t find me. I built toward it — intentionally, sacrificially, and with a lot of prayer along the way.
Nothing about CG Consulting happened by accident. Every client relationship, every partnership, every contract was the result of years of showing up — inside organizations, inside communities, inside rooms where I was often the only person who looked like me — and doing the work with excellence regardless of whether anyone was watching. I came into entrepreneurship with a track record I had spent over a decade building. When I launched CG Consulting, I wasn’t starting from zero. I was converting years of preparation into something of my own.
The blessings I can point to are mostly relational. I have been fortunate to encounter mentors and champions who saw something in me before I fully saw it in myself — people who put my name in rooms I hadn’t yet earned my way into, who vouched for me when my résumé alone wouldn’t have gotten me there. Those moments of being seen and sponsored changed the trajectory of my career. I don’t take that lightly, and I try to pay it forward every chance I get.
And yes — there have been hard seasons. Contracts that fell through at the worst possible time. Partnerships that didn’t survive leadership changes on the other side. Opportunities I worked hard to build that evaporated for reasons entirely outside my control. Moments where I questioned the timing, the model, the decision to bet on myself at all.
But my faith wouldn’t let me stay in those moments. Every closed door pushed me to build something that didn’t depend on that door. Every setback clarified my purpose and sharpened my strategy. I’ve come to understand that difficulty is not a detour — it’s often the road itself.
So was I blessed? Abundantly. But blessings have a way of finding people who are prepared to receive them. I came prepared. I stay prepared. And I give thanks for every single door that opened — and every one that didn’t.
Pricing:
- CG Consulting works on a project and retainer basis. Engagements are scoped based on organizational need, timeline, and complexity. We serve organizations at various stages — from early-stage nonprofits to national foundations — and structure our work accordingly. Reach out at [email protected] to start a conversation about fit and scope.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://chantellegeorge.org
- Instagram: @chantellegeorgeconsulting
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cgconsulting08/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chantelle-george-consulting/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/cg_consulting_
