Kézha Hatier-Riess
Kézha founded the consultancy TrueDoing where she works as a donor advisor, organizational strategist, and executive coach. She specializes in conditions—including the structures, culture, communication flows, and decision-making patterns—that shape what people and institutions actually do, and how they drift from what they intend. She works with funders, nonprofits, and their leaders to close that drift. For over 25+ years, she has connected resources to communities across climate and social justice, biodiversity protection, and human rights, and has guided organizations through launch, rapid growth, and leadership transition.
Kézha brings a behavioral lens to her work. Trained as a wildlife biologist, she studied how behavior adapts to conditions: when conditions support stability and trust, more adaptive behavior emerges; when they strain, behavior narrows and coping takes over. From that understanding, she developed the Organizational Conditions Assessment, a diagnostic that surfaces the structural drivers behind burnout, stalled strategy, and recurring friction.
Before TrueDoing, Kézha was VP of External Relations at Global Greengrants Fund, a public foundation working with 220+ advisors to fund predominantly Indigenous-led grassroots organizations globally using a decentralized, trust-based participatory model. She led a large global team and held multi-million-dollar relationships. She served as a philanthropic climate and gender justice lead to UN Women's Generation Equality Forum, collaborating with the Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, CIFF, Rockefeller Foundation, and Open Society Foundations, and on steering committees for the CLIMA Fund, the Human Rights Funders Network, and the Biodiversity Funders Group's DEI Committee.
Kézha holds an MS in Wildlife Biology and a BA in Environmental Studies. She is a certified integrative health coach trained in applied neuroscience.
She loves trail running, reading, and writing. She is outside as much as possible with her husband, twin boys, and dog in Colorado, or anywhere else in the world with mountains or oceans.