Aligna: Seattle Nonprofit Attorney & Strategic Advisor
What Kind of Help Do You Need?
Complex problems rarely arrive neatly labeled “legal” or “strategy.” Sometimes you know exactly what kind of help you need. Sometimes figuring that out is the first thing we do together.
Legal Services
Practical legal advice before a problem gets bigger.
Aligna provides Washington legal counsel to nonprofits, mission-driven organizations, founders, boards, businesses, and individuals.
Common matters include:
- Nonprofit formation, governance, bylaws, and board issues
- Organizational structure, contracts, and policies
- Employment and independent-contractor questions
- Disability access and reasonable accommodations
- Nondiscrimination and civil rights compliance
- Public sector contract compliance
- Legal risks connected to organizational decisions
- Understanding rights, obligations, and options before deciding what to do next.
Initial legal consultations are paid, focused, 45-minute sessions with Carrie.
Strategy & Consulting
For problems that require more than a legal answer.
Aligna partners with nonprofits, government agencies, and mission-driven organizations to navigate complex organizational challenges and growth opportunities.
Our work includes:
- Strategic planning and organizational alignment
- Governance and decision-making
- Stakeholder and community engagement
- Facilitation and conflict navigation
- Organizational assessments
- Disability, accessibility, and inclusion strategy
- Policy and process design
- Leadership and board advising
- Executive coaching
- Training and speaking
- Fractional strategy partnership
You’re in the Right Place
- You’re not sure whether your policies or procedures actually reflect your values or just say they do.
- You love doing the work of your organization or business, but you’re a bit afraid or embarrassed to think about what you might be ignoring or missing structurally to ensure sustainability and compliance.
- Inside your organization, people feel pulled in different directions and nothing seems to create lasting traction.
- Equity, disability, and access obligations feel high-risk or unclear, so decisions keep getting delayed until they seem too late or not enough.
- You’ve invested in inclusion, community relationships, codesign, or growth, but the results aren’t matching the efforts.
How We Work with Organizations
Some clients need one defined piece of work. Others need a partner over several months. A few need someone they can call when a complicated issue lands on their desk.
We love giving individual attention to clients. You won’t ever get a paralegal or assistant here. You’ll always know who you’re working with and how we might be working together, whether it’s:
Focused Engagements
Targeted support for a defined decision, organizational problem, policy, assessment, facilitation, or other bounded need.
Project-Based Consulting
Longer engagements such as strategic planning, organizational assessments, stakeholder engagement, governance work, systems design, or implementation support.
Ongoing Strategy Partnerships
For organizations that benefit from sustained senior-level strategic support, Aligna can serve as a fractional strategy partner and trusted advisor as conditions change.
Legal matters are scoped separately through Aligna’s legal practice.
Carrie Griffin Basas, Esq., M.Ed. | Attorney, Strategist, Founder, and Former Executive Director
She has served as the Director of the Washington State Governor’s Office of the Education Ombuds, led statewide disability-rights organizations, taught law and business, and advised public agencies, nonprofits, foundations, boards, businesses, and organizational leaders. This background means that she has seen plenty of policies that sounded great until someone tried to use them (or forgot about them) and organizational charts that explained very little. Carrie is familiar with governance problems that were supposedly “just interpersonal,” and legal questions that were not going to be solved by quoting a statute.
Aligna’s work is practical by design: understand the real problem, identify the constraints, make a sound decision, and build something people can actually use.
The Access Wheel™
Better decisions start by noticing what the system is telling you. The Access Wheel™ is Aligna’s framework for examining how access, power, relationships, process, and implementation shape whether a decision actually works.
It grew from disability experience, but it is not a disability-only framework. It helps organizations surface constraints earlier, ask better questions, and design decisions that are more likely to hold under real-world pressure.
We use the Access Wheel throughout our consulting, facilitation, training, and strategic work
Not Sure Where to Start?
Book a 15-Minute Intro Call
If you are considering working with Aligna but are not sure if your need fits our legal, consulting, training, or advisory work, start with a complimentary 15-minute telephone call.
We can briefly discuss:
- What you are looking for
- Whether it is within Aligna’s scope
- Whether the issue appears primarily legal, strategic, or both
- Possible next steps, scope, and fees
Looking for legal help?
The 15-minute intro call is not a legal consultation. Carrie will not review documents, analyze your legal rights, recommend a course of action, or provide legal advice during the call.
If you already know you need substantive legal advice about a Washington matter, you do not need an intro call. You can go directly to a paid legal consultation.
You’ve got to start somewhere, right?
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