Kindering

The Long View: fifteen years Alongside Kindering

Walk into a Kindering campus on any given weekday, and you might see a therapist working one-on-one with a toddler on a playmat, or a family sitting with a specialist who is helping them understand a new diagnosis, or a group of toddlers on their way to the Stepping Stones preschool classroom.

Kindering serves over 3,300 families a year across four campuses in King County — Renton, Bothell, Bellevue, and Redmond. With a staff of about 300 and roughly $30 million in annual operations, it is one of the anchor organizations in Washington State providing early-support services for young children with developmental disabilities and delays. The organization’s services span a wide range of needs, including programs for families experiencing housing instability, child welfare, and economic hardship; a program for children on the autism spectrum; inclusive preschool; and one-on-one pediatric therapies for children birth through 10 years old. Nearly $4 million of its operations each year is uncompensated care, absorbed for families whose insurance falls short or who rely on Medicaid.

Behind the work with families is an organization that has been growing steadily for over sixty years, and getting more complex with each decade. For close to fifteen of those years, one family of companies has been alongside it, through the growth, two CEO transitions, and the leveling up of its finance function from a fractional engagement into a full executive seat. Different services at different moments. The same family of companies: Ensemble Partners.

Where it began

Mimi Siegel led Kindering for 42 years. In 2011, she joined the board of the CFOS Foundation, the philanthropic arm of CFO Selections®. She served on that board for close to a decade and helped focus its grantmaking onto the population it still centers today: children and families in foster and kinship care. That was the shape of the relationship for years, a shared commitment to kids, mostly outside the walls of Kindering itself.

The working relationship started in 2016, when Mimi could feel her own organization outgrowing its finance function.

The right person, in the right amount

Kindering was moving from a sub-$10 million organization toward $20 million, and the finance function was straining under the shape of it. More programs, grantors, and precise allocation of indirect costs across a widening footprint. Mimi had a strong financial mind and had run Kindering for decades without a CFO, but she could see what was coming. Naturally, she called us at CFO Selections®.

What we offered was both a person and a rhythm. Some weeks Kindering needed two days of finance leadership. Some weeks it needed four. Some months called for a project, a systems build-out, an audit cycle, a grant reconciliation, and the engagement would swell to hold that work before settling back into the steady beat of monthly close and board reporting. The same person occupied the seat throughout, and the rhythm of the work moved with the organization.

We could hire just the amount of talent that we needed, either interim or short-term or part-time. There’s real flexibility there. And because CFO Selections® had such integrity and professionalism and a true love of our mission, I could trust that whoever they put in place would be, too. They did the vetting and the matching. It’s a very unique relationship.

— Mimi Siegel, former CEO, Kindering

The flex went beyond the CFO seat. In 2019, when Kindering’s senior accountant announced she was leaving, ASP, our fractional accounting and bookkeeping team, stepped in with an interim senior accountant to keep the monthly close on time, prepare the organization for its annual audit, and train the person Kindering eventually hired to hold the role permanently. Four months later we were gone, because Kindering was ready to take it from there.

When leadership changed

By 2017, Mimi was preparing for something she had never done before. After 42 years, she was getting ready to step back.

Kindering turned to our nonprofit executive search team at Valtas Group. What began as a half-day board planning session in the fall of 2017 grew into a full national executive search, and in 2018 Kindering promoted Lisa Greenwald from within into the CEO role. The finance seat held steady through the transition, the same interim CFO in the seat, but calibrating differently now, because a new CEO meant different needs from the finance function.

The support we have to give just differs depending on the organization, depending on the leadership.

— Becky Todd, Partner and Market Leader, CFO Selections®

Not long after, Kindering hired its first full-time CFO, a hybrid role that combined the CFO seat with the responsibilities of a departing COO. It was the first of several times Kindering would level up the CFO seat itself as the organization grew.

Interim leadership and search, working together

Several years later, Kindering entered another chapter of leadership change. The CEO seat was going to be empty for months while a search unfolded, the kind of interval where organizations either hold their shape or start to lose it.

Kindering engaged us in two ways. We placed Mari Offenbecher as an interim CEO, and in parallel began the search for Kindering’s next permanent leader. Mari’s charge from the board president came in a single sentence.

His message was to keep the waters calm. And I love that, because I just fully embraced it. That was such a driver for me.

— Mari Offenbecher, Interim CEO Consultant, Valtas Group

For nine months, she rotated across all four campuses one day a week, sat in the staff kitchen at lunch, ran listening sessions where staff could talk about what was working and what wasn’t, and built a shared-leadership approach the executive team could carry forward. She wasn’t there to make decisions on her own. She was there to hold the organization steady while the board did the harder, slower work of choosing what came next.

With Mari calming the waters, our search team invested time to understand Kindering’s current opportunities and impact, meeting with the leadership team, board members and staff, and led the recruitment for the next generation of leadership. In July 2025, Kindering selected Mike Stewart, who had spent close to three decades leading a similar organization serving the same population in another part of the region. Mari and Mike worked together throughout his first few weeks. Mari was there to set Mike up for success, supporting his onboarding, and even joining him for a Kindering board meeting.

The place that Kindering is in now—with strong financial planning, an incredible diversity of programs, and four campuses that allow us to meet the growing needs of our community—is because of the leaders who built it.

— Mike Stewart, CEO, Kindering                                         

One family’s story

In 1999, a nearly three-year-old boy was struggling to be in a group setting at his daycare in the Seattle area. A therapist from a nonprofit in Bellevue drove out to observe him, gave the teachers guidance on how to help him succeed, and helped his family get on the path to a diagnosis and the resources they needed. The nonprofit was Kindering.

A decade later, the same family came back. The boy’s younger brother enrolled in Sib Shops, Kindering’s former program for siblings of children with developmental delays, disabilities, and complex medical needs. He found a community of kids who understood what his life was like without him having to explain it. He eventually stayed on as a peer mentor to help other kids do the same.

Both boys are grown now. The older is a programmer, a graduate of a four-year program at Lake Washington Institute of Technology. The younger is a professional musician and sound engineer.

Their mother, Charlotte Morin, joined CFO Selections® in 2008, nine years after Kindering first came to her son’s daycare. She didn’t come to us because of Kindering. But by the time she did, our companies and the organization that had helped hers were already deeply connected. She has spent the better part of two decades helping run our office, supporting the work that supports the same organization that once helped her family.

Kindering is an irreplaceable resource for families in our situation. I’m just really happy that CFO Selections® has been able to support Kindering and its mission, to help kids and families. And I’m proud to be a part of that.

— Charlotte Morin, CFO Selections®

What continues

Today, Kindering has a full-time strategic CFO of its own, the third finance leader the CFO seat has been leveled up to hold since we first came alongside the organization. We’re no longer in the day-to-day; we don’t need to be, because Kindering has grown into its own capability. But our presence continues in a different shape. One of our partners sits on Kindering’s finance committee as a volunteer. Our Foundation continues to fund the organization. And when Kindering enters its next chapter, a new program, a new campus, a moment of change that hasn’t yet arrived, we will be the first call again.

Fifteen years, two CEO transitions, and a finance function that has grown up in stages. An interim accounting engagement in a moment of turnover. Interim leadership at the top while a search brought in the CEO now leading the organization. Continuing philanthropic support. Volunteer service. Different services at different moments. Different people over the years. That’s what our family of companies is for, ready in whatever form the moment requires.