The CORE Academy provides organizational consulting in Wilkes-Barre, PA for schools, nonprofits, healthcare-related teams, and service organizations across Northeast Pennsylvania. Most of our clients come to us at a specific moment. Something is not working. Communication. Leadership. Retention. Team behavior. Training quality. Accountability. The leadership team knows it but is too close to the work to name it cleanly. That is the moment to call us. We come in to see what is actually happening, build a strategic plan, and then deliver the training and development your team needs.
When you bring us in, you are working with a Pennsylvania Quality Assurance System (PQAS) Approved Organization and a Pennsylvania Department of Education Act 48 Approved Provider. That matters when professional development spending has to be justified to a board, a superintendent, or a funder. It also means the hours your staff spend with us can count toward requirements they already have to meet. Applications are currently in process for Continuing Education Units (CEUs) and Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credits.
Delivery as soon as engagement starts – That can mean leadership development for your supervisors, employee training across the organization, behavioral management instruction for high-stress teams, custom workshops built to your scope, executive consultation, or some combination. Engagements range from a single multi-session workshop to year-long partnerships that include training delivery, ongoing coaching, certifications, and quarterly check-ins.
Most of our consulting engagements begin with the same kind of conversation. A leader, a director, or a board chair has a sense that something is off but does not have the language for it yet. Maybe a staff team is drifting. Perhaps leadership transitions exposed gaps. Sometimes a behavioral incident in a school or program forces the question. Maybe a behavioral incident in a school or program forced a closer look at how the organization handles stress or maybe employee development has been on the to-do list for two years and never moved.
We start on-site. We talk to leadership, and where it makes sense we talk to the people doing the work, because those two groups often describe the same organization very differently. That gap is usually where the real problem lives. We look at how decisions get made, how information moves between levels, where supervisors are carrying weight they were never trained for, and what the team does when something goes wrong.
We put what we found into plain language: what is genuinely working and worth protecting, what is fragile, what is missing, and what is coming that you are not ready for. Organizations are rarely struggling everywhere. Naming what already works matters, because the plan should build on it rather than replace it. Then we sequence. Not everything can be first. We tell you which item, addressed now, makes the next three easier, and which problems will resolve on their own once an upstream issue is fixed.
The plan names the work, the order, and what The CORE Academy would deliver against each piece. Some of it is training we run. Some of it is work your own leadership does, and we will say so plainly rather than scope ourselves into every line.
Before we recommend anything, we will sit with your leadership team in order to get a clear picture of what is happening inside your organization. Further engagements can include a SWOT analysis, staff interviews, a needs-assessment and recommendations.
Produce a comprehensive written strategic plan covering what we see, what we recommend, and how the work should sequence. You can implement it yourself or bring us back to deliver it. Most clients say the plan alone was worth the full engagement costs.
When you move forward, we deliver. That can mean leadership development, employee training, behavioral management instruction, custom workshops, consultation, or a combination. Engagements range from a single workshop to a partnership.
Inside an engagement, The CORE Academy can deliver:
The majority of engagements blend several of these because real workplace problems rarely fit a single category. If your organization needs something we have not built yet, we build it. Customization is the norm here, not the exception.
There is no standard package, because the organizations we work with do not have standard problems. Scope comes out of the assessment. A single pressing issue, like supervisors who were promoted without ever being taught to supervise, might be a focused series of sessions over a few weeks. An organization coming out of a leadership transition, or one where turnover has hollowed out institutional knowledge, usually needs something longer.
Engagements range from one multi-session workshop to year-long partnerships that combine training delivery, ongoing coaching, certifications, and quarterly check-ins. Longer engagements are structured in phases with defined review points, so you are never committing to twelve months of work you cannot evaluate until the end.
We will tell you when a smaller scope is the right call. An organization that needs one thing done well is better served by that than by a broad engagement it does not have the capacity to absorb.
A recent engagement began with a private school that knew their staff development needed work but did not know where to start. We delivered a SWOT analysis of the entire organization.
The strategic plan that followed scoped a year of customized trainings tailored to their priorities. The engagement is ongoing. That arc, from assessment to year-long partnership, is how a lot of our most valuable organizational consulting work looks. The investment up front is small. The outcome is a team that is sharper, a leadership group that has a plan, and an organization that no longer feels stuck.
Explore TrainingsWhat separates us from program-based providers is structural. We do not run cohort classes your staff has to apply to and graduate from. We do not sell a course catalog and hand you a curriculum.
Our goal is to build engagements around what your organization actually needs and adjust as the work unfolds. CORE stands for Creating Opportunities for Reflection & Education. We genuinely like this kind of work. The messy reality of an organization that knows something is off but cannot quite name it. That is where we operate best.
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Jennifer Lutsey, LCSW | Executive Director, The CORE Academy
We are based in Wilkes-Barre and we work across Northeast Pennsylvania. Being local is not a tagline here, it changes how the work gets done. We come to your site rather than asking your team to travel, which means we see the actual environment: the building, the staffing pattern, the room where the difficult conversations happen. That context does not survive a video call.
It also means we are available between sessions. When something comes up three weeks into an engagement, you are not waiting on a consultant flying in from another state. And we understand the regional landscape our clients operate in, from the funding cycles nonprofits work around to the staffing pressures on schools and healthcare-adjacent programs in this part of the state.
