In the spring of 2020, the City of Sebastopol thought it was buying half of a person. The city had set aside $40,000 for a part-time community-vitality specialist - someone to check on local businesses and help the town’s economy. Then the pandemic arrived, the job changed shape, and the city hired CoMission instead. A half-time role became a small team. A tidy economic-development brief became a tangle of loan forms, nonprofit distress, food access, outdoor commerce, surveys, telephone calls and public meetings.
That transformation explains CoMission better than any agency credentials deck could. The firm is a community-relations consultancy based on Morris Street in Sebastopol, led by Craig Litwin, a former two-time mayor who has spent decades in local politics, nonprofits and environmental work. It does public affairs, fundraising, media relations, qualitative research, membership development and workshops. But those labels miss the more peculiar product: CoMission knows how a town is wired.
When a restaurant needs help with a government application, a service club wants to fund something useful, and a nonprofit needs volunteers as badly as money, the problem is rarely a lack of goodwill. The problem is routing. CoMission sells the map, the switchboard and, when required, the patient person who keeps calling.
The assignment that changed while everyone was watching
CoMission applied for Sebastopol’s community-vitality work before shelter-in-place. The original question was ordinary: what is working for local businesses, what is not, and what support would help? COVID made every noun urgent. CoMission’s scope expanded to helping businesses navigate loan and government paperwork, identifying which shops were open, connecting restaurants with food-support programs, and asking nonprofits where they could share staff, facilities or fundraising connections.
The team’s structure mattered. Litwin brought the local government and policy memory. Principal Johnny Nolen brought operating and budget experience, including managing a staff of 250. Herman G. Hernandez brought nonprofit and political-campaign networks. Ashley Nelson brought a Green MBA and local-economy expertise. A job designed for one half-time employee suddenly benefited from several kinds of fluency at once.
That sequence - listen, build, engage - is the company’s advertised three-step process. In Sebastopol it produced business surveys and a smaller survey about a possible loan program. The findings entered city discussions about outdoor dining, parklets, road use, online shopping support and letters seeking county or state help. CoMission also established three councils: one each for businesses, community-benefit organizations and service organizations.
The meeting was not the outcome
Consultancies often confuse convening with progress. CoMission’s more useful idea was to treat convening as plumbing. In 2021, service organizations were overwhelmed by requests involving housing, food security and health. CoMission, the city and local service groups surveyed more than 100 organizations, then organized the virtual West County Community Needs Summit. The point was to put organizations with needs in front of people who could contribute time, money or materials - and to publish an inventory against which later progress might be measured.
The customers for this kind of work are easy to name and hard to serve: small governments without a deep community-development bench, nonprofits short on fundraising infrastructure, service clubs unsure where money will do the most good, and local businesses too busy surviving to decode public programs. Conventional PR firms can earn coverage. Fundraising advisers can tune an appeal. Management consultants can write a plan. CoMission sits awkwardly, and usefully, between them - gathering the evidence, forming the group, preparing the assets and nudging the group toward action.
Then the invoice became the story
The first thing to buckle was not the premise. It was the budget logic. In September 2020, council members examined work running around $14,000 to $15,000 a month and warned that an annualized $180,000 contract was not sustainable for a city whose revenues had fallen about 20 percent. CoMission billed hourly under a not-to-exceed estimate. Stretch the money, the firm explained, and the same work would take longer; cut the budget, and polling plus auxiliary nonprofit support would be delayed first.
By July 2021, a lengthy work plan totaled $145,000, with its current-programming portion priced at $96,000. The council did not support the broad version. The proposal was narrowed to $36,000 for six months of facilitating the three councils, while the city discussed a fresh request for proposals for its wider marketing and community-vitality work. Even that narrower amount drew a pointed question: was six months of facilitating three groups worth $36,000?
How the public scope narrowed · 2021 discussion
These figures were scopes discussed in council records, not a claim that every amount was ultimately paid. The $36,000 proposal covered six months.
This is where the CoMission story becomes transferable. Invisible work needs visible units. “Community vitality” can contain almost anything; three councils, a survey with a response count, a loan-application clinic, or a summit with named follow-ups can be inspected. Buyers do not merely need a moving account of relationships. They need to know which relationships are being maintained, by whom, for how long, and what happens when the maintenance stops.
The city’s view changed for a second reason: the problem itself had changed. Officials noted that businesses in mid-2021 occupied a different world from February 2020, when the consultant selection was completed. A new RFP promised a new look. Meanwhile, some council members believed the councils CoMission created could continue on their own. That is both a threat to a facilitator’s recurring revenue and evidence that the facilitation worked.
A giving circle as the sequel
The cleanest later demonstration of Litwin’s method came outside the city contract. After Sebastopol withdrew longstanding grants to local nonprofits, Litwin and Craig Boblitt met at a Peacetown event in 2024 and asked whether locals could replace $200,000 of missing support. They recruited a board, found a fiscal sponsor in Community Foundation Sonoma County, and launched Sebastopol West 100 in March 2025.
The mechanics were deliberately legible. Annual membership cost $1,300. Each member received one vote. Higher contributions were welcome, but did not buy extra votes. Seventy-seven nonprofits applied; the grants committee narrowed the field to 16; members picked eight. In October, the circle distributed $295,000, including $100,000 to Food For Thought and two $50,000 grants. The original target was beaten by $95,000.
This is what another organization can copy. Start with five people who bring what CoMission calls one of the three W’s - work, wisdom or wealth. Write the rules. Choose a credible fiscal sponsor to handle tax and reporting machinery. Decide the contribution and voting model. Recruit members. Publish the need. Make the decision together. The party and giant checks come last.
It will not travel everywhere. CoMission’s advantage depends on unusually dense local trust and a leader with decades of civic memory. The model weakens when stakeholders do not believe the convener is neutral, when the geography is too large for relationship-driven outreach, when a client wants national media scale, or when nobody is prepared to own the councils after the contract. It also struggles when the scope stays poetic. Collaboration is a value; a maintained contact list, a monthly meeting, a completed application and an agreed next action are deliverables.
What the town’s ledger teaches
CoMission is not a software company disguised as a consultancy. Its technology is ordinary: forms, websites, email, surveys and meetings. Its expertise lies in sequencing them around human behavior. Ask before prescribing. Put businesses, nonprofits, residents, officials and funders into distinct but connected rooms. Build enough process that goodwill survives a missed meeting. Then measure the things a skeptical council member can point to.
The company’s market is correspondingly specific. It is most useful where institutions are small, needs overlap, and formal staff capacity is thin. Sebastopol’s city manager praised CoMission’s pandemic work; the public record also shows council members questioning cost and clarity. Both observations can be true. Local connective tissue matters. It is also expensive to maintain, and it becomes easier to defend when everyone can see which civic muscles it moves.
That may be the most honest pitch for CoMission. It does not manufacture community. The community is already there - the restaurant owner, the former mayor, the service-club treasurer, the nonprofit director, the resident with time on Tuesday night. CoMission gives them a reason to answer the phone, a structure for the conversation and somewhere useful to send the result.