Gather & Grow - SoCal

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Join your SoCal association peers at Santa Anita Park for Gather & Grow. As we embrace the fall season, we'll gather for some education and community in a warm, harvest-inspired setting. Come to connect with your peers, exchange ideas, and leave with inspiration and new insights!

Save the Association: A Membership "Escape Room" Challenge

What if your association's future depended on the decisions you make in the next 45 minutes?

In this highly interactive, escape room-style experience, you'll work alongside your fellow attendees to solve a series of realistic membership, engagement, financial, and leadership challenges facing a fictional association in crisis. Each scenario unlocks new clues and reveals the next chapter of the story as your team races to "save" the organization before time runs out.

Along the way, Sheila Kearns shares the true story behind one of the most remarkable nonprofit turnarounds you'll hear. As Board President of the Boys & Girls Club, she transformed a deeply in-the-red regional chapter into a thriving organization with more than $1 million in financial reserves, led a complex regional merger, and personally raised more than $2 million. As your team tackles each challenge, Sheila will reveal how similar decisions, strategies, and leadership principles played out in the real world—and what ultimately made the difference.

You'll leave with practical, proven ideas for growing membership, improving renewals, increasing engagement, inspiring volunteer leaders, strengthening member value, and building an organization that people are eager to join, support, and champion. Whether your focus is membership, marketing, programs, or executive leadership, you'll gain actionable strategies through an experience that's as engaging as it is educational.

Sheila Kearns, Director of Business Development
The Cliffs Hotel & Spa

Sheila Kearns is an internationally known master chocolatier, award-winning creative director & executive producer, veteran nonprofit board president, and high-stakes marketer who translates premium brand mechanics into massive organizational growth. Having successfully navigated complex corporate client portfolios, engineered multi-billion-dollar market pivots, and personally led a major regional nonprofit turnaround from deficit to a million-dollar reserve, Sheila brings uncompromised, battle-tested expertise directly to executive leadership teams. She provides organizations with the exact blueprints required to command market attention, secure high-value corporate partnerships, and design elite experiences that drive lifetime customer and member retention.

As Executive Producer & Luxury Cultural Architect, Sheila operates an elite international confectionery and luxury design house. She has successfully scaled traditional family heritage into a globally prominent luxury product line with major retail distribution, high-end consumer demand, and official Hollywood studio partnerships. As Founder & Principal Creative Director of The Kearns Group, she owned, managed, and executed the high-value acquisition sale of a powerhouse boutique advertising agency. Sheila built and transitioned an elite blue-chip client portfolio including Costco, Trader Joe's, Williams-Sonoma, Wells Fargo, Spice Hunter, the American Red Cross, the State of California, Hollywood screen legend Jane Russell and many more.