our team
Meet our Executive Director, Brent Baker
A Bonner County resident since 1977, Brent Baker founded or co-founded and led several companies, and has had a continuing commitment to community service during that time. Industries served were Construction, Real Estate Development, Resort Management, Ranching, Forestry, Project Management, Property Management, and Investment.
In 2016 he retired to a “swan song” career of business consulting, coaching and education. In February of 2020, wanting to shift to industry agnostic consulting, and focusing on developing strong company cultures underpinned by the highest possible ethics, he launched Elevate Now Consulting, LLC, with a strong focus on Leadership and Company Culture, as well as Clarity, Alignment, Learning & Development, and Innovation. Wanting to improve his coaching skills, he took two 5-month courses to become a certified Master Executive Coach. The instructors were David Goldsmith, who co-founded the Coaching Institute at the Harvard Medical School, and was an original co-founder of the ICF, and David Peterson, who was the Director of Leadership and Coaching at Google for 10 years – both considered seminal early pioneers in the field of executive coaching.
On the community service side, Baker has served on the Lakes Commission continuously since inception in 2003. He co-founded, with John Knowles, the Sandpoint High School Residential Carpentry Program, led the grant writing effort that funded it, and designed and implemented an experimental youth job skills training program at the Bonner County Juvenile Detention Center (with Debbie Stallcup). The 501c3 educational non-profit he co-founded in 1994, Gnomus, Inc., developed and delivered innovative middle school science education programs in under-served community public schools. The program was adopted and administered through UC Berkeley’s MESA Program (Math, Engineering and Science Achievement) and was later sponsored by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. He has also served as a school board chairman, fire district commissioner, and founded and participated in other community programs throughout the years.
