Independent Strategic Advisor
Twenty-three years, six national organizations, one craft — helping institutions build the capacity to do what they say they want to do. I advise nonprofits, governments and philanthropies at the moments that decide whether the work holds: new offices, restructures, spin-offs, and leadership transitions.
Selected record
Advisory practice
Six fields, one problem: how an institution builds the capacity to do what it says it wants to do. My career has run inside intermediaries — organizations whose work is to resource, equip and coordinate campaigns and communities led by other people — and I’ve been on both ends of that exchange.
Chief-of-staff support to principals — the operating rhythm of an executive office: decision-ready briefings, board and funder preparation, and the follow-through that turns a meeting into motion. Most recently as Strategic Advisor & Chief of Staff, Office of the CEO, at the Greater Baltimore Urban League, a century-old affiliate mid-restructure.
Multi-state campaign portfolios and the operating system underneath them — staged pipelines with written entry and exit criteria, campaign models matched to political context, evaluation that gates funding, and grantmaking designed to know when to stop as well as when to start.
Accountability that holds: public performance reporting that includes the adverse numbers, decision rights set down in writing, and coordination across cross-sector institutions — city halls, boards, agencies, and the communities the work is for.
Organizations in a hard chapter — restructures, nonprofit spin-offs, new offices stood up from concept, leadership in transition. I’ve done each from the inside, and I hand the work back with a written guide for finishing it.
Scoring competitive applications against published criteria, outside any employer role — peer reviewer for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime, and external reviewer for the MBK Community Challenge Competition of the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance. Portfolio and proposal review for funders who want an outside reader with an operator’s eye.
Fields
County field lead in the winning Massachusetts marriage campaign, and faculty for the Task Force’s Power Summits — grassroots organizing intensives delivered across eleven states.
Founding team of the YP4 Leadership Academy — the nation’s premier progressive youth leadership program, roughly 150 fellows a year — contributing to curriculum, selection criteria, and the development arc.
Built the national program that carried participatory census and redistricting methods from Mississippi across a nine-state network.
Led training and technical assistance to 74 urban, rural, and tribal communities as the Justice Department’s competitively selected national partner in the White House Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative.
Held primary approval authority over an $11.4M grantmaking portfolio across 71 grants, and drove the campaign behind IL HB 1836 — automated record relief for 1.74 million Illinois residents.
Chief-of-staff support inside a century-old Urban League affiliate — relaunched the advocacy function and installed a corporate partnership model in service of economic mobility in Maryland.
And at the Pushback Network, roughly eighteen distinct issue areas at once — from state constitutional reform to environmental justice to school discipline — across nine states and fifty-five affiliate organizations. I have rarely been the expert in the room; my job is to get the experts what they need.
How I work
Facts separated from judgment, options with a recommendation, and a brief a principal can act on the same day.
Entry criteria, exit criteria, decision rights — agreed before the work starts, so everyone knows what done looks like and when to stop.
I’ve been the national funder and the local recipient. That taught me what a program costs the organization absorbing it — the reporting, the convenings, the staff hours nobody budgeted for. I build differently because of it.
Career
About
I started national at twenty-one, on the staff of the country’s oldest LGBTQ rights organization, and I’ve spent the twenty-three years since inside organizations whose work is to resource, equip and coordinate campaigns and communities led by other people. I’ve been the one sending the money and the one receiving it. I’ve built the training, and I’ve been on the end that had to make it work. That’s why the practice looks the way it does: decisions in writing, credit distributed accurately, and the people the work is for in the room when the terms get set.
B.A., Public Policy and Social Change — Bentley University. Innovation Training — Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University.
Board Member, Community Voices Heard (2011–2017). Peer Reviewer, U.S. Department of Justice, Office for Victims of Crime. External Reviewer, MBK Community Challenge Competition.
Contact
If your institution is at one of those moments, let’s talk.
Based in Baltimore, within the Washington, DC metro area. Working nationally.