My WORK

I build strategies and stories that break through the noise, allowing organizations to build partnerships, coalitions, messages, and media that can change the world for the better.

I am a nationally recognized strategist, social entrepreneur, and communicator on the place where business, social impact, and policy issues meet. I help businesses evaluate and mitigate risk, craft messaging, and take action on pressing issues, and I help smart nonprofits organizations design and build strategies and partnerships to achieve impact.

My sweet spot: weaving together data, storytelling, and action to build new bridges and create new spaces to advance impact and ESG work with corporate executives, boards, employees, nonprofit and impact organizations, journalists, and policymakers.

I bring to bear an MBA from Oxford University a passion for understanding what makes people and systems tick, and a diverse career path, including:

• Recent engagements:

  • Senior advisor to a high-profile non-profit advocacy organization, designing strategy and roadmap for research and communications on corporate advocacy, driven by emerging policy debates and pressures from the organization’s base

  • Senior advisor to a high-profile non-profit mental health organization on bringing business partners along from funding and cause marketing to deep engagement in advocacy and employee engagement

  • Advisory role to fast-growth tech company on nondiscrimination policies, practice, and communications

• VP of Corporate Engagement and head of the America Competes business coalition, a project of Freedom For All Americans, a bipartisan campaign for LGBTQ nondiscrimination, where I led high-level corporate relationships, media relations, business case building, message development, policy briefings, and advocacy

• Founder and Managing Director of Texas Competes, a coalition that has become a national model for business education and advocacy in LGBTQ rights and beyond, where I led significant PR and earned media wins, coalition building among diverse large and small businesses, business case and narrative building across business, tech, and state and national press, spokesperson role, and deep policy engagement

• First Director of Giving and Social Impact at TOMS Shoes, where I designed and grew the fast-growing start-up’s global “One for One” in-kind shoe-giving model, with impacts in public health and education, across financial modeling, global logistics, impact, responsiblity, reporting, and brand; and launched a social enterprise investment model for the company's Eyewear line

• Speaker, writer, and thought leader on topics such as business activism; bridge-building on divisive topics; gender, caregiving, and work; the intersection of business risk & reward on social justice issues; and the hard work of doing good well

• Thought leader on the moral and economic case for paid family leave

This work requires a “Swiss Army Knife” approach, with a toolbox of skills including:

• Research-backed business and economic case development, including predicting likely future trends and pressures: the “why” on a macro scale to bring unlikely bedfellows into conversation about impact and justice issues

• People-centered storytelling, to put individual, human stories at the heart of any case for impact, twinned with data to build a compelling one-two punch that meets audiences where they are and brings diverse allies into the work

• Coalition and partnership building, assessing and addressing risks and complexities to create risk-mitigated opportunities for companies and other actors to meaningfully engage in DEI, ESG, and impact work

• Communications and PR strategy, including message development and training, earned media strategy and execution, including ghostwriting and placing op-eds for influential and prominent voices, on-background and on the record spokesperson role (see one example here), thought leadership (example here), social media toolkits, rapid response, training and talking points for spokespeople

• Workshops and trainings for C-suite, government affairs professionals, DEI teams, and employee affinity groups on social impact, policy landscapes, and the case for engagement

  Get in touch anytime to see what we can build together!