My Journey

From chickens to coalitions — I traded advertising for the long work that endures.

My first job out of college was at a food advertising firm. A year in, my head caught up with my heart: I couldn't spend my one life convincing people to buy more chicken nuggets. So I quit, and I started hunting for work I wanted to spend myself on. At 23, I networked into a consulting role with Project Rescue and AGWM's Eurasia region — and that season taught me what I've valued ever since: the real work as a consultant is in the listening.

The better I listened, the more the work landed. Branding tightened, people aligned, donations climbed, programs grew. Across countries and causes, two kinds of clients kept calling — the ones with big gaps they couldn't yet name, and the ones who'd closed their gaps but couldn't generate the momentum to scale. I was diagnosing both with instinct. My gut was usually right. But "usually" wasn't going to cut it.

Out of those early years, three principles emerged that held everywhere I went — conversations are the fuel of causes, build it to fit the people before you scale, and document every bit of progress. I didn't have the language to teach them as principles. So I closed my consulting laptop and opened a grad school application. The MBA gave me the analytical muscle. A master's certificate in negotiation, mediation, and conflict resolution sharpened the people part.

And then I put myself in the room with the best in the world — front row in one of Alex Osterwalder's early cohorts, learning his Business Model Generation methods. His frameworks were shockingly transferable to impact-driven work, if you knew which parts to bend. Almost nobody in global development at the time was doing that translation. His one-page business frameworks became an anchor to every client I served.

I now had language for two of my three principles. The third — conversations are the fuel of causes, and most leaders haven't been taught to have them — still didn't have an architecture. So I did a massive case study to pull apart the system behind the civil rights movement. I found a formula: Conversation. Participation. Advocacy. Ownership. Four moves that turn an idea into a movement and a movement into durable change. The two traditions clicked into each other. Osterwalder gave me the discipline to build the right thing. The civil rights movement gave me the discipline to move people toward it. That synthesis is the practice I run today.

Then Ethiopia made it personal. A few years ago, I met my adopted son's birth family in Ethiopia for the first time. They've endured famine and drought I'd previously only known on paper. We drove past sign after sign for projects that no longer existed — funding gone, work undone, communities left holding the cost of someone else's good intentions. I came home convinced of two things: the future of meaningful development runs through climate and through local ownership — both, not one or the other — and the cost of building work that doesn't last is paid by the people we're there to serve. Ethiopia is why I keep going. It's the center of my personal mission.

That conviction is what sent me back to school. I'm at Harvard now, earning a second master's in Sustainability with a Global Development Practice focus — sharpening myself daily by learning the frameworks, the evidence base, and the discipline the best practitioners in the world have spent careers building. That's the advisory I want to bring to the leaders I serve.

That's how I got here. Twenty years. Forty-five-plus countries. Two intellectual traditions woven into one practice — pressure-tested across two decades of field work, anchored by what Ethiopia taught me about why the work has to last. If you're holding a mission with big potential, bring me the hardest part of it. That's the table I've spent twenty years learning how to set.