I work upstream — at the level of institutional truth.

My background is unusual. I spent roughly fifteen years leading brand strategy for mission-driven companies and nonprofits in natural products, sustainable foods, and social impact — including Traditional Medicinals, Silk and WhiteWave, Nutiva, Kettle Brand, and Driscoll's. Then I went inside.

For about a decade I served as an independent school administrator, ultimately as Director of Strategy and Communications at Sonoma Academy. That decade gave me the thing most consultants don't have: an interior view of how institutions actually function under pressure — how decisions get made, how identity erodes, how teams burn out when the work is unclear. I learned what it feels like when a school knows itself, and what it feels like when it has lost the thread.

Today, I bring both perspectives to the work. I can enter an institution, understand it from the inside, and translate its truth into strategy and language that works externally. Most consultants understand institutions from the outside, or from the inside — rarely both.

How I work

I enter as a listener and diagnostician first — not as a vendor arriving with pre-built solutions. I use methods akin to organizational anthropology: observing culture, surfacing unspoken truths, naming what is actually happening beneath the surface. I am comfortable with complexity and ambiguity, and I do not flatten it prematurely.

I work at the level of leadership judgment, not production or execution. My work is cumulative and time-sensitive: meaningful change at trust-based institutions unfolds over years, not weeks. I pay close attention to runway and readiness — what an institution can absorb, what it is ready to act on, and what needs to wait.

Clients often describe working with me as clarifying without simplifying — grounded but not procedural, strategic but not extractive.

On thought partnership

A significant and undernamed part of this work is the relationship I hold with heads of school themselves. The role is structurally isolated. A head is accountable to a board, responsible for the whole institution, and surrounded by direct reports who are inside the supervisory structure. There are very few people a head can speak to with full honesty about the real picture — strategically, culturally, or personally.

As a fractional advisor sitting outside the org chart, I occupy a particular position in that gap. I function as a genuine thought partner: someone who understands the institution deeply, holds the big picture, and provides a confidential, non-evaluative space for the head to think out loud, work through hard decisions, and navigate the realities of institutional leadership.

This is not coaching, and it is not therapy. It is strategic thought partnership with a human dimension. My background in counseling psychology, facilitation, and rites-of-passage work informs the quality of attention I bring — not as a separate offering, but as what allows the strategic work to go deeper than it otherwise would.

That same capacity extends to the rest of the leadership team. I work closely with boards and board chairs, senior directors, and communications and admissions staff — setting strategy while actively developing the people responsible for executing it. Staff members who work with me grow. They develop sharper instincts, better judgment, and greater capacity to operate independently over time. I build institutional capacity, not dependency.

Earlier work

Earlier brand strategy clients include Traditional Medicinals, Silk and WhiteWave, Nutiva, Kettle Brand, and Driscoll's, among others.

Writing and speaking

I write and speak on institutional narrative, language and leadership, and strategic coherence in mission-driven organizations. Recurring topics include enrollment as a coherence problem, institutional drift, the role of language in institutional leadership, and brand as a disciplined act of truth-telling.