I spent about fifteen years developing brand strategy for mission-driven companies and nonprofits, mostly in natural products, sustainable food, and social impact. Traditional Medicinals, Silk and WhiteWave, Straus Organic, Lotus Foods, Ecotrust, and others.
Then I moved to education. For over a decade I worked as an independent school administrator, ultimately as Director of Strategy and Communications at Sonoma Academy.
Because I've worked inside the school offices for marketing, communications, enrollment, and advancement and sat on the admin team that navigated the day-to-day, from implementing new learning management systems to developing crisis communications plans to launching capital campaigns, I know what the daily life and rhythms of a school are. I know what heads of school are navigating in any given day, how boards actually behave, what an admissions office can realistically absorb in August versus January versus March, and what happens to a strategy that arrives without regard for the calendar. I learned what it feels like when a school knows itself, and what it feels like when the thread has been lost.
Now I work from both sides. I can come into a school, understand it from within, and translate what's true about it into strategy and language that works in the world.
I come in curious rather than prescriptive. The methods are close to organizational anthropology: listening across a community, watching how a place actually operates, and naming what's happening underneath. I try not to flatten complexity before I understand it.
I also pay attention to what an institution can absorb and when. Some things shift within months. Others take longer, because that's how trust-based institutions work, and a plan that ignores this sets a school up to feel like it's failing when it's actually on schedule.
Twenty-five years of doing this, most of it through implementation rather than at a remove, means my instincts about what will land with a community and in the marketplace are usually right.
heads of school
A significant part of this work is the relationship I hold with heads themselves.
The role is structurally isolated. A head answers to a board, carries the whole institution, and is surrounded by direct reports who sit inside the supervisory structure. There are very few people a head can talk to honestly about the real picture.
Sitting outside the org chart, I can be one of them. I understand the institution, I hold the whole picture, and I have no stake in the outcome except the school's health. My training in counseling psychology and facilitation shapes the quality of attention I bring to that. It isn't a separate offering. It's part of what lets the strategic work go deeper.
The same holds further down. I work with boards and board chairs, with senior directors, and with the communications and admissions people who carry the work week to week. The people who work closely with me get senior mentorship and strategic insight that stays connected to the daily tactical work, and they grow more skilled because of it. That's part of how I design engagements.
and service
I write and speak on institutional narrative, language and leadership, enrollment and market trends, and what brand actually means inside a school.
I also facilitate leadership retreats, strategic visioning sessions, and team sessions focused on aligning tactics with strategy, both inside larger engagements and on their own.
I serve on the Board of Trustees at Sonoma Earth School.