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My story

I’ve worked with and within nonprofits for more than a decade, including as a full-time staff member and as a strategy consultant.

In 2023, I noticed that many of the most visible and decorated organizations seemed to consistently attract new attention and resources.

Meanwhile, many smaller and younger organizations seemed insulated from the accolades—despite doing incredible work that deserved visibility.

Some light digging showed me that the difference between “thought leaders” and everyone else typically had nothing to do with wisdom or institutional expertise, and everything to do with the decision to carve out dedicated bandwidth for brand-building work.

(Brand-building: repackaging ideas for broader consumption and actively pursuing opportunities for writing, speaking, and recognition.)

So that’s what I did for my organization, Compass Pro Bono.

In just under two years, we went from minimal sector presence to a near-constant churn of visible community engagement:

• speaking at >5 of conferences and panels

• earning 10+ certifications and awards (including being listed as one of the “Best Nonprofits to Work for” in 2026)

• showing up in dozens of highly-visible listings and regional media outlets

• …and even getting nods in two books!

I started working with social impact leaders on their individual brand-building efforts, too.

I co-created and ghostwrote educational email courses, presentations, LinkedIn posts, panel scripts, and more. Through a process of rigorous iteration, I learned how to create content that reliably attracts an audience while retaining leaders’ unique voice and expertise, which is the basis of community trust. I knew this process worked when my early clients started getting invitations to speak at events—being sought after instead of having to seek out opportunities for brand-building and sector connection. Visibility begets visibility. (And more than just that, too! I’ll never forget when the first donation came in that cited one of our workshops as the inspiration.)

Around the same time, AI was having a cultural moment.

I began leading Compass Pro Bono’s multi-year AI integration effort, from internal interviews and platform scoping to large-scale integration into how we did our work. I posted frequent AI tips, hosted weekly AI debriefs and “office hours,” and held monthly hands-on AI workshops. Just four months after we launched a suite of enterprise AI tools, our team told us they were reclaiming an average of 4-5 hours/week; ten months in, my colleagues said they were reclaiming an average of 10-12 hours per week, per person using AI tools. One of them said, “Without it, [my work] would take twice as long (at least) and the quality of the content would simply not be as high.”

In early 2024, our clients and volunteers started asking what we were doing about AI at Compass Pro Bono. So I turned our integration process into a four-part Responsible AI Integration Framework and began sharing it with anyone in our network who expressed interest. When the scale of the demand became clear, we hosted our first AI workshop for nonprofit leaders. To my amazement, with minimal advertising, more than 300 people signed up—and based on survey results, they seemed to love it.

In the following months, I got formal training in AI/ML deployment (from MIT’s Sloan School of Business) and change management (From the Association for Talent Development). I began supporting organizations through AI coaching, lectures, workshops, 10-week sprints, and multi-month residencies. I spent dozens of hours sitting in the sticky, challenging work of AI integration with teams working on economic development, educational access, and DEI. Over and over, I saw that thoughtful, correctly-paced change management helped organizations go further on AI integration.

I knew that my early clients weren’t the only ones struggling with these challenges.

That’s why, in late 2025, I decided to launch my own consultancy, Purposeful AI, to scale this work across issue areas and sectors.

Now, I’ve made it my mission to help as many orgs as I can understand how to meet this moment thoughtfully and responsibly.

Ready to explore how we can work together?