about me

I offer a range of consulting services for social movement leaders, organizations, and grantmakers in the U.S. and around the world. With particular expertise on gender justice and women's rights, I bring a feminist lens to my work and a deep commitment to centering the perspectives and voices of those most impacted by injustice. My consulting work focuses on helping change leaders strengthen their programmatic, advocacy, and philanthropic strategies.

I have worn many hats, from educator to researcher to advocate, in my 25 years of experience in the field of human rights and social justice. As an international human rights lawyer trained in the U.S., my work traverses many areas of law, social justice advocacy, and geographic regions. I primarily support groups working within and across the fields of feminism and women’s rights, sexual rights and reproductive rights/justice, disability justice, racial justice, economic justice, climate and environmental justice. My CV is located on my LinkedIn page.

I start from the assumption that no one group or movement achieves change on their own. Social change requires deep collaboration across social movements as well as sectors that bring complementary skill sets, knowledge and expertise. Consequently, my role as a consultant is often to build bridges between activists, advocates, researchers and funders in order to more purposefully align strategies. Having lived and worked in many contexts outside the U.S., I am inspired by the goals, strategies and tactics of Global South-led social movements. Whenever possible, my approach connects U.S. change makers to global social movements in order to share learnings and deepen solidarity. I bring a feminist approach to all the work I do, which means centering those most impacted by oppression and injustice and supporting their struggle for structural change.

Many organizations are stuck in old ways of thinking and working. I am committed to helping leaders learn new practices and mindsets that can unlock creativity or embrace risk-taking that is necessary to confront today’s challenges. In the design and implementation of any engagement, I rely on experiential and participatory learning methods to help people reach beyond the limits of their own experience, expertise and knowledge.

Strategy

• Guide groups in developing or refining their advocacy, programmatic or grant-making strategies

• Help organizations monitor emerging trends in social movements, advocacy and philanthropy

• Develop processes for organizations and groups to reflect upon and refresh their strategies

Advocacy

• Help groups clarify their theory of change and create an advocacy strategy to realize it

• Design and facilitate strategic convenings to align around advocacy goals or work through conflict, disagreement or tension

• Build leaders’ capacity to develop an advocacy strategy and engage effectively in national, regional and global advocacy forums

Research

• Design participatory processes for gathering and synthesizing data from multiple stakeholders, coalitions, and networks

• Assess gaps, needs and opportunities for funders, advocates and movement leaders seeking to deepen their impact

• Research and analyze trends in U.S. law and policy and international human rights law

Learning

• Design learning inquiries for philanthropic leaders to gather input from the field to guide grant-making approaches

• Develop learning agendas for organizations to assess their impact and pivot when needed

• Build adaptive skills of leaders to create an organizational culture of learning and curiosity

facilitating cross-movement collaboration

My work often focuses on strengthening alliances across social movements by helping to address differences in goals or approach and identify strategic openings for collaboration. From 2015-2019, I worked to increase trust between the disability justice movement and reproductive health, rights and justice (RH/R/J) movements in the U.S. and globally. Examples of this work included: drafting a strategic framework for the U.S.-based RH/R/J movement to integrate a disability lens; facilitating five multi-disciplinary convenings between members of the U.S. disability justice and RH/R/J movements; and designing and facilitating a global activist convening that produced the Nairobi Principles on Abortion, Pre-Natal Testing, and Disability.

strengthening a feminist funding infrastructure

A series of engagements have focused on strengthening resourcing, infrastructure and visibility for women’s funds, the group of intermediary funders that resource feminist movements. For the Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights, I supported an advocacy assessment and strategy refresh in 2022, and also co-authored their 2018 report, Feminist Resistance and Resilience: Reflections on Closing Civic Space. Research for FRIDA, the Young Feminist Fund, contributed to a groundbreaking publication designed to help international NGOs and funders better support young feminist organizing and movements. Another inquiry jointly commissioned by Mama Cash and Global Fund for Women (for which I partnered with Andrea Lynch) helped the two largest global women’s funds strengthen their existing approaches and identify opportunities for strategic collaboration with the global ecosystem of women’s funds.