Hi, I’m Kristen.

I find the real problem, and then I design the right system to fix it.

That’s the whole job — whether the thing in front of me is a national coalition, a 40-year-old nonprofit in crisis, or one exhausted founder who can’t figure out why nothing feels like enough.

My career looks like a lot of different things from the outside: 12 years in federal consulting, a full nonprofit turnaround, two decades of coaching and organizational work. It’s actually one thing, practiced in different rooms.

What looks like an operational problem is usually a design problem. What looks like a culture problem is usually a systems problem. The fix is never just strategy, and it’s never just support — it’s building governance, operations, and culture as one coherent system, because they’re always one system whether you design them that way or not.

I spent 12 years holding federal agencies with competing mandates in the same room and finding language they could all agree on — authoring national consensus statements for the U.S. Departments of Justice and Health & Human Services, building a digital solutions function from the ground up, and producing convenings that drew thousands of people across government and nonprofit sectors. Then I took that same diagnostic instinct into leading a full organizational turnaround, and into coaching individual leaders through the exact same pattern on a smaller, more personal scale: find what’s actually broken, design something that holds, build it so it doesn’t depend on any one person — including me.

When I stepped into my current leadership role, I found an organization that needed a full structural rebuild, not a quick fix. Systems had grown up around individual preferences instead of durable infrastructure, and governance hadn’t been set up to actually function. Once we saw that clearly, we rebuilt the financial systems from the ground up, redesigned governance so the Board could do its job, and built a culture where people started staying instead of leaving. That’s the pattern I bring to every client, just at whatever scale you’re working at.

About Me

I live at 10,200 feet in Leadville, Colorado, with my husband, our teen twins, two cats, a terrifyingly smart cattle dog mix, and a pug who may or may not be a sentient potato. I’ve spent 20+ years across entrepreneurship, nonprofit leadership, and federal consulting — and somewhere in there I picked up an MBA, a master’s in publishing, and more certifications than fit neatly on a webpage. I’m direct, I’m warm, and I don’t believe those two things are in conflict.

Selected Credentials

• MBA, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts–Amherst
• Master of Professional Studies in Publishing, The George Washington University
• Professional Certified Coach, The Life Coach School
• Certified WRAP Facilitator
• Motivational Interviewing certification, UMass Center for Integrated Primary Care
• Mental Health First Aid (recertified 2026)

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