My Story

For the past 25 years, I’ve been working to build a more just and reflective democracy, in which women and people of color have power and voters have a say in their representation. Leveraging my extensive experience in progressive grassroots organizing, fundraising and philanthropy, I pivoted a decade ago to become a philanthropic consultant, supporting donors and foundations to align their values with their charitable giving.

Through starting organizations, running funder collaboratives and serving on boards, I have a proven track record for developing strategy, raising and moving money, and building partnerships between donors and field leaders — especially around women's leadership, candidate development, democracy and voting rights.

At the national level, together with foundation partners, I grew a money in politics funder working group, from just a handful of people to over 300 donors, and wrote the first-of-its-kind grantmaking toolkit for funders working on both democracy reform and climate change. We built partnerships across sectors that led to an intersectional giving strategy that connected the corporatization of our democracy with the destruction of our planet.

Here in Massachusetts, I built and ran the Progressive Mass Funders Collaborative, working in partnership with individual donors and BIPOC field leaders to build and scale the progressive electoral infrastructure at the state level. Over a few election cycles, we raised $3 million to support donor organizing, movement groups and candidates.

Supporting women and people of color to run and win is a passion of mine, and my first gig in philanthropy was running the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, funding women’s leadership. I’m also proud to have served as a founding board member of Emerge MA and founding advisory committee member of the Women’s Fund of Western Mass’s Leadership Institute for Political Impact. In addition, I’ve volunteered and fundraised for female candidates up and down the ballot.

I studied religion and Spanish in college, and after four years of grassroots organizing, I went back to school. At Boston University’s School of Theology, I explored liberation theology and the connection between feminism and environmental destruction, finishing with a Masters degree in Theological Studies, with a focus on feminist and ecological ethics.

I live in Western Massachusetts with my spouse, a public school math teacher, and our two teenage daughters. Fighting for community public schools that serve all our kiddos and raising two daughters in this political climate is also part of what keeps me busy (and up at night!).