Co-Creation

What some call consulting, I call co-creation. I partner with you and your team, complimenting your expertise and skills with mine to create something together.

  • Strategic Planning

    Having built 9 new programs and supported strategic planning efforts as both a staff member and a board member, I customize timelines, processes, and brainstorming sessions tailored to your needs.

    Complimenting these skills, I integrate my experience in coaching, human centered design, and facilitation into the process. A few examples of my work include:

    • Designed, launched, and managed a national awareness and advocacy campaign for UNICEF USA, reaching 60,000 constituents annually. Utilized field scanning, research, and monitoring and evaluation systems to understand our unique value add to the field

    • Coordinated a year-long strategic rethink of an individual grant-making program at Open Society Foundations. Utilized facilitation, field scans, and human-centered design to engage stakeholders from staff members to grantees

    • Led strategic planning for NGO-CSTIP, a coalition of 50 international NGOs collaborating to address human trafficking at the United Nations

  • Human-Centered Design (HCD)

    Sometimes referred to as design thinking, human-centered design is a process to consider how your services, products, or programs will benefit and impact the communities and populations you intend to serve. It actively engages stakeholders' perspectives and experiences in order to build or reimagine interventions.

    I’m passionate about this work because instead of thinking of a solution and then applying it, HCD integrates the people who are most impacted by the issue into the process. We work with and for the impacted communities. This means that interventions are more inclusive, sustainable, and effective. If you’re building a new program or offering, considering working with a new population, or revamping your existing work, HCD is a wonderful tool to think through how to build your work.

    Trained in this process through a MA in Social Innovation, I have used HCD to:

    • Reimagine a grant making program at an international human rights foundation by engaging staff, grantees, board members, and more

    • Conduct client journey mapping for a sustainable events company to redesign their offerings for clients, resulting in a customizable and inclusive wedding ceremony package

    • Design an intersectional approach to cultivate cross-sectional movement building among social and environmental justice movements

  • Facilitation

    With over a decade of experience of planning retreats, strategic planning sessions, board meetings, workshops, and more, I deliver facilitation that is customized for your team’s specific needs. My approach to facilitation is through the lens of equity and inclusivity. In order to have meaningful sessions, entire groups or teams have to feel like they are operating in a space of trust, where listening for understanding is taking place.

    I do this by thinking creatively about how to elicit input from each member of the team. Some of us are verbal processors, others deep thinkers who are perceived to be “quiet”, while some work best with a hands-on approach. Throughout our time working together, I’ll regularly check-in with and survey individuals to understand what’s working, ensure everyone feels like their voice is heard, and identify opportunities for improvement in our next session. My facilitation style fosters opportunities for all of our diverse styles and approaches in order to create an inclusive process.

    Examples of my facilitation include:

    • Quarterly Retreat Facilitation during a strategic rethink of a program at Open Society Foundations

    • Up to 100 trainings annually for civil society partners, volunteers, and corporate partners at UNICEF USA

    • Annual onboarding, training, and facilitation for Global Citizenship Fellowship for new and returning Fellows

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Client Testimonial

I worked with Emily as a human-centered design consultant to support launching a new service for my company (a socially conscious wedding and event planning company). Emily facilitated a user mapping journey session with my team that was incredibly helpful - both for the creation of our new offering and for garnering their feedback about our overall customer service experience. In conducting this session, I realized that I had not often solicited that kind of in-depth feedback from my team in our six years of business. Following that discussion, I’ve built more feedback mechanisms into my work - including a quarterly meta session (a meeting format I learned from Emily) and post-event feedback forms for all of my clients. 

That exercise and corresponding consulting sessions with Emily helped me turn an idea for a new offering into an actual offering that now includes digital assets and consulting services for a new market of clients who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to access my services. Emily provided thoughtful feedback on the assets themselves that we used prior to sharing the assets externally with clients. As a result of feedback from Emily and our team during the user mapping journey, I implemented a formal onboarding process for new clients that I now use consistently and my clients find incredibly helpful. As part of that process, we now use Asana (a project management tool) with clients from the start of our working relationship to clearly set expectations with clients and keep our work organized and visible. Previously, we had only used Asana internally, and Emily helped us create a branded Asana tutorial for new clients and a process for onboarding them to the software. 

One outcome that I didn’t expect from our work together is that I now use the digital assets we created as part of this service for ALL of our clients. I had anticipated that these new assets would make up our new digital offering, but our clients have benefited from using them across the board, and having this information as an easy-to-use template helps save me time by not having to continually write down best practices and budgeting information for clients who often have similar questions. 

Emily has been a close colleague of mine for years and someone whose input I trust immensely. Being able to engage Emily’s consulting services in a project for my business was such a pleasure. Her facilitation and input provided immense value to my team and subsequently to my client experience. I hope I can work with her in this capacity again! 

-Justine Broughal, Owner of Together Events