YOUR GUIDES

is a writer and educator with extensive multidisciplinary experience at the intersection of organizational development, health, and community care. Throughout her career, Amanda has partnered with community organizers, health practitioners, and educators to design participatory and collaborative initiatives. She is particularly skilled in identifying patterns, translating complex concepts, and fostering environments that prioritize long-term sustainability, engagement, and care.

She holds a master’s degree in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from the University of Maryland, where she learned to leverage strategies that strengthen organizational effectiveness and resilience. Her professional background spans instructional design, violence prevention, crisis services, and behavioral health, with a focus on training leadership, supporting high-stress and resource-limited teams, and navigating complex organizational change.

Her approach integrates contemplative leadership with practical, systems-level insights, informed by both lived and professional experience. As a caregiver and practitioner, she is committed to advancing work cultures that balance effectiveness with authenticity, well-being, and collective growth. As a working parent she thoughtfully considers human development frameworks, and as a practicing postpartum doula she prioritizes creating self-advocacy spaces. At the age of 22, Amanda was promoted to be the first Director of Training & Technical Assistance, and later the Director of Training & Community Engagement at the DC Rape Crisis Center. She worked for seven years at one of the oldest rape crisis centers in the US, and as a senior leader for the local and national coalition work on behalf of DC’s Sexual Assault Coalition. She was recognized by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center for her premier advocacy training, and advanced curriculum development and educational models for youth and adult learners. Initiatives she led include Art&Movement consent skills series through the DC Public Libraries, Rethinking Masculinity in partnership with Collective Action for Safe Spaces and Rethink, a whole school model in a DC PK-12th grade school system, and the introduction of a corps of community educators to lead child prevention and student advocacy clubs. She’s facilitated workshops at local conferences such at Service2Justice and Kennedy Krieger Trauma Symposium, as well as National Sexual Assault Conference and the Vera Institute Conference. 

is a farm girl turned international aid worker turned leadership coach, communications strategist, and artist. As creator of the blog, how-matters.org, she was named as one of Foreign Policy Magazine's "100 women to follow on Twitter” at @intldogooder. A book which she co-edited, Smart Risks: How small grants are helping to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, features the growing community of philanthropists that fund visionary, yet under-the-radar leaders around the world.

In her 20+-year career, Jennifer has served with various organizations in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Namibia, and the US, including Oxfam, the Red Cross, UNICEF, Catholic Relief Services, Thousand Currents, and Firelight Foundation, and has consulted with many more.

Jennifer is constantly looking for ways to portray the realities of people’s lives, their struggles, their strengths – as well as outsiders’ roles and mistakes – in an impatient, “silver bullet solutions” world. She taught “Storytelling and Communications for Social Change” at the University of Vermont for six years, and with her students at Georgetown University in 2014, she published “The Development Element: Guidelines for the future of communicating about the end of global poverty.”

Her articles and essays have appeared in such publications as The Chronicle of Philanthropy, OpenDemocracy, Alliance Magazine, Devex, NGO Storytelling, and Civil Eats. Her poems have been published in The Guardian UK, Lucky Jefferson, Yemassee Journal, Split This Rock, and an essay interrogating narratives of “America, the great” within her own German settler ancestry, entitled “A story of us,” appeared in EcoTheo Review.

Given that her hometown of Bruning, Nebraska, USA has a population of less than 300 people, it’s no wonder that Jennifer found her calling in accompanying people to heal and thrive in community. She supports people to work together to usher in political courage, cultural humility, and an ethic of care within your teams, your organization, and the social good sector writ large.

As independent consultants, leadership coaches, and facilitators, we support teams and organizations to untangle from cycles of dysfunction.

Through our various services and products, we help professionals build the skills rarely found in job descriptions or organizational planning documents - for example: (1) bridging the systemic and the interpersonal, (2) non-extractive, trauma-informed meeting design, and (3) unearthing assumptions and checking for shared understanding.

Together, we prepare and accompany people to subvert institutional fuckery - by knowing ourselves deeply first so that we can more effectively relate to each other and notice change that IS possible and practical.