One hot summer afternoon, I waited in the grass parking lot as campers boarded a van home for the evening. I waved goodbye to Daniel, a brown-eyed eleven-year-old with a heart-melting smile.
 

Then a miracle happened. Daniel waved back.
 

You see, Daniel fell on the severe end of the autism spectrum, and any form of communication was cause for celebration. Waving on his own after weeks of practice was a breakthrough for Daniel — and for me.
 

While my career path ultimately took me away from full-time direct service, I found a different way to combine my passion for helping people understand one another and making the world a little gentler place to live. Whether ensuring that inner-city students can obtain a stellar education, recruiting mentors to guide aspiring college scholars, or showing donors just how much their gifts matter, I set out to use my skills as a storyteller and graphic designer to help nonprofits make the world a better place.

Experience

 
With nearly a decade of in-house marketing and communications experience in the nonprofit world, including eight years as the director of communications for a prominent inner-city elementary school, I am keenly aware of the unique needs of nonprofits. I have done it all—developed communication plans; written newsletters, website copy, e-newsletters, appeals and award nominations; designed event invitations, programs, posters and letterhead; launched and managed social media pages; and managed projects with outside vendors, including a major website overhaul. But I hope my work speaks for itself. Please take a moment to review my portfolio.

Education

 
I have been superbly prepared to provide you flawless writing thanks to my mom, who instilled in me an abhorrence of all typographical and grammatical errors from an early age. I can remember sitting at the kitchen table, rewriting my first grade homework—a page of lowercase letters—because the columns were a little crooked. I would have rather been watching TV. As I got older, my mom could spot a grammatical error in a history paper from a mile away. So thanks, Mom!

My formal education included a research-oriented master’s degree in communication from Marquette University through the public service focused Trinity Fellows Program, a bachelor’s degree in the humanities from Providence College, and the Fundamentals of Fundraising through the Association of Fundraising Professionals and Villanova University. But I owe a tremendous debt to the IHM nuns, especially Sister Marie Therese, for imparting a superior mastery of English grammar throughout primary and secondary school, and to Schwester Rosemarie for sharpening my understanding of my own language through the lens of another.