MY WORK
I have spent most of my career building and strengthening mission-driven organizations: helping boards, CEOs, founders, and senior teams turn purpose into practice. Over time, that work has led me toward three connected areas: institutions that anchor, responsible business, and environments that sustain.
INSTITUTIONS THAT ANCHOR
This is where most of my career has lived.
I believe mission-driven organizations of all kinds can anchor communities when they are well-led, well-governed, well-resourced, and strong enough to hold purpose through change. When they are effective and faithful to mission, the organization itself becomes an expression of the mission.
Today, I serve as Deputy Executive Director at Inclusive Development International, a global human rights organization advancing corporate accountability for environmental and economic justice. My work sits across the full organizational system: mission and vision, strategy, fundraising, finance, governance, risk, operations, human resources, culture, and the relationships needed to help a growing organization hold its purpose well.
My grounding in this work began in education. I have worked with startup and turnaround public charter schools, a national charter school incubator, higher education institutions, education nonprofits, and ed tech companies. Across those settings, I learned how much communities rely on capable leaders, thoughtful boards, clear strategy, and strong systems.
I have helped build boards from the ground up, coached first-time CEOs and founders, advised established boards through change, and supported leaders trying to give a growing mission the structure to match. That work was recognized by LinkedIn for Good, which invited me to write about using LinkedIn to support board-building and leadership recruitment.
I have also worked inside older institutions trying to renew themselves. At a public liberal arts college, I helped build a community movement in support of the institution during a period of declining public funding and change. At a nearly 100-year-old organization working across Africa and the Americas, I partnered with leadership on strategy, rebranding, board development, and internal systems.
Across all of this, the work has been less about any single sector than a consistent practice: helping mission-driven organizations become effective enough to serve the communities that rely on them.
“Misha has accomplished more in the past four months than the previous three years.”
BUSINESSES THAT CREATE RESPONSIBLY
I am both an entrepreneur and an intrapreneur. I like building new things, and I like helping other builders give shape to ideas that are still becoming real.
I believe business can be a force for good when it creates value responsibly, expands opportunity and ownership, and remains accountable to the people and places it affects. I also believe community-rooted founders can connect real problems with novel solutions when they have the capital, relationships, strategy, and support to build.
That belief has shown up in different ways across my career. I have worked with school founders, nonprofit founders, business-led education advocacy organizations, and leaders building new programs inside existing institutions. At Keene State College, I designed and stood up a public-private partnership, bringing together a college, school district, community college, chamber of commerce, and regional partners to launch a workforce development initiative designed to connect education, industry, and regional economic need.
At America Succeeds, I worked with business-led alliances committed to improving education and workforce outcomes. That work deepened my interest in the role business can play in public problem-solving when it is responsible, accountable, and connected to community need.
I am also a founder. I created Maluti, an outdoor skincare brand rooted in outdoor wellness, sustainability, and inclusion. Maluti has become a laboratory for my thinking about responsible products, inclusive markets, community-rooted brand building, and the courage it takes to move an idea from imagination into the world. In 2023, Maluti took first place at the Jake Jabs Startup Competition and was a semifinalist in the Denver Startup Week Pitch Competition.
To me, businesses that create are not only companies. They are ventures, partnerships, programs, products, and models that generate new value and give people more agency over the future they are building.
ENVIRONMENTS THAT SUSTAIN
I believe the future depends on our ability to connect with outdoor spaces as sites of joy, community wellness, environmental justice, climate responsibility, and care for the natural world.
In 2017, I left my job at an education technology startup and set out on what I called a career sabbatical. Nothing could have prepared me for how much I needed it.
For 10 months, I explored the Colorado Rockies, backpacking to remote alpine lakes, sleeping in my car to catch sunrise on mountain summits, and finding community among people who understood the strange joy of being tired, dirty, awed, and grateful all at once.
Those months changed me. They gave me a deeper sense of responsibility to live and work in ways that honor the connection between people and planet, protect the natural world, and expand access to the joy and healing the outdoors can bring.
Since then, I have served as Colorado Co-Leader for Outdoor Afro and as a board member for the High Mountain Institute, Conservation Colorado, and the Conservation Alliance. I have also volunteered with Camber Outdoors and served as a brand ambassador for Feral, a community-based outdoor shop.
This work sits at the intersection of outdoor recreation, just and equitable conservation, environmental advocacy, access, and belonging. I care about protecting the places we love. I also care about expanding who feels invited into those places, who has power in decisions about land and water, and whether the environments around us sustain us rather than harm us.
That includes the food we grow and share, the air and water we depend on, the trails and parks where we gather, and the everyday ways communities build connection to the earth and to each other.
