I help people and organizations get described correctly.

About Fieldnote

That sentence is the whole practice. I've spent over a decade inside some of the most complex communications environments in the DC nonprofit and philanthropic sector — at the intersection of leadership, strategy, and narrative. The titles changed. The work stayed the same: I read environments with unusual precision, translate what I see into language leaders can act on, and advise on what's required while there's still time to choose.

What I've learned is that most organizations have an alignment problem wearing a communications costume. The messaging breaks down because something internal has drifted — in the leadership, the culture, the space between what's being performed and what's true. I find the drift. I give it language. I help leaders close it at the source, where the fix actually holds.

My work sits at a particular intersection: rigorous strategic analysis, deep cultural fluency, and the kind of precise communication that makes complex things legible. Every engagement gets all three.

A woman with dark hair in a zebra-print dress sitting at a table, smiling in a well-lit restaurant or cafe.

Meet Michelle

I'm a strategist and advisor, and a private person whose best thinking only happens out loud — which is how I ended up making my living inside other people's hardest conversations.

I keep binoculars on the windowsill. I know what the flowers mean. Reading for pattern is both how I'm built and what I sell: fifteen years across nonprofit, philanthropic, government, and corporate settings taught me that the rules of making ideas land are the same everywhere. What changes is whether anyone has applied them to you.

I'm unusually good at seeing what people can't see in themselves — the expertise they walk past, the value they undersell, the story they're sitting on — and building the strategic narrative that makes it legible to the world. I know this work from the inside. Every line of my own bio was once true and the whole thing still pointed at a woman who'd been retired for years. Updating that file, deliberately and in public, is the shift I now walk other people through. A master's degree, a pandemic, and a few forced reinventions supplied both the theory and the field experience of being seen clearly in rooms designed with someone else in mind.

I work with leaders and organizations ready to be understood on their own terms.

Close-up of a lit sparkler with sparks flying around, reflected on water at sunset with a colorful sky.

My Philosophy

  • When what a leader says, values, and does all fit, teams trust, stakeholders believe, and the work lands. I work upstream, where the fit is made.

  • The leaders I work with usually know something is off well before they can say what. Part of what I do is hand them the words — so they can act with precision on the actual thing.

  • I do the kind of rigorous, discerning work that stays sound over time, with a small number of clients, because that's what the leaders I serve require — and because I've never once had a good idea in a hurry.