Kristen joined grassroots solutions in late 2008 as a principal. She divides her time between leading firm-wide business development initiatives, overseeing the firm’s relationship-building and marketing efforts, and working with clients on strategy, organizing, and evaluation assignments. During her first three years at grassroots solutions, Kristen’s focus has been on securing a new partnership with the nationally recognized digital agency EchoDitto, setting up a new marketing department, developing an internal learning program to support sustainable firm growth, and building out the firm’s strategy work on urban redevelopment and community engagement. Her recent client work includes assignments with Unity ‘09, United Way for Southeastern Michigan, New World Foundation, We Are American Alliance Action Fund, Transportation Alternatives, and the Kresge Foundation.

Prior to joining the grassroots solutions team, Kristen spent 25 years working as an executive, senior manager and consultant with a range of prominent advocacy organizations, which in the U.S. included the Our Bodies Ourselves women’s health collective, National Women’s Law Center, National Wildlife Federation, Common Cause, League of Women Voters, Public Citizen, Brennan Center for Justice, and Rock the Vote, among others. Kristen has significant experience with international social movements as well. In the late 1980s, she worked closely with Dr. Gene Sharp at Harvard University, whose groundbreaking scholarship and movement leader trainings on nonviolent action and democratization helped bring down the Berlin Wall and the apartheid system in South Africa, and are now being widely adapted by a new generation of activists in the recent Arab Spring movement. As a director of the Greenpeace International secretariat in Amsterdam a decade later, Kristen helped craft a $145m global resource and campaign strategy and oversaw the development of the federation’s 30+ national organizations around the world. Kristen left Amsterdam after being drafted to lead a comprehensive organizational turnaround as Executive Director of Greenpeace USA in 1997. In 2001, Kristen became Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, now known as Human Rights First, leading them through a major identity change and transition in their public advocacy practice both in the U.S. and globally. Following the 2004 elections, Kristen’s focus once again shifted back to the U.S., working at the invitation of the JEHT Foundation to design and launch a new grant-making program focused on election reform and civic engagement.

In her other life, Kristen is a lapsed art history major who still feels a geeky thrill remembering the time 25 years ago when she got stuck in traffic for an hour with David Hockney in the passenger seat of her Honda Civic, and had the chance to ask him questions about the discovery of perspective in renaissance Italy, art and optics, and his incredible portfolio of photo collages.