Moving out of a school

We recently moved from Baltimore to New York. As such, I needed to find a new job and am working for a small non-profit in New York City. While I'm no longer working in a school full time, I find that much of what I'm dealing with as the Associate Director of this non-profit is about how we communicate, what our message is, and how we can reach our constituents.

It seems vaguely familiar to what I was doing when I worked in a school. Our life has definitely been turned upside down with trying to figure out commuting, daycare, and creating a new community of friends for our family.

When we put our house up on the market, I really understood how much the way you present yourself really matters. No one wanted to see our messy bedroom, so it meant that the whole house would need to be cleaned up every day before we left for school. If you don't have small children (or maybe this applies to those with older children as well), this is not an easy task. We created routines and figured out how to put our bedrooms on display for those walking in.

While I was really aware of the messaging beforehand, this really influenced how I thought about our house and the way it looked to outsiders. My experience working through a database conversion and then a major overhaul of our website, I began to realize how important it is on how you present things both internally and externally.


With the experience of Student Information System, Point of Sale, and Website Projects, I began consulting with independent schools and non-profit organizations in across the country about how to think about their internal structure and systems in order to deal with their external message. While I no longer work in an independent school, I am very familiar with the issues that independent schools and non-profits face. It is the reason I began consulting, so I could help schools and non-profits make better and more informed decisions.