|Dedicated to working with compassionate leaders|
|Supporting those who are wounded to heal and serve as an instrument of change|
|Advocate for hope, truth, racial healing, and transformation as a path towards justice|
| Transforming Public Health Through Strategic Leadership and Fundraising Excellence |
I am a New York–born storyteller and global health strategist with deep experience in philanthropy and fundraising, trauma-informed systems, child sexual abuse prevention, and survivor-centered leadership. Through my consulting practice, JSC, LLC, I support individuals and organizations working at the intersection of health, ethics, justice, and narrative.
For over two decades, I’ve helped nonprofits, foundations, and public institutions develop strategy, build partnerships, write compelling proposals, evaluate impact, and center lived experience in everything they do. I bring a relational, narrative-driven approach to all my work—whether supporting policy change, training leaders in trauma-informed practice, or shaping ethical storytelling frameworks for programs and campaigns.
My work is grounded in the belief that change happens when we move at the speed of trust. I choose my partnerships carefully, working each year with a handful of organizations whose missions echo what I believe matters most: compassion, fairness, dignity, and repair.
I’ve followed stories of healing and harm around the world—from trauma workshops in New Zealand to arbovirology labs in Colombia, from memoir research in Albania to program development in Estonia. My carry-on is always the same: research notebooks, grant proposals, family photographs, and fragments of memory that continue to shape how I write, serve, and witness.
I hold degrees from Columbia University (BA), SUNY Albany (MPH), and Albany Medical College (MS in Bioethics), and am represented by Barbara Jones at the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency.
How I Approach Proposal Development with Organizations and Communities
How I Approach Proposal Development
Every good proposal begins with a promise—not just of funding, but of trust. Of listening closely. Of honoring what communities already know and do. My role isn’t to overwrite that knowledge, but to translate it into language funders can understand—without losing what makes it alive.
This story reflects how I work: relationally, strategically, and with deep respect for those closest to the issue. Whether the proposal is about child safety, health equity, or trauma-informed systems change, I begin with the same question:
What is the promise we’re making—and how do we build a structure strong enough to hold it?
This particular collaboration began, as many do, not with a deadline, but with a conversation. A shared recognition that something urgent and beautiful was already happening—and that the right kind of support could help it grow.
In this case, the promise was to a community with a devastating history of child sexual abuse. We weren’t just applying for a grant. We were committing to do it differently. The spirit behind the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation application was part dream, part logistics, part late-night panic. Working across hemispheres meant someone was always groggy. Someone was always emailing from a locked bathroom. Someone—usually me—was stitching it all together with grace, urgency, and caffeine.
The stakes were high, not because we needed a win, but because we’d made a quiet commitment: this time, the community would not be an afterthought. We weren’t building something for them. We were building it with them—and, in many ways, under their direction.
We became the kind of team that knows when to press and when to wait, when to soften an email and when to escalate. We learned to code-switch across funder-speak, academic-speak, survivor-speak, and the language of the Marae. The proposal itself became a kind of manuscript—each draft shaped by hope, urgency, and honest constraint.
We weren’t just asking for support. We were trying to reframe the problem. This wasn’t about trauma as a metric. It was about colonization, cultural wisdom, and the long arc of relational healing. That meant letting go of control. That meant letting the community lead.
The scaffolding for the project came from the community itself—from a Samoan proverb often repeated by our local partners:
“O le fofo e sili mo le tiga o le alalafaga, o le alalafaga lava ia.”
“The best solutions to the pain of a community come from the community itself.”
The first story I ever wrote was about a group of girls choosing who would go first in a game. I didn’t realize it then, but I was already asking the questions I’d spend my life circling: Who decides? Who gets heard? How do we bring everyone in?
That instinct—to shape chaos into something understandable—stayed with me. Writing became my form of survival, then witness, then return. I have written through trauma, policy, research, grief, and memory. Each piece an answer to the quiet question beneath everything: Now that you know, what will you do with it?
My creative work spans memoir, fiction, poetry, and performance, exploring themes of survival, maternal complicity, spiritual terror, and radical repair. My memoir-in-progress, Hope Was the Work: A Memoir of Survival, Public Reckoning, and Radical Repair, weaves personal narrative with public health work, cultural analysis, and the slow construction of hope. My novel Howard Be Thy Name is a literary exploration of family betrayal, secrecy, and the long arc of survival.
Dream Alibis, a poetry collection, and its companion play Little Red Wagon centers on a family navigating the aftermath of a political activist’s suicide, bound by grief and silence. The play was produced on Purple Radio and staged at the University Club of Albany.
Other dramatic works include We Are at the Well and Waller, which explore maternal complicity and relational survival in the aftermath of spiritual and emotional harm.
My short story “Second, You Are Really Nigerian” was published in Arts and Understanding Literary Magazine, received an Honorable Mention Award from Glimmer Train and the Hudson Valley Writers Guild, and was later adapted into a one-act play performed by The Wit and Will Theater Company.
My essays have appeared in The Guardian, Chicago Story Press, P.S. I Love You, DewDrop, Arts & Understanding, and The Writer.
My essay “How Do You Forgive the Unforgivable?” was nominated for both a Pushcart Prize and Best American Essay in 2025. Another personal essay, “This Is About My Mother”, appeared in The Guardian and explores silence, complicity, and the limits of maternal love.
I write two SubStack newsletters—The Second Silence on cultural critique and survivorship, and Dream Alibis, a blend of poetry, photography, dream, and memory.
Much of my writing is informed by my parallel life as a public health strategist. For over two decades, I’ve worked at the intersection of narrative, trauma recovery, and children’s wellbeing. I continue to develop programming that integrates storytelling, ethics, and systems change.
I return to the same questions: Who is at the table, and who isn’t? When should I speak, and when should I listen? How do we enter a space with grace and humility? When is it time to lead, and when is it time to step aside? Writing doesn’t give me answers. It gives me better questions. It keeps asking: What else? Who else? Where else?
In the Dream House
Created by Sarah Blesener and JoAnn Stevelos
In the Dream House is a collaborative, interdisciplinary project investigating how we engage with visual archives through a trauma-informed lens, aiming to make visible the absences that have been excluded from historical narratives and, in doing so, create opportunities for recovery, reworking, and reimagining the stories we tell. This work is interested in the gaps, silences, absences and redactions that often permeate archives, especially in the context of traumatic histories and survivor testimonies. How can we bridge the boundaries between private and public memory in mourning and grief? How can participatory visual storytelling practices be integrated into recovery? By reimagining how we work with our personal and collective archives, we create a space where healing becomes a shared responsibility—one that embraces creativity, compassion, and mutual support.
This project explores how archives—both personal and collective—can support survivors of trauma by reactivating them through sensory memory and creative interventions such as the use of flowers, heirlooms, and memorabilia. Rather than focusing on erasure, we aim to work with archives in ways that honor the experiences of survivors while fostering recovery and growth. We are interested in integrating participatory methodology and therapeutic techniques, focusing on care-driven, rather than state-driven, methods to transform trauma into creative spaces for creativity and healing.
This project asks a radical question: What do we do with the personal archives of trauma survivors—especially when those archives were curated by the very people who caused harm? Co-created by writer and public health advocate JoAnn Stevelos and documentary photographer Sarah Blesener (www.sarahblesener.com), What Do We Do With the Photos of Monsters? centers around a collection of family photo albums that depict a smiling priest, a complicit mother, and children performing normalcy under threat. These aren’t just photographs—they’re instruments of forgetting, built to obscure what they also record. Rather than destroy them, this work reclaims the archive as a site of authorship. Through visual redaction, annotation, and re-framing, it turns passive documentation into active survival. The project becomes both a question and a method: Can a photograph be repossessed? Can survivors transform the record of their own erasure into a map of survival? This is not revenge. It’s not nostalgia. It’s a practice of truth-telling, one that refuses to let the monsters keep the frame.
I am an innovator and executive leader with a proven track record of shaping public health policy and advancing children’s health care across local, national, and global contexts. My work is rooted in equity-centered, trust-based leadership that prioritizes community-led solutions, redistributes power, and amplifies the voices of those most impacted by systemic injustice.
For over two decades, I’ve worked at the intersection of narrative, trauma recovery, and child wellbeing—designing and leading multi-year, multimillion-dollar initiatives grounded in systems change and survivor-centered approaches. I specialize in building cross-sector strategies that integrate research, ethics, and healing into public health practice.
In both my leadership and writing, I return to a central question: Who am I to do this work? This inquiry lives at the heart of The Wounded Leader, a workshop I co-facilitate for professionals and survivor-advocates navigating personal trauma and systems leadership. It also shapes my authorship of Worthy: Raising Body Positive Children with the Power of Kindness, a compassionate guide to raising emotionally resilient children in an image-driven world.
I advise executive teams and boards on thought leadership, brand positioning, and philanthropic strategy, and I build coalitions with foundations, high-net-worth individuals, and mission-aligned supporters. Known as a transparent and empathetic communicator, I am committed to sustainable, compassionate leadership that transforms institutions from within.
Alongside my public health and leadership work, I maintain an active creative practice rooted in memory, performance, and narrative repair. My plays, essays, and poetry explore themes of maternal complicity, survival, estrangement, and the long arc of healing. I’ve developed work through residencies at Arts Letters & Numbers, The Church, PS21, and the Roxbury Writing Residency, and have collaborated with artists like Sarah Blesener, JD Urban, and Ryder Cooley on archival and performance-based projects. My creative writing has been staged, broadcast, and widely published, with recognition from Glimmer Train, The Guardian, Chicago Story Press, and The Writer. Whether in a theater, a gallery, or the margins of a SubStack essay, I return to the same creative commitments that shape my public health work: honoring complexity, amplifying the unheard, and transforming silence into story.
My consulting practice, JSC, LLC, supports a small number of nonprofits and community-led organizations each year through strategy, narrative development, proposal writing, and trauma-informed advising. I choose my partnerships with care—working only with those whose missions reflect the values I hold most: compassion, fairness, dignity, and repair.
I hold degrees from Columbia University (BA), SUNY Albany (MPH), and Albany Medical College (MS in Bioethics), and I am represented by Barbara Jones at the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency.
Public health strategy & global children’s health
Equity-centered leadership & community-led solutions
Strategic partnerships & philanthropic engagement
Trauma-informed systems & survivor-centered design
Thought leadership & narrative-driven impact
Program development & applied research
Cross-sector collaboration & ethical innovation
MPH, Social Behavior and Community Health
School of Public Health, SUNY Albany
MS, Bioethics
Alden March Bioethics Institute, Albany Medical College
BA, Liberal Arts
Columbia University, New York
Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness (TSM) | 2024
Harvard ED-X: From Laboratory to Market | 2024
Mastering the Treatment of Trauma | NICABM, 2024
Working with the Pain of Abandonment | NICABM, 2023
Mindfulness for Life and Work | NICABM, 2021
Contemplative Therapies & Resilience Building | Embodied Philosophy, 2020
End of Life Doula Training | INELDA, 2022
200-Hour Yoga Teacher Certification | Yoga Alliance, 2025
Board Member, The Hope Institute
Board Member, Eat REAL
Board Member, New York State Public Health Association
Committee Member, International Society of Child Abuse Prevention
Advisory Board Member, Obesity Action Coalition – Childhood Obesity Division
Member, American Public Health Association
Member, American Society for Bioethics and Humanities – Pediatric Ethics Alliance
Memoir: Hope Was the Work: A Memoir of Survival, Public Reckoning, and Radical Repair
Chapbook: Dangerous Situations
Art Book: Architecture of the Trap
Archival Workshop: The Dream House
Little Red Wagon – Submitted to Yale Drama Series Playwriting Competition (2025)
Little Red Wagon
• Radio Reading – Purple House Radio (2017)
• Staged Reading – University Club of Albany (2017)
We Are at the Well
•Full Production – Wit and Will Theater (2008)
This Is About My Mother – The Guardian
How Do You Forgive the Unforgivable? – Chicago Story Press, Nominated for the Pushcart Prize & Best American Essays
The Second Silence – Substack newsletter
Passersby – DewDrop
The Alaei Brothers – Arts & Understanding Literary Magazine
No Syrup, Just Butter – P.S. I Love You
Howard Be Thy Name – Novel
Dream Alibis – Anthology of Poetry and Plays
A Voice of My Own – The Writer
Second, You’re Really Nigerian – Arts & Understanding Literary Magazine, Honorable Mention – Glimmer Train & Hudson Valley Writers Guild
NYS Poetry Workshop with Gary Maggio
NYS Writers Institute:
• Short Fiction with Lydia Davis
• Fiction with James Lasdun
Troy Arts Center:
• Poetry with Victorio Reyes
• Fiction with Lucia Nevai
Columbia University: Writing for Television with Frank Pugliese
31 Plays in 31 Days Challenge
Arts & Letters & Numbers with Sarah Blesener
The Church – Residency & Performance with Ryder Cooley
PS21 – Residency & Performance with JD Urban
Roxbury Writing Residency with Annie DeWitt
