Testimonials
Telling the story of LAFCO and communicating the values that drive our organization were always a difficult task for us. We hired Joel to help us, and I must say he did an incredible job.
Upon completing extensive interviews of employees, clients, colleagues, and friends, Joel produced a comprehensive and beautifully written story, gently weaving all of the details of our 30-year history in a way that clearly defined and communicated the values that drive both our business and me personally as its founder. We now use this history as required reading for all of our employees so that they can fully immerse themselves in the culture that drives our business.
In the process of stepping back, reading what Joel learned from others, and evaluating these ideas against our own perceptions, we felt that we gained a greater capacity to define ourselves as a brand and to tell our story more fluidly in a distinct voice.
This work was not easy, but Joel was a master at encouraging members of the executive team to express their ideas while coaching and leading us to reach consensus on which best defined our brand ethos.
—Jon Bresler, Founder, LAFCO
Joel was an absolute pleasure to work with! His approach is inquisitive, sensitive, thorough, and strategic—all qualities that are necessary to navigate and understand an international organization.
He is an excellent interlocutor, adept at traversing complex and politically sensitive conversations with empathy and deep listening skills. At the end of our process together, Joel put together a comprehensive narrative that reflected the organization's 15 year history, and expressed the diverse perspectives of its stakeholders.
This narrative provided me with an opportunity to reflect on and recognize the diversity of voices and experiences within the organization, as well as gain insight into the full scope of its history. As a relatively new Executive Director, having this narrative in hand was invaluable! Given the day-to-day work, it would have taken me a number of years to learn the stories and experiences that Joel assembled so proficiently in the months we worked together. This, in turn, provided the organization with a strong scaffolding for the creation of a 3-5 year strategic plan.
Since working with Joel, I have used parts of the narrative he created to introduce new stakeholders to the organization in a clear and efficient way; relied on it to articulate and present who we are as an organization on our new website; and consulted it when encountering questions or organizational challenges that may have been addressed in different ways in the past.
I found Joel's process to be both supportive and challenging in an exciting way, and I highly recommend working with him!
—Hillit Zwick, Executive Director, Artis
Working with Joel was enlightening.
We worked together on a publication to commemorate the 10th anniversary of The Gender & Family Project at the Ackerman Institute for the Family. We knew that we wanted to tell the story of this landmark program, but we didn’t know exactly how.
Joel gave the project shape, worked with us to find the best writers to tell the story, and was the definitive force in guiding the project through completion. Not only did he keep the project on track and organized, but he brought a journalistic rigor and curiosity to a subject that I thought I knew everything about. The result was a piece that beautifully showed the origin, impact, and vibrancy of our work.
