MissionPlay Consulting

I help sports-based youth development organizations work together — programs using sport to create access and opportunity for young people in high-need communities across Massachusetts, building the structure and coordination to do collectively what none of them could do alone.

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Work

I work with coalitions and networks of sports-based youth development organizations — helping them build the infrastructure to do collectively what none of them can do alone.The organizations in these coalitions are already doing important work: designing programs that help young people grow, developing their staff, and working hard to secure the resources they need to sustain it all. These are organizations serving young people in high-need communities across Massachusetts — using sports as a vehicle for access and opportunity. Coalition work sits alongside all of that. It requires shared governance, coordinated communication, and a different kind of trust than what any single organization needs to function on its own. Building that takes time and a particular kind of support. That's what I provide.

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About

I've spent more than 30 years working in sports-based youth development — first doing the direct work, then running organizations, and now supporting the coalitions and networks that connect them.
That background matters for the work I do now. I've been an ED. I've been a COO. I've managed boards, built staff teams, navigated funder relationships, and figured out how to take a program from one site to three. I know what these organizations are actually dealing with — not from the outside, but from having lived it.
I also spent seven years running the Boston Youth Sports Initiative, a Barr Foundation-supported network of youth sports programs across Massachusetts. That's where I learned what coalition and network building actually requires in practice, as opposed to in theory.
Thirty years in this sector — in Boston, in Lawrence, in gateway cities across Massachusetts, working alongside programs that use sports to open doors for young people who don't have the same options as kids in more resourced places — means I know these communities and the people in them. In this work, that matters.B.A., Bates College | M.Ed., Lesley University

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