The Content Jeannie
Your board tells one story. Your staff tells another. Your funders hear something else. Your community experiences something completely different.
You don't have a communications problem.
You have narrative chaos.
I’ve lived this before…
As a youth, I was active in an local arts nonprofit. I knew the founders. They were my downstairs neighbors and I babysat their children. I was one of over 50 youth who showed up every day to practice my craft. They were mentors to many city youth like me. Because of them, I saw firsthand the personal and financial sacrifices leaders made to keep their doors open.
I devoted my career to creating access and removing barriers. I was passionate about my work, but I kept burning out. I would see the same problems:
Leadership tells one story
Staff tells another
Marketing uses borrowed language that doesn’t fit
Supporters describe their experience as entirely different
It wasn’t until years later that I realized my burning out was a sign of organizational dysfunction. Staff fatigue happens when the organizational narrative doesn’t align with what it actually takes to do the work daily.
As a former marketing professional, I watched this play out in organization after organization. When it came to submitting another grant, launching a program, or designing a new website, no one shared the same impact language.
This operational disconnect is narrative chaos.
Sure, I wanted to quit. But every time I interviewed a learner, an employee, or a former client, their lived reality renewed my heart for the work:
Financial stability after years of survival mode
Legacy building after generations of sacrifice
Personal agency after years of self-abandonment
Their “why” became my “why.”
Passionate people burn out because organizations scale individuals by compounding role capacity rather than investing in infrastructure. The more I talked to my peers across the sector, the clearer it became that this wasn't personal failure. This was a design problem no one was naming.
I have a heart to serve. But when upstream processes around clarity are not addressed, that desire withers. I want to continue supporting my peers and the work being stewarded in communities nationwide.
You can't scale people.
You scale narratives.
Most organizations confuse personal commitment (heart, passion, founder charisma) with organizational infrastructure (sustainable narrative, clear structure, mission that transcends individuals).
When you're inside the organization, you can't see this. You just keep asking for better execution of approaches that don't work.
The problem isn't downstream. It's upstream. You never built organizational narrative infrastructure in the first place.
This Is Not Marketing.
This Is Discovery.
Narrative ethnography is the practice of systematically listening to how different stakeholders experience your organization, then synthesizing what they reveal into organizational narrative infrastructure.
I use narrative ethnography to unstick your organization from its founding moment and test whether your organizational narrative can exist independent of the specific people who started it.
This isn't market research asking what audiences want to hear—it's ethnographic discovery of what stakeholders already experience.
I do the depth work clarity requires. Then marketing, communications, and grant writing can finally address the same impact.
This approach ensures board, staff, clients, and supporters are finally operating from the same organizational reality, not competing versions of what you do.
Storying as Capacity Building
The Foundation Work That Comes First
Narrative ethnography surfaces what everyone experiences but no one's named:
The gap between your mission statement and what you actually do daily:
The actors who make this work happen (not who leadership thinks makes it happen)
The relationships that matter in specific spaces (not the org chart)
The reality stakeholders experience vs. the story you tell funders
Storying invites your stakeholders (staff, clients, supporters) to co-author the organizational narrative.
Staff name what actually happens in their work (not what the strategic plan says should happen).
Clients share their journeys and outcomes.
Supporters offer perspectives on how the organization has made a difference
This isn't storytelling (execution of a story you've already crafted). This is storying: the foundational work of discovering your organization's narrative infrastructure by witnessing what stakeholders already experience.
Staff contribute insights from day-to-day reality. Clients share their actual journeys. Supporters describe what they've witnessed. Board names what they steward.
Everyone co-authors the organizational narrative. This is where capacity building happens. Not after you're already exhausted, but before you scale.
When you address narrative chaos upstream, you stop exhausting yourself downstream.
WHO THIS WORK SERVES
The order matters:
Narrative ethnography → capacity building → downstream execution
This work serves organizations experiencing:
Board and staff operating from different realities ("We're empowering families" vs. "We're running a food bank")
Grant applications that don't match what happens on the ground (staff exhausted reconciling funder language with actual work)
Marketing campaigns that sound like everyone else (borrowed language that doesn't fit your actual impact)
Rebrands that fail within 18 months (because upstream narrative chaos wasn't addressed first)
Also serves:
Foundation officers who want their grantees to build narrative infrastructure BEFORE they fund marketing, rebrands, or capital campaigns so those investments actually land.
Collaborative networks where partner organizations can't align because they've never named their actual work
INVESTMENT & SCOPE
Most organizations invest $100K-$500K in marketing, capital campaigns, and rebrands built on narrative chaos. This work ensures those investments actually land.
Engagement Investment: $48,000–$85,000
(Founding rates available through March 2026: $38,000–$68,000)
Scope is determined by stakeholder ecosystem complexity:
Foundation (concentrated leadership teams, emerging organizations)
Growth (multi-departmental, established operations)
Scale (complex stakeholder networks, federated structures)
Each engagement is customized during discovery call based on your organizational context, stakeholder count (internal + external voices), and narrative complexity.
This work serves organizations with $3M+ budgets and foundation partners funding capacity building for grantee portfolios.
Founding rates available for 5 organizations through March 2026.
Meet Jeannie
I'm a narrative ethnographer trained in cultural anthropology (M.A., The New School) with 12 years inside mission-driven organizations as marketing and communications leader.
I've lived what you're experiencing. I was the marketing person absorbing the invisible labor of reconciling competing narratives. I kept building coherence from chaos until I burned out.
Then I realized my exhaustion wasn't personal failure. It was a symptom. Organizations trying to scale people instead of infrastructure burn everyone out.
Now I use narrative ethnography to address the upstream problem everyone else ignores. I embed in your organization to surface the competing narratives you're too close to see. Then we build the infrastructure so your board, staff, funders, and community are finally operating from the same organizational reality.