LB Advising · Mentoring and technical advising for social impact ventures
Built to create impact
Social impact ventures live in two worlds: the mission, with its funders and frameworks, and the business, with its customers and revenue.
I've worked in both, and I help founders make the two fit together.
| 20+ founders and ventures advised since 2021 | 15+ years in international development | Led digital health and gender programs for adolescents | MPH and MPA, Columbia University |
How I work with ventures
Founder Coaching
A venture has to work as a business before it can deliver on its mission. Through accelerators and founder communities, I teach masterclasses and coach founders in groups and one to one.
The focus is what each venture needs most: usually the model, operations, marketing, and sales. That includes the founder herself, because mindset often decides whether a good plan gets carried out.
Impact Advising
Funders, partners, and impact investors will all ask what difference your venture makes, and a list of good intentions or SDGs won't hold up.
I help you define impact goals that fit the business and what you can realistically measure, in the terms those funders and partners use. You end up able to show who you reach, what changes for them, and how you know.
Technical Advising
A product for young people or women only works if they trust it and keep using it. I advise on designing for that, from youth-centered design and user safety to content that is accurate, age-appropriate, and engaging.
My expertise is sexual and reproductive health and behavior change. It comes from a career designing gender and public health programs in the US and internationally, including the digital ones I led in Rwanda and Nigeria.
About me
I spent the first part of my career designing and leading gender and public health programs, in the US and internationally. Those programs were built on behavior change theory and evidence, so I know what separates content that informs people from content that changes what they do.
In Rwanda I set up YLabs' country office and led CyberRwanda, a USAID-funded digital health platform for adolescents, through its launch and the baseline of a randomized trial across 60 schools. Before that, at Girl Effect, I managed the product strategy that took a phone-based service for girls in Nigeria from pilot to national scale.
I've also run two businesses of my own. For four years I worked as an independent consultant on gender and health. I led strategic planning for nonprofits and for large consortiums working on gender and sexual violence, much of it built on qualitative research, and I wrote evidence reviews and gender toolkits.
Since 2021 I've coached and advised more than 20 founders and ventures through accelerators, and more than 100 entrepreneurs through Purpose Built by Laura. That's the mix I bring: I know how funders and programs think, and I know what it takes to build a business that sustains itself.
I hold master's degrees in Public Health and Public Administration from Columbia University, and I'm an ICF-certified coach.
Let's talk
If you're a founder building a social impact venture, or you run an accelerator,
a founder community, or a fund, let's talk.
Looking for business strategy and coaching for solopreneurs? That's my other work, at Purpose Built by Laura.
