About Josie.
Higher education is navigating enormous change. Enrollment pressures. Public scrutiny. Technology shifting faster than anyone's comms plan can keep up. How institutions communicate, and who they bring together, matters more than ever.
Here's the thing. Higher ed, associations, and nonprofits all love to talk about community. Few are actually built to sustain it. That's the gap I live in. I help leaders turn it into something that moves the needle, through digital leadership, integrated marketing, and executive communications.
Through my consulting practice, Dr. Josie, Inc., I partner with colleges, universities, professional associations, and mission-driven nonprofits to strengthen how they show up for their people, across every channel and at the executive level. And I don't just hand you a strategy and disappear. I pair it with coaching, so the systems we build keep working long after I leave the room.
But long before the consulting, the speaking, the book, I was just a kid who fell hard for campus life. From my first day as a freshman at South Dakota State University, I was hooked. Certain, even then, that community could change lives. Social media was barely a thing yet, and where most saw risk, I saw potential: to build community, amplify student voices, and make institutions feel more human. What I learned back then holds true anywhere a mission depends on its people. Community isn't a tagline. It's built.
That hunch became my doctoral research at California Lutheran University on digital leadership in higher education. Then I launched out on my own, helping organizations lead and communicate with intention.
My path wasn't traditional. I come from a hardworking family in Wyoming, where "start a consulting business" wasn't exactly the expected move. I learned it the hard way: trial, error, and a lot of grit. That's why I co-founded AHECC, the Association of Higher Education Consulting and Coaching, a home for the consultants and coaches who serve our field.
Over the past decade, I've worked with thousands of professionals worldwide. I'm the author of Digital Leadership in Higher Education: Purposeful Social Media in a Connected World, creator of Josie and the Podcast, featured by The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, and a three-time LinkedIn Top Voice in Education. I serve on the NASPA Foundation Board and am a NASPA Pillar of the Profession.
And I still believe what I believed as that wide-eyed freshman: education changes lives, community makes it stick, and the people who lead them deserve to communicate like it.