Twenty-plus years since graduating from college, my professional background is generally rooted in business management, although my career began with a very specific focus on marketing. I graduated college with a liberal arts degree during a relatively rough economic period and, living in Central Vermont at the time, my options were limited. My first job out of college was a business-to-business telemarketing position 45 minutes away from where I lived that paid $7.25 an hour. For the most part, the job was complete and utter drudgery. The bright spots were that I was free to develop my own scripts and was able to create marketing plans for my clients based on what I found was and wasn’t working. Telemarketing is far from glamorous, but it provided me the opportunity to work with high-profile clients like Ziff Davis, Murdoch Publishing, and Condé Nast.

Two years after graduating from college I moved back home to Maine and was lucky enough to land a job as Communications Coordinator at Cole Haan, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Fortune 500 Company, Nike. I was very fortunate to work under a Vice President of Marketing & Merchandising who was incredibly bright, motivated, and served as my mentor and role model for a number of years. Perfection was her standard. The other members of Cole-Haan’s in-house agency staff were no less talented and all-around stellar. It was among this group of people that I came to know what it was like to work on a team that fired on all cylinders. I found the experience of working with such an amazing group of professionals to be amazingly invigorating. Blue lines of every document were team-proofed round and again until flawless, each quarterly sales meeting and company function—often off-site—was coordinated by this team, and brainstorming in order to arrive at a better product was openly encouraged.

From Brand Marketing, I moved into a product management role, which seemed to be near the epicenter of the Cole Haan universe. I performed research and analysis that supported development of the business and line plans, read the Wall Street Journal and New York Times every day, worked with designers to merchandise the women’s footwear line, wrote product copy, and provided direction for collateral material.

Part of the strategic plan was to launch a wholesale line of women’s accessories and I was asked to help lead the charge. I then began working with the former Vice President of Women’s Accessories at Donna Karan and a product developer. The three of us, along with a freelance handbag designer, were it. As my counterparts were based in New York City, I spent a lot of time there as well as traveling back and forth. I managed all operational aspects of launching this business, including public relations, aligning the product database, training material development, and collaterals.

Cole Haan’s Brand Marketing department was a member of the Advertising Club of Maine and participated in the Ad Club’s Community Service Days. On my first Community Service Day, I was assigned to one of Goodwill’s resident homes in Portland where we did some gardening work. This was the first time I had done any volunteering and immediately understood the good that can come from members of a community pitching in to support one another. It was then that I realized there were ways in which I could contribute to my community in a more meaningful way.

I joined the Junior League of Greater Portland in 2000, and became aware of the League’s involvement in helping to establish the Children’s Theater of Maine, The Children’s Museum of Maine, the Center for Grieving Children, and the Kids First Center. In 2008, I was asked to sit on the Augusta Reads Project committee, an offshoot of Karen Baldacci’s Maine Reads Program. The program’s focus was Augusta’s 5^th and 6^th grade students who had been identified as an underserved population in the area of literacy. Annually, the program brought a Maine children’s author to give a presentation at each of the five Augusta schools and each student received their very own copy of the author’s most recently published book. In 2008, I became a literacy volunteer and worked with a particular client for a little over a year, by which time he had become functionally literate.

A few years ago, I parted ways with Cole Haan and took some time to figure out what I wanted to do next. I knew that I wanted to help those in my community who were less fortunate than me and last year completed the University of Southern Maine’s certificate program in grant writing. I now spend my workdays striving to utilize my cumulative professional skills and talent for writing to make a difference. Earlier this year I launched my own business, Sustainable Writing & Consulting, and am loving it. I recently ghostwrote a book, the proceeds of which my client is planning to donate to a mission working to further women’s causes in Western Africa.

I currently live in Wayne, Maine in a really nifty c.1838 post and beam New Englander that was originally a parsonage. When I’m not wrapped up in projects for clients or around my house, I enjoy being active outside skiing, snowshoeing, golfing, kayaking, or hiking with my rescue-hound dog, Bailey.