"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." -Marcel Proust
Mikaela's fifteen-year career reflects a sustained commitment to the full achievement of our individual and collective capacity to impact our toughest social challenges. Mikaela began consulting to organizational leaders in 2004 rooted in the belief that the real work happens in the space where possibility meets the hard facts, where the heart and the head can both be fully engaged, and where work is undertaken with a deep awareness of meaning coupled with logical frameworks for action.
A sampling of current clients includes: The Annie E. Casey Foundation, The State Education Office of the District of Columbia, The Institute for Educational Leadership, The Tohono O'odham Nation, and The National Urban Indian Family Coalition.
Mikaela knows the challenges inherent in leading because she has been there - in nonprofit and public sector organizations. She served as Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer at Greater DC Cares, the largest coordinator of volunteer services in the Greater Washington region, where she led the organization's first-ever staff-board strategic planning and designed and taught in the nonprofit certificate program at the University of the District of Columbia.
As Senior Policy Advisor for Education to Mayor Anthony A. Williams, she developed the Mayor's education budget and key policy priorities and recruited and headed up the District's first community-based team to select school board candidates. Her frontline experience as a public school teacher with Teach for America and as a founding administrator of a Brooklyn, NY charter school deeply informed this work.
Mikaela travels extensively in the United States, Africa, Europe and Asia and engages diverse cultures in both her approaches and processes. In early 2004, she completed a six-month self-designed study tour to Southeast Asia and India, which has strongly influenced her consulting practice. She is also active close to home, in Washington, DC, where she serves as a mentor to a DC public school student; was a founding member of a local education interest group called EdActionDC; and was an active Board Member and Committee Chair for the Washington Literacy Council until 2005. She is also a graduate of the 2002 class of Leadership Washington and the 1997 Education Policy Fellows Program.
She completed her Master in Public Administration at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where she was awarded high honors for demonstrated leadership and academic achievement. She has also trained in a variety of facilitation and coaching approaches and techniques, rooted in both Eastern and Western traditions.
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Mikaela Seligman