SCALABLE STRATEGIES · PHILANTHROPIC IMPACT · Collective change
Purposeful Impacts: Executive Strategies
Policies, Practices, and Partnerships that Change Lives
Purposeful Impacts leads executive strategies for philanthropists investing in meaningful change for people, communities, and programs. We strategically focus on how grantee support impacts outcomes, who leads that change, what it actually costs to do it well, and how you know it worked. We help you partner with others to co-learn from your outcomes, telling full stories of meaningful change and transformation.
For foundations, intermediary funders, and national organizations designing the vehicles, partnerships, and platforms that reach the people and communities that need them most - at the intersection of health, gender-based violence, child welfare, and social services.
SENIOR ADVISOR · NATIONAL LEADER · CHANGE MAKER
For sixteen years, I led two portfolios at once: survivor-centered funding infrastructure and federal interagency coalition builder.
It is rare to have leaders who have done both. Those roles are different people, in different departments, who don't talk often enough - which is why so many funding partnerships underperform, and nobody can say why.
A Record of Scale
$1B+
SURVIVOR SERVICES FUNDING
Innovated, coordinated, and strategically scoped to reach every U.S. state and territory.
2,000+
GRANT RECIPIENTS
Including state agencies, coalitions, and 252 tribal nations supported through grants, policies, and training.
$100M
APPROPRIATIONS GROWTH
Over six years, from 14+ legislative budget proposals authored.
1.3M
PEOPLE SERVED ANNUALLY
People and community centered services offering help 24 hours a day when its needed most.
Accomplished on Both Sides
Shawndell has accomplishments on both sides of the funding relationship: the funder deciding which models to invest in and how to structure them, and the practitioner holding mission, staff, and budget.
Thirteen years came first: as an advocate, a state technical assistance provider, and a national trainer who wrote curriculum the field still uses. The federal record proves she could implement at scale. The years before it are where she learned what to implement.
Purposeful Impacts was built to put that dual vantage to work for the foundations and intermediaries deciding how resources reach the field.
PROBLEMS I HAVE ALREADY SOLVED
Not a theory of change.
A record of them.
Every engagement draws on a problem already solved at federal scale — with the outcome documented, and in several cases, peer-reviewed. These are not case studies assembled after the fact. They were built intentionally to leverage health, social services, and gender-based violence assets.
Problem
A national funder can't reach grassroots organizations at scale— and the organizations serving your prioritized communities have never received foundation funding or large institutional funding.
Four systems both serve the same family, seeking to improve similar outcomes, and neither was coordinated nationally with funding, policy, or capacity building.
Eight federal systems all served the same families and none of them were coordinated nationally with funding, policy, or technical assistance.
My Strategic Actions
Designed a $49.5M intermediary model: five national organizations with subgranting authority, a required three-month planning period, distribution accountability to move funds, and mandatory compensated partnerships with culturally specific expertise.
Launched four cross-system intermediary models for health clinics, community health centers, child support agencies, and housing providers nationwide. Routed funding and policy guidance between health, social service, and domestic violence programs.
Coordinated an enterprise-wide interagency policy release across eight ACF offices — child support, TANF, child welfare, Head Start and child care, community services, refugee resettlement, Native American programs — each built on a system-specific mechanism and citation, with one shared standard: recognize the impact, respond with trauma-informed strategies, and safely link families to services.
The Outcome
311 community-based organizations funded across states, territories, and tribal nations. Most of the grantees were receiving federal funding for the first time. The first program of its kind in 40 years.
Eleven years of continuous model refinement in health alone. Project Catalyst: five state leadership teams integrated IPV into state initiatives; all implemented practice and policy changes; Published evaluations documented a 17% increase in collaboration. Peer-reviewed and applauded by states, territories, and local communities.
Eight offices published policy guidance. The Assistant Secretary wrote to every state human services commissioner. 10,000+ stakeholders reached. Every memo routed readers to the resource centers and coalitions funded by the office I led.
Four intermediary models.
Eight federal offices. Multiple statutes.
Over 20 partnerships were fostered in states that had never held dedicated collaboration agreements to support shared outcomes.
And peer-reviewed evidence that it worked.
Where shall we begin?
WHAT Kind OF EXECUTIVE Strategies ARE POSSIBLE?
Closing the Distance Between Intention and Outcomes
FOUR SHIFTS A FOUNDATION CAN ACTUALLY NAME WHEN OUR WORK IS DONE.
Intermediary Model Design
Moving from a centralized capacity-building approach that cannot reach grassroots organizations at an acceptable cost, to a specialized expert intermediary structure that channels resources through experienced subject matter capacity-builders to the community-based organizations doing the work, leveraging existing trust frameworks that protect the investment while providing mentoring that improves outcomes.
Portfolio ROI & Measurement
Moving from progress reports that describe effort to portfolio-level outcome evidence a funder can learn from, leverage, and adapt. Board decisions get driven by documented change rather than activity counts. And the learning runs both directions — grantees, communities, and the foundation working from the same evidence instead of reporting past each other. Research-backed strategies produce higher-fidelity impact data while reducing, not adding to, grantee administrative burden.
Cross-Sector Partnership Leverage
Strengthening the relationships already in your ecosystem - across health, violence prevention, child welfare, and social services - so the whole is worth more than the sum of the grants.
Field & Health-Equity Terrain
Navigating the intersection of health equity and gender-based violence, and designing funding that reaches culturally specific, tribal, rural, and historically under-funded organizations while sustaining the field through funding volatility.
OUR COLLECTIVE WORK
Advancing priorities without losing rigor or reach.
Most foundations and intermediaries are not waiting for permission or strategy. They are already investing, already convening, already carrying the weight of deciding where resources go: often with less infrastructure than the stakes deserve. Executive Advisory is built to add senior counsel to that momentum.
Integrated Diagnostics | $10,000
Engaging and assessing intermediary structures, channel resources, and grantee experiences through an integrated process that assesses: how funds flow, what monitoring frameworks protect the investment, what the administration actually costs, and how to build partner capacity for self-sustaining relationships. Grounded in four cross-system intermediary models built in federal service, and in designing a $49.5M program that reached 311 organizations, most of them for the first time.
The Four Dimensions:
You select up to three dimensions when you book your Integrated Diagnostic package and provide up to six documents in total for review.
Grantmaking Process Analysis
Where does your process cost you the grantees you most want to reach? An examination of your application, review, award, and reporting requirements against the capacity of the organizations you're trying to fund — and what it would take to close that gap without lowering your accountability standards.
Capacity-Building Portfolio Analysis
Is your capacity investment building capability or absorbing it? An examination of what your capacity-building dollars are actually purchasing, whether grantees are stronger at the end of the grant than the beginning, and what the field's evidence says about which investments hold.
Intermediary Readiness Analysis
Are you structured to move money through an intermediary vehicle? An examination of your readiness to fund through a partner — what subgranting authority requires, what monitoring frameworks protect the investment, what the administration genuinely costs, and what has to be true internally before the first dollar moves.
Cross-Sector Partnership Investment Analysis
What would it take for your partnership investment to hold after the grant closes? An examination of the partnerships in your portfolio — across health, violence prevention, child welfare, and social services — and what the published evidence shows about which ones survive the funding period and which do not.
Need all four dimensions examined? That's a customized engagement — let's talk about scope.
Customized Engagements
How customized engagement pricing works: Each engagement is quoted as a range because scope genuinely varies. What moves you within it: whether stakeholder interviews are included, how many deliverables you need, whether board or leadership presentations are in scope, jurisdictional or regulatory complexity, and how many revision rounds.
You receive a fixed price before anything begins. The strategy session produces a blueprint that names the number, states what's included, and states what isn't.
Payment is structured in three parts: 25% at signing, which delivers your engagement charter within ten business days — confirmed scope, deliverables, schedule, document requests, and decision points. 50% at the midpoint deliverable. 25% before final handoff.
Your strategy session fee credits toward any engagement begun within ninety days, up to 20% of the engagement fee.
Engagement pricing does not include travel. Travel and related expenses are billed separately at cost, agreed in advance.
Partnership Leveraging | $22,000 - $40,000
Engagement and assessment of the relationships that exist across your ecosystem, including foundations, intermediaries, national organizations, community-based agencies, health and social services, and the cross-sector stakeholders whose outcomes the mission depends on. Drawing on convening 75 federal partners across seven federal departments for fifteen years, coordinating eight federal offices into a single policy release, and designing and convening a $2.3 million consortium across three federal departments.
Intermediary Model Design $55,000 - $85,000
Designing the funding and change vehicle itself: subgranting structure, planning period, distribution accountability, monitoring framework, compensated partnership requirements, and the administrative cost model — the decisions that determine whether resources actually arrive, and whether the organizations receiving them are stronger afterward.
You receive the model architecture, the accountability framework, the cost structure, and the sequence for standing it up. Where an intermediary already exists, the work is redesign: what to keep, what is quietly costing you reach, and what has to change before the next cycle.
Grounded in four cross-system intermediary models built in federal service — health clinics, community health centers, child support agencies, and housing providers — and in a health model built twice, years apart, with the same intermediary partner and the same university evaluation team both times. The second build produced a peer-reviewed evaluation in the Journal of Women's Health. Very few people have designed one of these at national scale. Fewer still have the published evidence of what held after the funding ended.
Policy Analysis & Systemic Coordination $40,000 – $60,000
Reviewing the statute, regulation, and appropriations language at the intersection of health, gender-based violence, child welfare, and social services — and translating it into operational reality. Sixteen years of doing this inside the federal government, across multiple authorities that were never designed to speak to each other.
What an engagement produces: a written read on what a funder can and cannot do under existing authority, where authorities overlap or conflict, what a policy change would actually require, and how to sequence a systemic coordination effort across agencies or jurisdictions that do not share a mandate.
The record behind it: 14+ legislative budget proposals producing a $100M appropriations increase over six years; 15+ technical guidance documents reaching 10,000+ stakeholders and cutting technical assistance demand by half; an enterprise-wide policy release coordinated across eight ACF offices, each on a system-specific mechanism and citation; co-architect of the first U.S. National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence; and the regulatory instruments that let grantees build revenue alongside federal awards rather than instead of them.
Outcomes & Co-Learning Design | $60,000 – $90,000
Designing the measurement layer that helps a funder support transformative data collection, outcome planning, and co-learning from research-informed outcomes: partnership-health tracking, portfolio dashboards, and survivor- and community-defined impact translated into terms a health or philanthropic funder can recognize and report. Grounded in the Social and Emotional Well-Being Framework and Conservation of Resources theory: the field's shared theory of change, which I stewarded, seeded, funded, and helped shape as its federal program officer, and which has since been adopted nationally and across Ireland. And in rebuilding a federal data operation from an 18-month lag to six. You receive the architecture and the sequence. If you want the system built and run, that's a separate engagement.
Convening, Workshops, & Dialogues| $10,000 - $32,000
Four formats: a keynote or plenary address, an executive workshop for a leadership team, a facilitated cross-sector dialogue among partners who do not share a mandate, and a closed-door board session.
Keynote or plenary address — $12,000 to $18,000
Executive workshop, half day — $15,000 to $22,000
Facilitated cross-sector dialogue, full day — $22,000 to $32,000
Closed-door board session — $10,000 to $14,000
These are working sessions, not motivational ones. A room leaves with something it did not have when it walked in — a shared reading of the problem, a decision framed clearly enough to make, or a set of questions the group agrees are the right ones. Facilitation across sectors that do not naturally speak to each other is the specialty: health and violence prevention, philanthropy and grantees, federal partners and community-based organizations.
Grounded in sixteen years of convening federal partners across seven departments, national learning communities spanning states, territories, and tribal nations, and a career of standing in rooms where the participants arrived with different mandates and left with a shared one.
Pricing reflects preparation and customization to your context. Travel and related expenses are billed separately at cost. Custom formats are welcome — tell me what the room needs to accomplish.
Strategic Advisor Retainer | $10,000 - $15,000 per month
Includes a defined band of senior advisory hours each month, set at the start of the engagement.
Additional hours are available and detailed in the engagement agreement. All additional hours are discussed and confirmed prior to implementation.
Six-month minimum.
For a Vice President, Managing Director, or Chief Operating Officer carrying decisions that deserve more thinking than the calendar allows.
What a month looks like: a standing session, asynchronous access when something moves faster than the schedule, review of documents before they go to a board or a partner, and preparation for the conversations that matter most. You get a senior thinking partner who already knows your portfolio, so nothing has to be re-explained.
This is also where asset activation lives — the work of putting to use what your institution already holds. Most organizations are sitting on expertise, relationships, data, and earned credibility that are not fully working for them. Sometimes the highest-return engagement is not building something new; it is recognizing what is already there and turning it into momentum leadership can act on. Advisory partnerships begin with a strategy session, where we determine scope, cadence, and the hours band that fits the work.
Every customized engagement begins with a meaningful conversation and is scoped through a Purposeful Impacts Customized Engagements Scope Discussion.
Meet the Founder & CEO
SHAWNDELL N. DAWSON
Dawson Visionary Enterprises, LLC
I believe that investing in collaborative public health and gender-based violence models is our greatest opportunity to prevent violence in the first place.
Published Work
Hendrix E, Segebrecht J, Thomas K, Branch T, Dawson S (2025). Survivor Health Connection Project: Understanding Experiences of Accessing Health Care Among Those Affected by Intimate Partner Violence During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Public Health Reports.
Scott SE, Risser L, Miller-Walfish S, Marjavi A, Ali A, Segebrecht J, Branch T, Dawson S, Miller E (2023). Policy and Systems Change in Intimate Partner Violence and Human Trafficking: Evaluation of a Federal Cross-Sector Initiative. Journal of Women's Health, 32(7).
Southworth C, Finn J, Dawson S, Fraser C, Tucker S (2007). Intimate partner violence, technology, and stalking. Violence Against Women, 13(8), 842-856. — Foundational to the study of technology-facilitated abuse.
Southworth C, Dawson S, Fraser C, Tucker S (2005). A High-Tech Twist on Abuse: Technology, Intimate Partner Stalking, and Advocacy. VAWnet.
Contributor to the conceptual model in Sullivan CM (2018), Journal of Family Violence, 33:123-131 — produced by the DV Evidence Project, which she seeded, funded, and managed.
“The intermediary model, done well, is not bureaucracy - it is the bridge between a foundation's intention, a survivor's safety, and improved outcomes.”
- Shawndell Dawson, CEO, Dawson Visionary Enterprises
DVE'S COLLABORATIVE COMMITMENTS
Four Commitments We Bring
Trauma-informed.
Our conversations center the recognition that the people who built the field, the people leading it, and the people it serves have all been shaped by experiences that matter.
People- and community-centered.
The engagements, conversations, and gatherings center people and communities. We review funding strategies, programmatic decisions, and coalition building that center wellbeing and positive impact for people, families, and communities.
A curator of all ways of knowing.
Lived experience, community wisdom, practitioner knowledge, and academic research are each invited into the room.
Evidence-based and practice-grounded.
What the research shows, what practice confirms, and what the work actually requires are honored - accountable to the literature and to the leaders, staff, and communities who live with the decisions.
OUR INVITATION
Let's do great things together...
You bring the question your foundation or organization is sitting with: an intermediary model to design, a partnership to leverage, a policy to analyze, a portfolio to measure, a cross-system coordination strategy, or an interest in innovation. I bring a 16-year seasoned federal-funder lens, thirteen years of nonprofit service before that, and my expansive coalition-building commitments. Our discussion will be steeped in twenty-nine years of leading with the innovations and approaches that seed lasting change for survivors, families, and communities. What we produce together is strategic direction - clear enough to act on and deep enough to build from.
TESTIMONIALS
What others are saying
"Highly recommend working with Shawndell!"
"Shawndell and her staff at OFVPS oversaw funding for programs serving survivors of domestic violence and their families. Their funded programs were efficient and effective, serving survivors all over the country. Part of that success was because OFVPS was so well run! My grantees always spoke highly of their FVPSA projects and the staff there, and never failed to point out where OFVPS was doing it better!"
-Jenny M. - Grants Expert, Gender-Based Violence and Victim Services
© 2026 Dawson Visionary Enterprises, LLC | Purposeful Impacts. All Rights Reserved.
purposefulimpacts.com