Yellow House Ideas

About

Stephanie is an urban planner, community advocate, and systems thinker. She blends a passion for meaningful and inclusive revitalization in cities with the clear-eyed pragmatism borne from years grappling with political and economic constraints. As she's found, requiring some extra creativity is no excuse for inaction.

Before beginning Yellow House Ideas, Stephanie spent four years with McKinsey & Company, focused on infrastructure development and public sector transformations. There, she led multi-disciplinary teams on intensive consultancy projects with clients in the public, private, and non-profit sectors. 

Her work ranged around the globe, including: negotiating financing and implementation for a West African nation's infrastructure strategy; launching the transformation office for major regulated utility; facilitating a regional economic development strategy in the Midwest; and designing sustainable business plan, operating model, and organization structure for major non-profit foundation. With the McKinsey Global Institute, she co-authored Reinventing Construction: A route to higher productivity (2017) and was a member of the core team for A Blueprint for Addressing the Global Affordable Housing Challenge (2014).

Stephanie started her career in politics, serving on two Presidential campaigns and co-founding New Strategies Group, which counseled candidates and organizations through the initial strategy and consolidation of campaigns. Her BA is in government and history from Georgetown University where she was a John Carroll Scholar and Lisa J. Raines Fellow.  She has an MUP from the Graduate School of Design and an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School where she was a Dubin Fellow and a Gramlich Fellow.

Stephanie serves on the alumni advisory council of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard and is an elder at Calvary Church in Minneapolis.  She is certified by AICP.