Shoshana Grossman-Crist is a consultant helping impact champions move the world forward. What does that actually look like? It looks like helping NGOs fundraise without headaches and helping companies achieve profit + purpose without spending their entire budget on a consultant. Find out the details here.
With 15 years of experience, her superpowers are in project design, communications and fundraising, and she is obsessed with figuring out how to ensure impact for communities. As someone who has worked with the Inter-American Development Bank, the Danone Ecosystem Fund, Chemonics, TechnoServe, and local NGOs across the world, though particularly in Latin America, Shoshana brings a unique set of tools to the table, as well as a ton of respect for the challenges of implementing projects with impact. Recently, she has been building a gender inclusion lens into her work more and more.
When Shoshana is not chugging away with her clients, you can find her volunteering in the fields harvesting for the Vermont food bank. She holds a Bachelor's in Community Health and Latin American studies from Tufts University, she got a Master’s in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University.
Shoshanna was one of the more mature and engaged of the students I had the privilege to attract to the Institute and its intellectual and activist pursuits. She exuded a strong, independent, yet sensitive leadership sensibility. and powerful determination. She was exuberant and infectious. Her smile radiated.
As one of the student founders and co chairs of Pangea whose mantra was "global awareness, advocacy, and action,” it was not surprising to learn of her leadership role in inspiring scores of students to engage in a three-day “sleep -out,” staying overnight in small tents on the main quadrangle of the University to simulate a symbolic refugee camp.
They programmed to promote consciousness of the plight of refugees, not only those who migrated beyond their country’s borders, protected by international law, however fragile, but the even more severe reality of IDPs. internally displaced peoples, fleeing violence, ethnic cleansing, and severe discrimination.
They also raised thousands of dollars to support Mapendo International, the first organization created by Convisero's Sasha Chanoff, who then founded RefugePoint.
Another of the Pangea organizations Shoshana supported was STAND, originally Students Taking Action Now: Dafur, an anti-genocide initiative then also concerned with violence in the Congo.
“Shosh,” had already come to Tufts with a finely honed sensibility about the struggles of marginalized peoples, but also their determination and agency.
In January 2007, under Institute sponsorship she returned to Herradura, Costa Rica where she had lived and taught English before studying at Tufts, this time to study the high levels of out-migration to the United States and the effects this migration was having on the town.
She learned about the confluence of international coffee prices, socio-economic levels of residents in the canton, interpersonal relationships, and the immigration laws of the United States that create the high level of out-migration that distinguishes the region from most other cantons in Costa Rica.
Not surprising for me to see what she is currently doing.