The organization

Virtual Enterprises International

A national nonprofit that teaches roughly thirty-five thousand students a year to build and run real businesses inside their schools. They raise capital, hire, market, sell and close the books. It is one of the few educational programs that treats young people as operators, and it has held my attention for eighteen years. We are building the leaders of tomorrow.

I joined in 2008 as an in-class volunteer and student mentor. In 2010 I joined the board as an independent director and have served ever since, more than a decade of that on the executive committee and as chair of both Audit and Strategy.

Financial oversight

As Audit Chair I supported the implementation of an enterprise risk management framework, led and managed the review of the annual financial audits, and established board-level discipline over financial controls, oversight and organizational accountability.

Coaching senior leadership

Beyond formal governance, I have spent years as an ongoing coach and sounding board to the executive director, the CFO and other members of the leadership team. That work is embedded in how the team frames growth, sets goals and measures outcomes, and the leadership counts it among the most lasting part of my service. It is also the part no board seat requires.

Long-range strategy

As Strategy Chair I led development of a multi-year strategic plan with the executive team and established it as a living document guiding the organization's next stage of growth. The work is the alignment of people, process, tools and decisions across several years, aimed at one objective: serving more students each year than the year before, without giving up the quality of what those students get.

Leadership continuity

I helped the organization through multiple executive director transitions and financial gaps that required direct board intervention, holding continuity through change.

Governance and innovation

Most recently I helped shape an AI-enabled approach to how student work is evaluated at scale, which is the same decision-systems thinking I bring to operating work, applied where the stakes are a student's grade rather than a quarter.

Why I still serve

Governance done well is quiet.

It shows up as an organization that holds together through hard transitions and makes better decisions than it did before. Service usually looks like that: unglamorous, patient, and worth doing.

People learn to lead by building and running something real, with consequences. VEI gives thirty-five thousand students a year that experience, and the work compounds in a way almost nothing else I do does. I am here to build lasting relationships and to serve other people. That is the honest answer, and it is why I have stayed for eighteen years.