Our Team
Learn more about:
The Work in Progress Team
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Briana is a seasoned professional with over a decade of experience in education, nonprofit management, and strategic consulting. She holds a BS in Biological Sciences and STEM Education from Florida State University and a M.Ed in Educational Psychology with a focus on Creativity and Research. In addition to her academic credentials, Briana has earned certifications in Nonprofit Management, Human Resource Management, and Inclusive and Ethical Leadership, further solidifying her expertise in driving organizational change and promoting inclusive, equitable environments.
Briana is deeply passionate about supporting organizational development, empowering leaders, and crafting strategies that foster equity and inclusion across diverse teams. A former educator, Briana understands the value of not only acquiring knowledge but also applying it effectively to real-world challenges. With expertise spanning people and financial operations, development, and organizational strategy, Briana leverages her extensive experience to conduct comprehensive needs assessments, design customized strategies, and collaborate closely with clients to drive operational excellence and achieve long-term success. Her consulting approach is rooted in delivering tailored solutions that prioritize sustainable change, leadership development, and system optimization. A strong advocate for social justice, Briana is committed to fostering equity and empowerment in every aspect of her work.
Briana Brown M.Ed., Associate Consultant
Femi Disu-Oakley JD, Associate Consultant
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Femi is passionate about creating spaces that challenge people to think about how identity and power impact interpersonal and organizational dynamics, while also creating systems and structures within those same organizations to produce transformational change. Her background is rooted in social justice work, where she worked as a proud public defender at The Legal Aid Society of New York City, advocating in and out of the courtroom for marginalized communities. Her experiences within the justice system cultivated her desire to build more diverse and equitable systems in the legal field and beyond, as she transitioned into internal and consulting Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) roles, where she created and implemented best practices, protocols, and learning opportunities to advance equity within multiple organizations.
As a leader in the sexual reproductive health space, she is committed to creating systems and structures to identify and eliminate disparities for patients, staff, and community members. Her expertise in employee relations, policy analysis and development, change management, equitable HR practices, EEOC compliance and conflict resolution have been cultivated through her public interest work and experience as a seasoned expert in the DEIB space. Her commitment to engaging in these practices with an equity lens stems from the belief that we all can develop the will and skill to produce equitable outcomes and drive meaningful change in and for our organizations and communities. She received her J.D. from St. John’s School of Law.
Ginny Nemchick MBA, Principal Consultant & Co-Managing Director
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Ginny is a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit professional with more than 15 years of experience creating and implementing programs and policies, as well as]supervising both staff and volunteers in the context of a healthy, supportive management style.
Their professional experience in the nonprofit sector includes higher education, social services, LGBTQIA+ focused-organizations, volunteer services, event planning, youth education and mentorship, entrepreneurship, and more. They are particularly passionate about doing work for organizations that support women, queer people, the arts, and children.
Ginny brings an eye on equity, efficiency, and creativity to all of their projects. With a B.A. in English and Gender Studies alongside an MBA with a focus on Nonprofit Management, they contribute a powerful combination of lived experience, professional experience, and education to collaborative projects in human resources, hiring, operations management, project management, and strategy to our team.
Also, they want to pet your dog.
Hannah Honor, Associate Consultant
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Hannah is an interdisciplinary educator, doula, and strategist with over a decade of experience in transformative justice education and participatory strategy building. Grounded in community organizing, they specialize in creating adaptive, people-focused systems that bring organizational missions to life and aid transformative leadership. Their skillset reflects extensive experience crafting unique modalities to develop effective long-term strategies, including facilitation, curriculum development, and conflict mediation.
Hannah’s approach to consulting is shaped by their extensive experience as a social worker, birth and death doula, and organizer. They strive to meet people at their stages of growth and build organizational cultures rooted in anti-racist, restorative values. They prioritize care, adaptability, accessibility, and trusting environments for growth and transformation. Hannah’s other specialties include board leadership, the management of justice-focused initiatives, and childbirth education.
Jessica Yox
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Karen is a seasoned consultant with over 15 years of experience in workplace culture and diversity management, nonprofit directorship, and healing-centered leadership. They hold a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from St. Francis University (PA) and a Master of Arts in Educational Policy and Leadership from The Ohio State University. Karen’s career began in collegiate athletics and higher education as a women’s basketball coach and mathematics adjunct professor, eventually evolving into a passion for cultivating workplace cultures rooted in safety, connection, and belonging. They specialize in trauma-informed facilitation, culture and diversity strategy, and leadership development—particularly centering Black, LGBTQ+, and neurodivergent experiences. Karen is known for their ability to hold space for complexity while moving individuals and organizations toward clarity, accountability, and growth. They are driven by a deep belief in the transformative power of connection and the possibility of workplaces that allow for healing.
Karen brings a grounded, holistic approach to their coaching and strategic facilitation practice. With extensive training in Polarity Therapy, Reiki, and Zen Leadership, they utilize grounding and capacity building as foundational tools for cultural change. Karen partners with clients to build brave spaces where individuals feel seen and systems are reimagined to reflect shared values. Their approach weaves data, lived experience, and humor to support sustainable change that centers people and community. Whether guiding leadership teams through difficult conversations or designing healing-informed strategies for organizational resilience, Karen helps clients move from intention to impact.
Outside of consulting, they are a published author and poet, multidisciplinary artist, and rest advocate who finds joy in community, creativity, and connection.
(she/her) As of 2025, Jessica is no longer available for consulting work through Work in Progress, but still serves as our billing specialist & accountant.
Karen Hewitt M.Ed., Associate Consultant
Leslie Wright, Senior Consultant
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Leslie is a proud graduate of an HBCU, Hampton University, where she earned a degree in theater with an emphasis on directing. She has worked in nonprofit organizations for over a decade, in roles focused on on training, education, team management, leadership development, Human Resources, and creating systems and strategy. Leslie has extensive experience in coaching for public speaking and is also a seasoned blogger and host of virtual events.
Her skills include teaching, facilitation, mediation, professional development guidance, curriculum development, strategic planning, and creating effective evaluation and feedback processes. Recently, Leslie has worked with the HFLA and expanded her skillset to include personal finance which she teaches to community members seeking to improve their credit and learn how to budget. Leslie is a firm believer in knowledge = power and loves sharing knowledge with her community.
Mahogany Thaxton, Senior Consultant
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Mahogany Thaxton is a Pittsburgh-based development and information professional with 15 years’ experience building relationships, creating fundraising, donor stewardship and engagement strategies for small grassroots and large well-resourced organizations. No matter the organization, donor, or staff backgrounds, she believes raising money is rooted in building relationships first. Her commitment to racial and wealth equity in her personal life extends to reimagining what philanthropy can look like when built on organization and donor partnerships, not power.
Her skills include helping organizations build and maintain their individual donor base, create fundraising and donor stewardship plans, and implement strong donor data and information management practices that match their organizational needs and staff capacity. Her experience has shown her that small to mid-sized organizations and organizations led by or serving BIPOC individuals receive the least amount of individual donations and are the organizations she is particularly interested in supporting. She’s currently pursuing a Master’s of Library and Information Sciences, focusing on the value of librarianship and library skills within nonprofits and community archives and their unique needs for information and data organization.
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Ashley is a strategic leader and equity-centered practitioner with over 15 years of experience driving systems-level change across higher education and the nonprofit sector. As the Founding Executive Director of CS Pathways at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, she conceived and scaled a nationally recognized initiative advancing inclusive access to STEM and computing education, growing from a pilot serving 30 students to reaching 5,000+ youth annually while achieving 100% college matriculation for graduates of its residential summer programs. She secured more than $5M in philanthropic and institutional funding, built multi-sector partnerships across community organizations, universities, and corporate partners, and developed an organizational model later adopted by peer institutions.
Ashley grew up in a rust belt community hit hard by the opioid crisis, watching firsthand what happens when talented young people don’t have the resources they need to find their way. That experience shaped her deeply, and it’s never far from the work. She joins Work in Progress Consulting with deep expertise in strategy development, equity-centered program design, coalition building, and evaluation-informed learning across education, workforce pathways, and philanthropy. She brings a specific approach to that work: starting with deep listening, building formal systems rather than relying on good intentions, and translating vision into structures that actually hold. She has a particular talent for helping leaders name what they’re really trying to do, then designing the practical pathways to get there. At her core, Ashley believes that communities already hold the knowledge and leadership needed to solve their own hardest problems, and that the real work is creating the conditions for that to happen.
Ashley Patton, Associate Consultant
Rachel Kacenjar MNO, Principal Consultant & Co-Managing Director
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With two decades of diverse experience spanning nonprofit directorship, capacity building, people operations, finance, development, philanthropy, and small business leadership, Rachel brings a wealth of expertise to her consulting clients. She holds a Masters in Nonprofit Organizations and Public Administration from Cleveland State University, complemented by a BA in Management and Entrepreneurship from the New School for Social Research. (She also has a lapsed PMP and SHRM-CP, both of which she will not renew due to these certifying bodies divesting from equity-aligned practices.) Over the past seven years, she has dedicated herself to teaching people-centered coursework in Human Resources functions. Rachel's focus has predominantly been in Reproductive Health & Rights and Disability Justice in the nonprofit sector.
In 2020, she co-authored the groundbreaking Anti-Racist Human Resources Guidebook, followed by Reframing Pride: The LGBTQ+ HR Guide in 2021. Her most recent co authored book and toolkit, The Equitable Hiring Guide, debuted in June of 2024. Her publications with Equity Guides have garnered widespread acclaim, with tens of thousands of copies sold. Her innovative policy-building frameworks that center the humanity in Human Resources have been adopted by hundreds of workplaces both domestically and internationally. Rachel is deeply committed to operationalizing values and emphasizing inclusivity by seeking input from all levels of an organization when building new systems. She utilizes a trauma-informed coaching style and guides leaders in practicing transparency and direct communication with their teams. She believes that meeting people where they are at is always the best place to start.
Samara Knox, Senior Consultant
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Samara has over 24 years of experience in Reproductive Health and Justice with a focus on training and managing front line clinic staff. For over a decade, she worked as the Director of Patient Services for Preterm, a nonprofit, feminist abortion clinic. Samara oversaw hiring, orientation and continuing professional development for nearly 100 of Preterm’s Patient Advocates. She has provided mediation, conflict resolution, counseling, and coaching for staff members at all career levels and walks of life. Samara has also spent the last five years auditing and improving patient funding and navigation systems for abortion funds.
She has been involved in several Reproductive Justice leadership initiatives such as the 2017-2018 Movement Makers cohort with NNAF, and has presented on whole-person counseling techniques at Abortion Care Network and National Abortion Federation conferences. Her nationally recognized training program for non-judgmental, patient-centered counseling has been used in dozens of workplaces. Some of her most notable trainings have been 3-day intensive "training the trainer" courses with topics such as: preparing leaders for community engagement, counseling techniques, active listening and proactive communication, anti-oppression and privilege trainings, and conflict management and resolution. With her vast experience in hiring, training, and coaching, she continues to hold space as a trusted leader and advocate in the nonprofit and Reproductive Justice ecosystem.
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Ryan Zymler is a Chicago-based educator, change maker, and storyteller originally from Cleveland, Ohio. They bring more than a decade of experience in nonprofit leadership and administration, communications, and training and development. Ryan holds an MS in Social Administration (MSW) from Case Western Reserve University and a BA in Psychology from Ohio University, and brings a people-centered, strategic approach shaped by a foundation in community mental health and intersectional activism. Their advocacy has been recognized with the City of Cleveland's LGBTQ Heritage Day Award for Advocacy & Activism (2022) and the inaugural Preterm Change Maker Award (2025).
As a consultant with Work in Progress, Ryan’s expertise is in Human Resources with an emphasis on people and culture, bringing to the team experience in employee engagement, internal communications, conflict resolution, program design and development, and strategic planning. They aim to support clients through a unique blend of social work training and DEI expertise, using mediation and facilitation skills to bring people together, surface solutions, and positively impact organizational culture. Their approach is always rooted in collaboration, knowing that anyone in the organization can have useful insight and expertise and that the best answers are probably already at the table.
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Ryan Zymler MSW, Associate Consultant
