Strategy, partnerships, and human-centered design for organizations taking a real risk on a new approach to social and economic problems.
Experience at USAID and Chemonics International. Master of Public Policy, University of Chicago. Based in New York City.
I design and stand up the systems a program runs on: workflows, data flows, and decision tools, shaped around the people who will use them every day. Your staff get something they adopt, not a document that sits on a shared drive.
A good fit when your idea works on a slide and now has to work across teams, sites, or countries.
I structure and launch collaborations between institutions that don't usually work together, from the first conversation through the agreement, the governance, and the capital that makes it real.
A good fit when you need a funder, a company, and the people doing the work around one table with one plan.
Before you commit budget, I dig into what the research says and what your own data show. Then I review your plan for what could fail, who it hasn't been tested with, and whether a simpler route gets the same result. You get a plain account of what is known, what is assumed, and what to test first.
A good fit when a big decision is coming and you want a candid read grounded in evidence.
Human-centered design is a habit of starting with the people who will live with the result and checking my thinking against evidence. Most projects follow the same four steps.
I spend the first stretch listening to the staff, partners, and communities who will live with the outcome, and reading what the research and your own data already say. Together they shape the brief.
A one-page version, a rough workflow, or a mock-up lets everyone react to something real before money is committed.
I try it in the real setting with the real constraints, measure what happens, and change it based on what breaks.
Your team gets a working version, the documentation, and the know-how to run it without me.
The teams I work best with are taking a real risk: a new model, a first-of-its-kind partnership, a market they haven't operated in before. If your plan has a precedent to copy, you may not need me. If it doesn't, I'd like to hear about it.
Tell me what you're buildingThree examples of how I approach a problem. I'm happy to share more detail in a conversation.
U.S. Agency for International Development
Migration was commonly treated as a sign that development had failed, and that framing shaped what programs could do about it.
I led the development of the agency's first global migration policy, built on the view that migration is intrinsic to development. I later co-authored an op-ed arguing the policy stays relevant after the agency's dismantling.
U.S. Agency for International Development
Migrants send money home to their families and communities, and aid planning has mostly treated that flow as separate from its own work.
I developed strategies to reframe remittances as a channel toward local resilience, one that works alongside and outside traditional aid funding.
Chemonics International
A convening is only worth the room if it changes who an organization is talking to. UN General Assembly week and Climate Week fill New York with events, so each one has to earn its audience.
I ran multiple events across both weeks, designed to put Chemonics in front of audiences it hadn't reached before. The events brought in those new audiences, informed new dimensions of the organization's public positioning, and started new conversations with potential partners.
I'm a strategist and partnership builder based in New York City. I was born and raised in Canada. I've spent my career inside the institutions that fund and run international development: first as a researcher and policy analyst at USAID, where I led the agency's first global migration policy, and then at Chemonics International, where I've worked on new models for bringing private capital to underserved communities.
In both places I kept seeing the same thing. Good ideas stall at the point where someone has to turn them into something people can run. That handoff is where I like to work. I bring a policy and research background, practical skills in financial modeling, monitoring and evaluation, and grant writing, and a habit of designing around the people who will use the result.
I hold a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago's Harris School and a BA from the University of Toronto in International Relations, Diaspora and Transnational Studies, and African Studies.
Research and policy writing on migration, development, and capital mobilization.
Op-ed in Science Politics, co-authored with Laurie Ashley
Argues that USAID's global migration policy, which treated migration as intrinsic to development, remains urgently relevant despite the agency's dismantling.
Policy paper (PDF)
Argues that migration is intrinsic to development and not a symptom of its failure, and outlines a policy framework that reflects this.
Research report, funded by the Laidlaw Foundation
Examines Ontario's approach to language education for immigrants and newcomers, and what a more multicultural policy could look like.
Journal article, Landmarks: The Journal of Undergraduate Geography
Examines the realities of refugees in Dadaab, Kenya to challenge common frameworks around refugee identity and belonging.
Two or three sentences is plenty. I'll reply and we can work out whether it's a fit.
Prefer LinkedIn? linkedin.com/in/keenankrause