
When you start your journey with Human Service Innovations (HSI), you will engage in critical inquiry taking a deep look at your organizational readiness in four areas: people, process, infrastructure, and finance.


Utilizing a human-centered approach, HSI will co-create an opportunity for you to articulate and activate your goals, sustaining relevant, actionable, and community-driven outcomes. This planning ensures the right solution, at the right time. The pathway you follow may incorporate change management, capacity building, infrastructure development, community engagement, business development, finance and sustainability, and legislative and policy strategy.


Implementing solutions is hard work, and HSI works in partnership with you to enable seamless transformation. When it’s time to launch, your new pathway may lead to deploying on critical components for change, such as change management facilitation, engaging HSI’s fractional CEO offering, building capacity for resource development, systems design, network and partnership enhancement, coalition building, new finance models, or advocacy.


More than often, you engage in a transformation and look back and think, hey, there are places we can tweak our approach and further meet the needs of our constituents. It’s time to iterate.

HSI will be with you throughout the toughest climbs and soothing descents, supporting you along the way to adapt to your new vision of success!
What Our Clients Say…

Kelly King Horne
Executive Director, Homeward
In early 2020, John saw people experiencing homelessness and the challenges will providing shelter at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. He started to volunteer, and ended up managing the biggest shelter in the state of Virginia. During the peak of the crisis, we hosted up to 800 people for a total of 502 days. It was urgent, and it was successful. He helped us develop policies and procedures and empowered staff to deploy sustainable structural and programmatic changes to best meet the needs of people experiencing homelessness. His ability to positively develop systems, quickly, at a time of dire need for humanity, amazed me.

Ally Singer Wright
Senior Director, Virginia Mental Health Access Program
HSI has been integral to my leadership development and all the challenges that come with my role. How and why decisions are made, governance, how I navigate complex relationships across stakeholders (i.e. medical directors, director of behavioral health, state commissioners). HSI has been a lifeline for me.

Valerie Carlin
Chief Impact Officer, Aspen Community Foundation
HSI is known for having a passion for leadership development, which includes board development, and the focus is on capacity building at a systems and personnel level.

Ivan Jackson
Non-Profit Executive
Authenticity is a key ingredient to what you will get with HSI. In my past work with HSI and Lift Up, I would see HSI take a complex problem, break it down quickly, analyze it, and recommend the top 3 actions needed to solve it. This happens without making stakeholders feel inferior and it instills confidence in people’s ability to tackle big problems.

Cindy deSa
MCH/Title V Director, Virginia Department of Health
For us, as the Virginia Department of Health, understanding the health needs across our state and identifying the trends to develop a significant strategic plan for our federal partners, Health Resources and Services Administration, is complicated work. HSI has been able to convene diverse groups of people, facilitate thoughtful conversation, and bring synthesis to a broad range of ideas. The acumen applied to keep varying perspectives moving forward, removing limiting beliefs, and developing a cohesive plan is unbeatable. There is an ethic of care and strategic partnership required for social work, and in the long-game of public health, it’s what we need. HSI has been invaluable.
Elizabeth Creamer
Vice President, Workforce Development & Credential Attainment, Community College Workforce Alliance (CCWA)
The benefit of working with HSI is the wide network and capability of clearly articulating vision to diverse stakeholders: business, nonprofits, you name it. There is an ability to identify the potential within and help realize it, where other people might bypass it because it’s not impressive. John saw the potential for our coalition long before the rest of us did.

Carol Minter
Executive Director, Soundscapes, Richmond, Virginia
This is where John thrives: he helps people think big and beyond their boundaries. He “dissolves the tendency to limit our beliefs.” We are further along in the journey than if he had not been involved.
Katherine Sand
Executive Director, Aspen Family Connections, Colorado
HSI provides tools, clarity in thinking, and experience from elsewhere, and gives organizations an injection of enthusiasm and refreshed perspectives. HSI can reset how organizations think and leave them with the skills, operating, and governance models to succeed.

Greg Poschman
Pitkin County Commissioner, Colorado
Mature agencies understand the pain of inefficiencies and failures to connect and execute with their staffs, boards and communities, but they may not know that a fix even exists. Enter HSI. John is an itinerant specialist who builds strong, focused boards, effective executive teams and staff who get the work done. People are left smiling, and asking, “ Who was that masked man?”