To Make Nonprofit Sector Impact, Alumna Learned to ‘Be Fluent in Different Stakeholder Languages’

Alyssa Tulabut (MBA/MPP ’24) has spent most of her career in social impact work. Today, she is a consultant with The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting organization that advises nonprofits, philanthropists and impact investors. She spoke about her experiences in the nonprofit sector and her time at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.

Tell us about where you grew up and where you went to college?

I mainly grew up in Chesapeake, Virginia. My dad was in the Navy, so we also spent time in California, Washington and Belgium. But Virginia is where we lived when I was in middle school and high school, so it’s where I call home.

I went to the University of Virginia, where I studied economics and psychology. I picked psychology because I find it so interesting to understand people’s way of thinking and the social dynamics between people. Economics, from a systems lens, is fascinating to me in terms of how markets work and the intersection of the two—how people behave and how those behaviors shape markets even beyond the economic sphere. It’s related to what I do now in terms of social dynamics and what that means for downstream effects.

How did you become interested in nonprofit work?

Injustice has always really unsettled me. I grew up believing that if you worked hard and got good grades, you would be successful. But as I became more exposed to how the world actually works, I realized it’s not a meritocracy. There are larger systems that create advantages and disadvantages. That motivated me to try to do something to fix it.

What professional experience did you have before going to graduate school?

For the first year after college, I went into wedding planning and dreamed of working my way up to be social secretary of the White House. But during the 2016 presidential election, I decided I wanted to do something different with my life, something more directly connected to community. That’s what led me to the nonprofit space.

I spent five years with the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, which focuses on community engagement and policy advocacy for Southeast Asian American communities. In college, I’d cultivated a community of fellow Southeast Asian Americans that I didn’t really have growing up, so finding a way to work in the nonprofit sector while working with that community was really appealing to me. I was manager of our flagship program to train community members from across the United States on how to effectively advocate to their elected officials. Eventually, I oversaw our community engagement programs more broadly and led a coalition of community-based organizations working on COVID and 2020 civic engagement outreach efforts.

Why did you decide to pursue joint master’s degrees in business and public policy?

After working in the nonprofit sector for about five years, I felt nonprofits couldn’t solve some challenges alone. I became interested in how you bring together nonprofits, business and government to tackle complex issues and build strategic partnerships.

I met a lot of folks in the nonprofit space who had a master’s degree in social work or public policy, and I became curious about how you bring in another lens. A close friend working in the nonprofit sector pursued an MBA, and I thought, “Here’s someone doing similar work to me through a business degree,” and that inspired me to explore it.

I wanted to be fluent in different stakeholders’ languages, so that’s why I also got an MPP. My ultimate goal was to be able to navigate both policymakers’ and business leaders’ worlds to build connections and strategic collaborations to drive social change.

Pursuing joint master’s degrees is a major time commitment. Why did you decide to participate in the Board Fellows program, too?

I thought it was a great opportunity to marry what I’d been learning at Darden and Batten with my nonprofit experience to give back and add value to a nonprofit.

What was also appealing about the Board Fellows program is that you get to zoom out and think, “If you’re trying to get here, what does that mean in terms of overall strategy?” It was a new but exciting muscle that I was eager to flex.

Which nonprofit were you matched with, and what did you focus on during your fellowship?

I was placed with The Sum, a nonprofit that focuses on diversity and equity issues. It was a pretty scrappy and small team. At the time, the Board Fellows program didn’t require a strategic project, as it does now, so our main roles were attending board meetings and providing advice—particularly as fresh eyes.

This advice ranged from small suggestions, such as encouraging them to shift away from their black-and-white website design to color, to larger suggestions such as potential partnerships they could pursue to increase their reach and impact.

We also discussed which programs made sense for them to devote their time to, instead of trying to do too much. We encouraged them to zoom out from a program-specific lens and focus on what was core to their impact thesis.

How has your experience as a Board Fellow helped you in your career after graduate school?

It’s been incredibly helpful in terms of where I wound up after graduate school. I’m at The Bridgespan Group, a consulting firm that works with nonprofits, philanthropists and impact investors. I’ve now seen the gamut of very, very small nonprofits to billion-dollar foundations.

A lot of times we’re operating at what I call the “eagle level”—taking a 10,000-foot view of an organization’s broader challenges. Nonprofits are typically trying to do everything with very few resources, so we try to help them focus on what’s most important to them. What’s their special sauce, and how do they do that really, really well, versus trying to solve everything under the sun?

One of my favorite assignments to date has been what we call our Leading for Impact coaching program. We work with small nonprofits’ executive teams and help them strengthen their strategic clarity and foundational building blocks. It’s very similar to my Board Fellows experience, in terms of helping them take stock of all these big strategic questions: from metrics to funding strategy to their theory of change to making sure their programs align with their theory of change. Then we do a project with them focusing on a challenge where they want to dive deeper as an organization.

It’s really affirmed that I love helping these nonprofits that have amazing missions, visions and goals. It’s great to see them gain real clarity about what they do and help them amplify their impact. It’s such rewarding work.