A servant-leader for more than two decades, Kelly graduated from Oakland University with degrees in Public Administration and Policy with emphasis in Business Marketing. Kelly’s interest in these diverse and dissimilar areas of study provided early clues that she would successfully apply this unusual pairing of interests to both the greater good of the community and the monetary benefit of businesses competing in the marketplace.

Teaching Leadership and Providing Community Service 

Early evidence of Kelly’s unique pairing of abilities manifested itself through her highly- successful Service Learning program she conceived and developed for a multi-campus Michigan college. Available to the community at large, the program consisted of two initiatives: continuing education course work for adults on how to apply business management and problem-solving practices to community service projects, and a Student Volunteer Leadership Program for middle school students that taught leadership skills and good citizenship. Unique to this program was the daily application of classroom lessons into community settings such as nursing homes, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and to greening/beautification projects. 

Kelly served as the Program Manager for the United Way Service Learning Center for Southeast Michigan while employed by the United Way. In this capacity she developed content and instructed K-12 educators on how to incorporate hands-on community services experiences into their school’s curriculum. Lessons and skills learned in the classroom prepared students to become responsible and contributing members of their community.   Kelly also served on the Michigan Community Service Commission for several years.  

As an independent consultant, Kelly traveled to Guam to provide training to faculty at Guam Community College and the U.S. Department of Defense schools on how to effectively integrate community service classes into their respective curriculum in association with community agency partners. 

The Marketplace:

Project Management, Marketing and Communications

While employed with a global ‘tier-one’ automotive supplier, Kelly was responsible for the business acumen training of 18,000 salaried employees worldwide.  This exceptionally complicated large-scale project provided Kelly with experience that further enhanced her project management skill. Communicating the training project to multiple regions globally was critical to its success. In this context, Kelly applied her skills of communication and marketing to tailoring marketing and correspondence that recognized the nuances and unique cultural differences of the countries in Europe, South America, the Pacific Rim and North America.

Kelly's passion for communication brought her employment with CBS Radio in 2001. As a highly-regarded account executive, Kelly took exceptional effort to ask the right questions when interviewing a client or prospect. She conducted her meetings with the decorum of a corporate board meeting rather than a sales call. Her straightforward, business-like approach coupled with her ability to innovate resulted in radio advertising campaigns that were fresh, effective and tailored to clearly-defined objectives.

Kelly distinguished herself at CBS Radio by again pairing project management skill with marketing savvy:

• Helped design and execute several large and successful WWJ Newsradio 950-sponsored events including a multi-year consumer education series of events for the general public and the Igniting Innovation in Michigan Conference for entrepreneurs and small businesses.

• In 2011 brought innovation to CBS Radio nationally by creating and producing the first ever WWJ Newsradio 950 live video webcast series which incorporates no fewer than nine communications tools to deliver its highly-robust and timely content. Her unique webcast format remains unreplicated by other broadcast companies.

Always striving to create the best marketing, advertising and communication instruments for her clients, Kelly recognized that stand-alone traditional mass broadcast media was insufficient in meeting her clients’ requests for additional resources and creativity.   So Kelly created Graceful Communications.