About
Joanne has two decades of experience developing and executing advocacy, electoral, communications, and philanthropic campaigns. She specializes in building momentum for critical issues through targeted multi-state and multi-city efforts that demonstrate success and build power from the local level. She also has extensive experience reframing issues to more effectively connect with target audiences, inspire them to act, and move public opinion. She serves as a partner with her clients, working with them hand-in-hand, to achieve their goals.
Joanne founded Momentum Advisors in 2020. Before starting Momentum, she served as a principal at Civitas Public Affairs Group, where she continued working with a team of professionals who she had partnered with in the effort to secure marriage equality nationwide. In her role as a strategic advisor and campaign operative, Joanne has supported a number of efforts including:
- Designing and implementing a 50-state legislative advocacy plan to ensure testing and tracking of sexual assault evidence kits.
- Utilizing deep listening and public opinion research, as well as partnerships with community-based organizations to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake, especially in low-income communities and communities of color.
- Overseeing communications and programmatic activities of a nonprofit incubator investing in innovative solutions for challenges workers face.
- Driving several public education efforts that utilize storytelling to personalize issues that have been politically polarized.
- Working with the country's largest cities to adopt policies proven to enhance health and wellbeing of residents.
- Designing and implementing an initiative that re-centers the health care policy debate on the priorities of people who interact with the health care system every day.
- Overseeing a multi-state political program to elect champions of reproductive health in state legislatures.
- Advising individual candidates for U.S. Senate as well as campaigns supporting swing-state candidates for U.S. Senate and Congress.
- Crafting initial business plans and securing funding for multi-million dollar, multi-state advocacy efforts.
- Advising federal and state-based gun violence prevention measures.
- Engaging top-tier city officials to ensure an accurate 2020 Census count focusing on traditionally undercounted communities.
Joanne previously served as the executive director of ProgressNow Colorado, the state’s largest progressive multi-issue advocacy organization. She oversaw its communications campaigns and voter education efforts during one of the most successful election cycles for progressives in the battleground state.
For nearly a decade early in her career, Joanne supported the movement for LGBTQ equality and marriage equality, serving in several roles at Gill Action and the Gill Foundation. Joanne was a key member of the political team tasked with passing and protecting a variety of relationship recognition and nondiscrimination laws in multiple states that fed into the eventual U.S. Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality. She partnered with leaders in states like Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin to secure new policy or policy changes while managing communications, press relations, and public education on behalf of the entire organization. Joanne also oversaw early investments in public opinion research and implementation of research-based messaging that helped shift the narrative about marriage equality toward the winning frame of love and commitment.
Born and raised in Colorado, Joanne resides in Denver with her husband, two young sons, and dog. Joanne has a master’s degree in international studies from the University of Denver.
