Our Team

Jen is a strategic innovation leader who helps organizations transform and grow by creating value that leads to revenue growth and social impact. She leads the development of new services and strategies by facilitating a human-centered research and development process rooted in entrepreneurial methods. With over 20 years of experience working in public, private, and non-profit sectors, she is uniquely adept at cross-pollinating approaches from other sectors to uncover new solutions that create economic and human benefits. She specializes in stakeholder engagement, facilitating creative workshops, and developing strategic plans that align mission and metrics. Her work is guided by inclusive and sustainable practices.

Experience

Before starting Align, she led the Pennsylvania Governor’s Office of Transformation & Innovation and worked with Agency leaders to manage efficiency projects. Earlier, she was a key leader on the founding team of a STEM university start-up and led its initial development of marketing, admissions, financial aid, continuing education, and contracted training functions. There, she experienced firsthand the grittiness of launching new initiatives in a highly competitive, mature market. She’s also been an Interim VP of Enrollment & Innovation at a regional art college, where she co-led a turnaround of the admissions department. Jen has led workshops and taught graduate courses in entrepreneurship and innovation.  

Background

Jen has a Master’s in Business from Penn State University and numerous experiences in non-profit leadership.  She’s a wife and mother, and grew up among the dairy farms of Northeastern PA. Her blue-collar upbringing taught her the importance of persistence and creative problem-solving.

Click here to read a short blog post about how her prior work led her to start Align.

Colette has a broad base of business experience.  She understands tailoring products and services to the end user, having managed an $80MM advertising budget as a media supervisor.  She excels in a B2B environment after serving as a marketing and sales leader in a Fortune 100 consumer product company. Colette leveraged her business background to purchase and operate a small recycling business, having no industry experience.  By forging strategic relationships, she built her business into a regional powerhouse and a top auto battery recycler in Pennsylvania.  Between her business ventures, she found time to lead the incorporation and board formation of a non-profit, now over 10 years old.  Her passion is to help businesses grow in a meaningful, purposeful way. 

Background

Having sold her company, Colette moved to a Corporate Faculty position at Harrisburg University where she supports students interested in business.  The wide range of topics she teaches matches her experience and includes courses in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, and Communications.

Colette holds a BA in Communications from Southern Methodist University and an MBA from the University of Tennessee.  She grew up in South Dakota and now calls Hershey, PA her home. 

Joel’s formal training is in communication and user experience, and his passion for technology began in college. Thus, he truly has technology and communication woven into his DNA. Joel is a tech enthusiast, and firmly believes it exists to make lives better without more complexity or stress. This creed has led him on occasion to develop highly effective, low-tech solutions for clients who don’t need more complicated options.

Background

Joel has worked in B2B marketing communications and digital communications. He was a principal in his own agency, held elected office, and now teaches as a tenured professor. His previous roles as an entrepreneur, employee, public official, and academic allow him to see a client’s organization from many different perspectives.

Joel has a bachelor’s degrees in science and humanities from Lebanon Valley College, a master’s degree in Communication from Temple University, and a Ph.D. from Texas Tech University. One thing a Ph.D. should teach you is that you cannot possibly know everything, even in the niche of a discipline.

He lives a charmed 3-2-1 lifestyle. Three kids. Two daughters who recently graduated from Philadelphia colleges and one son at Elizabethtown College. Two dogs, a sheep-a-doodle and labradoodle, and one spouse, Laura. Make sure you read the “…3-2-1...” sentence before you read “one spouse”, or it looks a little peculiar!

Andy has been working with learning technologies since the laser disc and Bernoulli drive!  He has broad experience in a variety of learning design, consulting and educational technology roles spanning training, K-12 education and higher education. Andy shares his knowledge of instructional design and educational technology best practices and emerging strategies as a speaker and author - "Alternate Reality Games: Gamification for Performance", 2016.

Andy personifies the definition of internal entrepreneur. He’s a utility player with multiple talents beyond his specialty in immersive technologies. He created the role of Marketing Coordinator at a small business college to begin his career and has been blazing a trail of innovative strategy and detailed execution ever since. Andy was the first team member in the multimedia department of what is now a regional media production powerhouse.  He launched innovative learning methods at a large regional healthcare provider.  Then he built a Learning Technologies graduate program at a higher-ed start upnd went on to develop an innovative social enterprise for workforce development of entry-level IT workers.

He has a creative portfolio of wide-ranging, innovative learning solutions and delivery methods. Learning games, simulations, blended learning and live online learning are specific areas of Andy's emerging learning technologies experience. 

Background

Andy has a Bachelor's Degree in Marketing and Business Administration and a Master's Degree in Instructional Technology.  He transitioned his career from marketing to instructional technology with the goal of making education and training a more dynamic and engaging experience.