About Us
For more than 25 years, Monica has worked at the intersection of leadership, learning, and organizational change.
Her career has included leading schools, launching citywide initiatives, building public systems, and helping nonprofit organizations navigate growth and change.
She’s lived and worked in New York City, Phoenix, Washington, DC, Seattle, and now Austin. These different contexts have shaped how she listens, how she asks questions, and how she helps organizations better understand themselves.
Through Voices, she brings together her experience as a leader and her passion for portrait photography to help organizations listen more deeply, understand themselves more fully, and lead with greater clarity.
View my LinkedIn profile h
Meet Monica
The Story Behind Voices
Two Passions. One Practice.
For more than 25 years, I've worked as an educator and executive leader, serving schools, districts, non-profits, and city government. Whether I was leading a bilingual school, launching a citywide initiative, or helping organizations improve systems, one lesson kept repeating itself:
The most important insights rarely come from data and reports alone. We need people to give them context and meaning.
The conversations that taught me the most were often spontaneous and informal. They happened in hallways, on playgrounds, or in my office after the official meeting had ended. Those moments reminded me that while data can tell us what is happening, people help us understand why.
Portrait photography has been a lifelong passion.
More often than not, while I'm talking with someone, I find myself thinking, I wish I had my camera right now. Sometimes it's the composition. More often, it's a fleeting expression or a quick pause that reveals more than the words they’re speaking. Over the years, I've created portrait projects centered around a shared theme, using conversation to shape the photographs I make. Eventually I realized that conversation and portraiture are remarkably similar. Both begin with curiosity, both require trust, and both help people feel truly seen.
Voices brings those two worlds together.
Voices helps organizations understand themselves by listening to the people who bring their mission to life.
What guides my work:
I listen before I act.
The goal isn't to confirm assumptions. It's to understand what's really happening.
I believe people are the experts in their own experience.
Every participant deserves to feel heard, respected, and accurately represented.
I look for patterns, not anecdotes.
Individual experiences matter. Together, they reveal organizational insight.
Insight matters when it leads to action.
The goal isn't simply understanding, it's helping organizations move forward with greater clarity.
MLA Strategies exists to help organizations understand themselves more deeply so they can lead with greater clarity. Voices is the first expression of that mission, and the beginning of a growing collection of approaches that put people at the center of organizational learning and strategy.