01
Understand
Get the context, the history, the people, the goal, and what is actually getting in the way.
Open to aligned consulting + part-time roles
I make complicated work easier to understand, organize, and move forward.
I work across programs, operations, systems, and implementation, usually where there are a lot of moving pieces and no obvious path through them.
My background spans NIH, federal public-health consulting, and hands-on work with founders. I’m best at understanding what’s happening, finding what matters, and building a practical way forward.
NIH Director’s Award
Lean Six Sigma Green Belt
NIH + Accenture Federal Services
Independent consulting since 2022
Federal + founder-side experience · Lean Six Sigma Green Belt
NIHFederal Programs
AccentureFederal Services
HowardUniversity
RegenerateWomen’s Wellness
How I think
The same pattern keeps showing up.
I’m at my best when I can understand the whole problem, not just inherit a task list. My work usually follows the same pattern.
02
Organize
Make the moving pieces visible. Clarify ownership, information, decisions, dependencies, and next steps.
03
Improve
Find the friction and simplify it. Build for how real people work, not for how a perfect process looks on paper.
04
Implement
Build it, coordinate it, communicate it, test it, improve it again, and help the work reach the people it was meant to serve.
Featured founder partnership
What ownership looks like in practice.
Regenerate
Women’s hormone health + vitality · women 55+
44–50%Average open rate sustained across 9 months
1,000+Engaged opted-in subscribers
8.4%Peak click rate on targeted hormone campaign
50% ↓Spam complaints after offer-format redesign
Building a high-trust email engine for a premium wellness brand.
Grow and convert without ever making a relationship-driven health brand feel salesy.
Regenerate is a boutique hormone-health and vitality brand founded by a nurse practitioner whose professional reputation rides on every word that goes out. I lead the email program end to end: strategy, monthly ghostwriting in the founder’s voice, Flodesk build, segmentation, and performance analysis.
I built a value-first system in which every newsletter leads with something genuinely useful or personal, teaches something real, and earns the right to make one soft ask. The list grew past 1,000 subscribers while open rates held between 44 and 50% across nine months.
One campaign looked successful until I looked deeper.
A high-performing announcement quietly caused a spike in spam complaints. I traced the issue to the standalone-blast format, restructured how offers were delivered, and cut complaints in half on the next commerce send while keeping engagement strong. I also built a plain-language monthly scorecard so the founder can see list health without living in a marketing dashboard.
The work extends beyond email into the backend and content ecosystem: CRM, content repurposing, editorial guidance, client-facing communications, and launch planning. The goal is not “more content.” It is a brand voice people trust, backed by systems and numbers that support sustainable growth.
“Rachel stepped in and took real ownership of the backend... She’s made it much easier for me to focus on my clients and the bigger picture. Having her on my team has made a meaningful difference.”
Sharie Hiller, MSN, CNM · Founder, Regenerate
Selected work
Different settings. The same kind of problem-solving.
NIH Path to Excellence & Innovation team · White House Initiative on HBCUs Chairman’s Award, 2019
Federal programs · NIH
Connecting HBCUs, federal agencies, and contracting opportunity.
At NIH’s Small Business Program Office, I helped support the Path to Excellence & Innovation initiative and broader small-business programming through stakeholder coordination, outreach, federal partnerships, vendor and event logistics, documentation, contract oversight, and program operations.
The work brought HBCUs, acquisition officials, federal agencies, and industry stakeholders together around access to federal opportunity. Our PEI team received the White House Initiative on HBCUs Chairman’s Award in 2019 for this work.
View a surviving federal event record ↗Public Health Implementation
PDMP–EHR Integration Toolkit
Public implementation guidance developed for states, health systems, and technical stakeholders.
Public health · Accenture Federal Services
Turning complex implementation work into usable guidance.
On a national health IT engagement, I coordinated work across state health departments, health systems, federal partners, analysts, and subcontractor organizations. I directly managed multiple workstreams while reviewing deliverables, facilitating stakeholder conversations, synthesizing findings, and helping move implementation guidance through drafting, editing, QA, and approvals.
The resulting PDMP–EHR Integration Toolkit is publicly available and reflects the kind of work I enjoy most: understanding complicated information, organizing what matters, and helping translate it into something people can actually use.
View the public toolkit ↗
White House Initiative on HBCUs · Rachel Kenlaw during her Howard University HBCU All-Star ambassador year
Early leadership · Howard University
Building a health-and-wellness platform before it was my job.
As a White House Initiative on HBCUs All-Star ambassador, I designed a year-long Health & Wellness platform and planned more than a dozen campus initiatives, including Howard University’s Mental Health Summit.
The work required partnership-building, sponsorship outreach, logistics, student and administrator engagement, communications, and turning a broad mandate into actual programming. It is one of the earliest examples of a pattern that has followed me professionally ever since.
Process Improvement
A CRM built around the person using it.
Three publications. One simplified lead system. Better visibility and follow-through.
Founder operations · Publishing
Simplifying a system instead of adding another one.
A local lifestyle publisher had prospects, follow-ups, calls, business cards, and future opportunities scattered across an increasingly complicated workflow. Important leads were slipping through the cracks.
I redesigned her existing Notion CRM around the way she actually works, reducing it to a small number of useful views, surfacing follow-ups when they were due, and giving administrative support a clearer backend rhythm without overwhelming the owner.
Follow the thread
The setting changed. The pattern didn’t.
Systems, access, implementation, people, and meaningful work have been showing up since before my first full-time job.
Howard University
Programs + public service
Supply Chain Management, HBCU All-Star leadership, health-and-wellness programming, and institutional partnerships.
NIH
Federal program operations
HBCU engagement, small-business programs, contracting, national events, process improvement, and cross-agency coordination.
Accenture Federal Services
Implementation
Public-health technology, multi-stakeholder workstreams, analyst leadership, deliverables, QA, and translating complexity into guidance.
Independent Consulting
Ownership close to the founder
Systems, CRM, email, content operations, client delivery, launches, process design, and the freedom to improve what is not working.
Maternal + Women’s Health
A domain I care about deeply
Direct birth-sector experience now sits alongside my operations and public-health background, giving me a different view of how health systems land in real life.
Meet Rachel
A little more context.
I’m Rachel. I’m what I call a context person. I want to know how something got here, why it works the way it does, who actually uses it, and what happens before and after the part everyone is focused on.
Apparently I’ve always been this way. As a kid, I was organizing bake sales and taking science-fair projects a little too seriously. These days the problems are bigger, but I still genuinely enjoy figuring things out and making things make sense.
Outside of work, I’m a wife and mama who would almost always rather be outside. I love gardening, hiking and exploring state parks, cooking from scratch, herbalism and plant medicine, swimming, traveling, and reading an actual physical book. I’m also working on a family recipe book and trying to make more room in my life for pickleball.
The thing I keep coming back to, in work and in life, is curiosity. I like learning how things work, understanding where they came from, and leaving them a little better than I found them.
Recognition
Recognition along the way.
National Institutes of Health
NIH Director’s Award · 2020
Recipient during my NIH tenure for work connected to the Small Business Program Office and its broader mission.
White House Initiative on HBCUs
Chairman’s Award · 2019
Our NIH Path to Excellence & Innovation team was recognized for work expanding HBCU participation in federal opportunity.
White House Initiative on HBCUs
HBCU All-Star · 2016–2017
Selected while at Howard University and used the role to build a year-long health-and-wellness platform with 12+ initiatives.
Process Improvement
Lean Six Sigma Green Belt
Training and certification that formalized something I was already inclined to do: understand a process before trying to improve it.
Two ways to bring me in
The right structure depends on the work.
Bring me into your business.
For founders and small organizations that need more than task execution. Good fit areas include:
- Fractional operations and implementation
- Systems and process improvement
- Special projects and launches
- Client delivery and backend infrastructure
- Founder-side strategic execution
Bring me onto your team.
For organizations looking for a thoughtful operator who can own substantive work. I am especially interested in:
- Program operations + implementation
- Technical assistance + capacity building
- Special projects / strategic initiatives
- Research-to-practice and knowledge work
- Public health, maternal health, education, and adjacent fields
Start a conversation
Have something meaningful and complicated?
Those are usually the projects I like best. I’m open to select consulting engagements, project-based work, fractional partnerships, and part-time roles where there is real ownership, a problem worth understanding, and something tangible to move forward.