Green Mountain Strategies helps universities and institutions increase the impact of research to tackle society’s hardest problems and improve people’s lives.

SERVICES AND SPECIALTIES

  • GMS plans deliver powerful, innovative new visions and strategies for institutions, organizations, and teams.

  • GMS advising sessions empower leaders to identify obstacles to public impact, create and implement strategies to overcome them. GMS delivers expertise in metascience and emerging best practices for impact, helps clients deploy reflective practice to improve.

  • GMS interactive trainings and presentations include:

    • Who Is My Research For?

    • Power Mapping and Stakeholder Outreach

    • Research Practice Partnerships 101

    • Fewer Papers, More Impact

    • Impact Share and Solve

    • Let's Not Write Your NYT Op-Ed: Secrets to Actual Impact

    • Communicate: Why?

  • Leaders need to know how much impact their labs, centers, or institutions are having outside academia. GMS delivers insightful, actionable, independent assessments.

  • Choosing whether to create a new research-practice partnership or innovation network -- or join an existing one -- requires scientists understand the actors in the issue landscape. This is a type of analysis that researchers are rarely trained for and never have time for. GMS makes maps that empower wise choices.

  • Individual centers and scholars can face conflicts between promoting their own institution and providing the best possible team of partners to policy stakeholders. GMS solves this through Project Quarterbacking. A unique service for large-scale impact projects, GMS providing strategic planning, coaching, assessment and training to multiple project participants across many institutions. Synthesizing research insights and stakeholder management, advancing inter-university priorities to the benefit of all, we own the projects no one else does.

  • Researchers who aim to strengthen core national institutions and government agencies need guidance to find partners and choose high impact projects. GMS is there -- because we have been there.

ABOUT GREEN MOUNTAIN STRATEGIES

It takes more than first-class scientists and excellent communications to spur impact. Research impact depends on research questions that much be chosen with deep knowledge of the challenges and choices facing practitioners and communities. And research impact depends on structures — partnerships and innovation networks — without which findings are highly unlikely to be put into action to help people at scale.

GMS serves universities, governments, philanthropies by providing unique expertise in one thing: the art and science of creating and executing strategies to increase the impact of research. University researchers are experts in their field. Innovation accelerators help insights from science connect to private sector companies and markets. Communications professionals deliver messages, break news, and build brands. Creating strategies and structures for research to impact public sector challenges like alleviating poverty, reducing inequality, and strengthening democracy is a different and unique challenge, entirely outside of any of those specialities — and it is the only thing we do at Green Mountain Strategies. In addition to principal and owner Avi Green, GMS assembles teams as needed to provide clients with insights, plans, and support to increase their impact on some of the world’s hardest problems. Recent clients include Stanford University, Cornell University, Tufts University, Common Cause, and the University of California San Diego.

ABOUT AVI GREEN

For 25 years, Avi Green has worked to improve public policy, build organizations, support rising leaders, and strengthen democracy.

From 2013 to 2020, Avi served the Scholars Strategy Network, an organization dedicated to increasing the use of research to improve public policy and strengthen democracy. As Director of Communications and then as Executive Director, Avi helped dozens of professors and researchers tell their stories in venues including The New York Times, The Daily Show, Fox News, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Vox, and The Boston Globe. He hosted over 100 episodes of a podcast, No Jargon, which has been downloaded over 2 million times. As a policy entrepreneur, coach and matchmaker, Avi helped researchers build collaborations and partnerships with policymakers, advocates, and community leaders in dozens of states, working on issues including election modernization and poverty reduction. When Avi joined the Scholars Strategy Network, it was a group of fewer than 200 researchers, by the time he departed, it had grown into a national association of more than 1,500 members with 36 regional chapters.

From 2006 to 2012, Avi served as executive director of MassVOTE, an organization that works to end racial disparities in voting and civic engagement in Massachusetts. Avi turned around a nonprofit facing a financial crisis, raising new revenues, retiring debt, and focusing the organization on efforts to close the racial voting gap. During the 2011 redistricting process, Avi helped convene a coalition whose advocacy resulted in the bipartisan passage of new maps that doubled the number of majority-minority districts in Massachusetts. Avi conducted the first election audit in Massachusetts history and was a key leader in the multi-year effort that led to the Massachusetts Elections Modernization Act of 2014. Avi served on the Massachusetts Ballot Law Commission and the Massachusetts Local Elections District Review Commission. For his work, Avi was awarded the Kivie Kaplan Humanitarian Award by the Boston Branch of the NAACP. He also observed elections in Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the invitation of the Boston College Irish Institute.

Avi holds an undergraduate degree in Comparative Religion and Mathematics from Columbia University and a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University. In 2000 and 2001, Avi was a JOIN for Justice organizing fellow. Avi has also been a yoga teacher, a ski instructor, and a campaign manager. He is conversant in Spanish and French. He enjoys hiking, movies, and spending time with his wife and daughter, and Latke the dog.

TRACK RECORD

Avi Green has provided strategic impact advice, communications counsel, and trainings to researchers based at the following universities:

Brown University

City University of New York

Cleveland State University

Columbia University

Cornell University

Duke University

Emory University

Georgetown University

Georgia State University

Harvard University

Johns Hopkins University

Marquette University

Michigan State University

North Carolina State University

Northeastern University

Ohio State University

Oklahoma Policy Institute

Princeton University

Rutgers University

Stanford University

Syracuse University

Temple University

The George Washington University

The New School

Tufts University

University of California Berkeley

University of California Davis

University of California Los Angeles

University of California San Diego

University of California San Francisco

University of Colorado Denver

University of Maine

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

University of Massachusetts, Boston

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

University of Texas, Dallas

University of Utah

University of Washington, Seattle

University of Wisconsin, Madison

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Vanderbilt University

Washington University in St. Louis

Yale University

"Avi is exceptional. With Avi’s help, I achieved something that I did not think was possible. With Avi guiding the way (and doing most of the hard work), I was able to build a coalition of organizations, legislators, and activists around the country. Together we were able to change American democracy in profound ways. With Avi’s keen insights, deep connections, and wise strategy directing the operation, we have changed electoral institutions around the country and brought millions of new voters to the ballot box for local elections. With Avi, we have made democracy in American cities more open, more inclusive, more diverse, and more equal. Without Avi’s assistance and guidance at every step in the process, none of this would have been possible. I am deeply indebted to Avi. There is no one like him.

Zoltan L. Hajnal, Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research, University of California San Diego

“Avi Green delivers the goods.

He is an amazing strategist and a brilliant communicator. Avi helped me break into publications like The New York Times and has given me crucial counsel. When I wanted to be sure my book, Paying the Price, would make an impact on scholars and students, be a gripping read for non-academics, and shift the debate in the halls of power, Avi's coaching and editing helped me bring out my best voice. I’m deeply grateful.”

Sara Goldrick-Rab, President & Founder, Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice; Professor of Sociology & Medicine, Temple University

"I had the pleasure of working with Avi on a series of research projects about campaigns and political party leadership. I didn't have much 'on-the-ground' experience, and Avi stepped in and helped me match my project's goals to the realities of modern campaign practices. His expertise and depth of knowledge were second to none, and he was a joy to work with. Avi's input at key decision points reshaped the entire trajectory of the larger project and the final product was so much richer because of his guidance."

Nicholas Carnes, Professor of Public Policy and Sociology, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University

"I brought in Avi Green to help me build the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy -- and he had a tremendous impact. Avi was integral to the foundation of the Institute and a major source of support for me as a director. Avi has all the skills people need to build organizations. He provides great ideas for strategy and communications. He edits beautifully. He creates budgets. He puts together teams to win seven-figure grants. He considers the big picture. He is a thoughtful counselor and a great partner."

Darrick Hamilton, University Professor, Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy, Founding Director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, The New School

"I had the privilege of working with Avi as he contributed to Scholars Strategy Network's growth into a nation-spanning resource for policymakers, journalists, and civic groups. I benefited directly from Avi's deft leadership, creative thought partnership, and supportive mentorship and coaching as I learned how to bring my research to a broader public audience. I deeply appreciate the ideas, connections, and skills he helped me to foster."

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

TESTIMONIALS