Aspen Baker is an award-winning leader, author and nonprofit consultant who helps leaders and organizations navigate growth, uncertainty, and change. She wrote her book Pro-Voice: How to Keep Listening When the World Wants a Fight at the Mesa Refuge in 2014. Published in 2015, Pro-Voice received Living Now Award’s 2016 Evergreen Gold Medal for World Peace and an IPPY Bronze Medal for Current Events (Humanitarian Issues). She has also written for Elle.com, New York Times, TED.com, New York Daily News, Refinery29, Huffington Post, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review, among others. A nonprofit founder, Aspen launched Exhale with $1,000 initially raised in small donations from friends and family
and scaled it into a $1.2 million national organization supported by America’s leading philanthropic organizations, as well as individual and major donors from across the country. As a spokesperson for Exhale, Aspen has been featured by media outlets across the country, including CNN Headline News, Fox National News, Ladies Home Journal, New York Times, National Public Radio, and many more.
Aspen gave the first TED talk on abortion in 2015, which has more than 2 million views. She has been a keynote speaker on topical issues and spoken at many nonprofit conferences on issues from board governance and fundraising to financial scenario planning and program evaluation. Her essay “My Abortion Brought Us Together” was featured in the anthology Nothing But The Truth So Help Me God: 51 Women Reveal the Power of Positive Female Connection. Aspen was named “Miss Body Positive” by Mashable and called a “fun, fearless female” by Cosmopolitan.
Now a nonprofit consultant, Aspen has done it all: from serving as an Interim CEO of a global philanthropic network to helping a new nonprofit founder organize their first board meeting with their first annual plan and budget. With a wide range of nonprofit management expertise and social change experience navigating complex dynamics within and between communities, Aspen offers clients her unique mix of entrepreneurial perspective and practical nonprofit know-how.
She lives in Oakland, California with her family and you can find her on LinkedIn.