Meet Our founder

Lea is a nonprofit Chief Executive herself. She founded Rising Impact Leaders Group to help level the playing field for early-career and mid-career folks in the nonprofit sector. Her goal? Give you the inside knowledge from a Chief Executive perspective and space for guided self-discovery to advocate for yourself at work and rise in your career.

When people ask about Lea’s story and experience, here’s the glossy version she usually shares:

Lea Madry serves as Executive Director at a $20M nonprofit organization that works to increase civic engagement among underrepresented communities through digital media. Prior to her role at Accelerate Change, Lea served as Chief of Staff at the Trevor Project and in a variety of nonprofit executive and leadership positions.

An attorney by training, Lea began her career as a transactional attorney at a large national law firm. After transformative leadership experiences serving on several nonprofit boards over the course of nearly a decade, Lea ultimately left the legal profession to pursue her commitment to social impact. Lea has spent the decade since then working to contribute her skills and experience to the movement everywhere she can, from leading people functions and finance and operations teams, to leading fundraising and marketing, to overseeing impact programs, to executive leadership roles.

Hailing from Ohio, Lea is a proud first-generation college graduate with a B.A. from the Ohio State University and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

But here’s the real story, in Lea’s own words:

I’m a big believer in the power of choice points: the idea that, as leaders, we have so many key decision-making opportunities that we can use to advance our values (or not). My approach to leadership centers on choice points that reflect organizational and personal commitments to equity in building and scaling impact organizations.

My most impactful choice point: Coming from a humble background, I went on to become a first-generation college graduate, a graduate of one of the top 5 US law schools, and a corporate attorney in a prestigious “biglaw” firm. Me - a Black woman from rural Ohio - achieved something that my family and I sacrificed for and dreamed of for so long, despite the unlikely odds. You can imagine the surprise of my community, then, when I left the legal profession to dedicate my career to improving the lives of others through impact organizations. That choice was exactly the right one for me - one that is aligned with my values and the positive impact I hope to make on the world.

After a couple decades now of working across traditional and nontraditional roles where I have led nearly every function in nonprofits (strategy, fundraising / development, marketing / communications, finance, operations, recruiting, human resources / people operations, programs, and holding the role of principal / chief executive), I believe the greatest asset of mission-driven organizations is people.

My superpower is bringing this lens of people-centered leadership choice points to grow social impact organizations. The work of building and scaling organizations toward social impact is joyful for me because it’s my favorite avenue to bring together what I’m best at (people, process, vision, strategy, and values-driven decision making across all of these) and what I care about most (improving the lives of individuals and communities through social impact). I am particularly energized by the thorny challenges that come with this stage of organizational growth - I love a puzzle! - alongside the opportunity to embed values when building and scaling for impact.

In the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of my free time thinking about and talking with others about how to address what I think is one of the most pressing challenges in the nonprofit sector: nonprofit workplaces (even the best ones) aren’t set up to deeply invest in the career development of early-career and mid-career nonprofit staff, and that makes nonprofits less effective and less sustainable long-term. There are as many reasons for this as there are possible solutions - many! But from my view, one fundamental truth is that early-career and mid-career nonprofit staff deserve the context and inside knowledge that comes at the Chief Executive level to better navigate workplaces and their job, to advocate for themselves, and to ultimately shape their career in the ways they imagine. Without this guidance, I fear we’re stuck in this broken loop that is unfair to rising leaders and to the detriment of the nonprofits where they work. Launching Rising Impact Leaders Group in 2025 is my effort to be of service here - to use my experience and perspective as a Chief Executive to help guide early-career and mid-career staff in the nonprofit sector as a career advisor. My big bet is on the rising leaders in our sector - on their potential, and ours collectively - because of their rise.