Our Theory of Change
Tallawah Consulting helps businesses do better in ways that meaningfully benefit the customers and communities they serve, one product, experience, and workforce at a time.
We do this by helping mission-driven brands maximize their social impact by using inclusive innovation to drive their core strategy forward. By creating innovative impact solutions that enable the development of more equitable, resilient and inclusive communities, we are helping to build a better world that works for all, not some.
Problem
There are companies and organizations that want to do business better in ways that are socially and environmentally beneficial, but either don’t know how or don’t have the capacity internally to operationalize their good intentions. In the absence of intervention, these entities are at best expending resources inefficiently that makes for misalignment between their intentions and impact and at worst, unintentionally causing harm. Tallawah Consulting exists to stand in the gap, being a bridge figure that helps these organizations align meaningful intentions with equally meaningful impact.
Solution
Tallawah does this by providing the support to these companies and organizations through the following avenues:
Collaborative inclusive design
Designing products, programs, and experiences in an inclusive way that aligns with a company or organization's core strategy
Mission-driven business strategy
Advising mission-driven businesses and organizations in effective evidence-based ways
Facilitative dialogue & coaching
Facilitating meaningful moments aimed to catalyze transformational professional and personal development
It is our belief that by providing catalytic support in these ways, the companies we serve will have the knowledge and know-how to implement strategies that allow them to prioritize people, planet, and profit simultaneously.
Founder
Marissa Davis is Founder & Principal and beneficial owner of Tallawah Consulting, a social impact consultancy that helps companies maximize their impact by leveraging equity, innovation, and inclusion to drive their core strategy forward. She collaborates with these companies to help them design better products, programs, experiences, and communities that more equitably address critical needs of the most marginalized within their companies. She leverages her experiences working at the intersection of various sectors, including law, public policy, tech, social entrepreneurship and business to provide creative and meaningful solutions for her clients.
Her career began in impact program design for underrepresented communities, but over the last 15 years, she has built on that foundation, incorporating evidence-based methodologies to define, measure, and weave impact and inclusion into organizational priorities beyond the social sector. She has done so with companies including Etsy, the United Nations, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, the Kauffman Foundation, Redesign Health, Codesmith, and WeWork.
Specifically, she has designed, conducted and led impact opportunity studies for companies, including facilitating one-on-one interviews, focus groups, synthesizing and delivering findings to inform corporate strategy. She has worked with organizations to evaluate the impact of their D&I initiatives on their employees, organizational behaviors on their communities of entrepreneurs and client companies. She has facilitated group dialogues on race, equity and inclusion within leadership as well as in cross-cultural global teams in the professional, academic and community spheres. She has also helped to design and facilitate flagship professional development programs to enable a stronger pipeline of leadership that better reflects the diversity of the US and beyond.
She serves as Global Advisory Council Member to global executive search firm Hedley May, and has previously served in an advisory role for business consulting firm for social entrepreneurs, Root Financial, and health innovation venture company, Redesign Health. She is also a professor in the field of social entrepreneurship and innovation, serving as an Adjunct Lecturer at City College’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership for students pursuing their Master's in Public Administration and Chairs the B Local NYC Board for B corps.
She received her Master in Public Policy(MPP) from Harvard Kennedy School of Government, graduated from Swarthmore College with honors in History and is the recipient of various awards, including Harvard's Public Service Fellowship, and the Cultural Bridge Fellowship from Harvard Kennedy School's Women and Public Policy Program.