Stephanie Meeks
stephanie@ogsp.org
(703) 980-1905
Stephanie Meeks has benefited from the One Page Strategic Plan® tool (aka OGSP®) since 1999, having the distinction of being the first client to do so and a continuous practitioner ever since. She is joining the One Page Solutions (OPS) team in April of 2023.
Prior to joining OPS, Stephanie served as CEO and in other executive positions with four national and international organizations whose programs spanned the Americas, Africa, and Asia in the fields of conservation, environmental education, and historic preservation. She has used the One Page Solutions toolbox to effect transformative change, clarity of purpose, financial sustainability, and operational effectiveness at organizations of different size and scale and across geographies and program areas.
Most recently Stephanie served as the CEO of the Student Conservation Association (SCA), America’s first, largest and leading youth conservation corps. While there she led her team using the OGSP framework to promote environmental education and support thousands of students in protecting and restoring national parks and forest, marine sanctuaries, cultural landmarks, and community green spaces from Anchorage to Atlanta.
From 2010-2018, she served as the CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the nation’s leading non-profit organization dedicated to protecting cultural resources in the United States and U.S. Territories. There she developed an ambitious strategic plan to create greater organizational cohesion and alignment, strengthen financial sustainability and build a vibrant, diverse, and growing constituency. While at the Trust she published with co-author Kevin C. Murphy The Past and Future City: How Historic Preservation is Reviving America’s Communities (Island Press, 2016.)
At Counterpart International, she led employees in twenty-five countries and expanded programming in civil society development, food security and climate adaptation working extensively with USAID, the US Department of Defense, and the Department of State.
As interim CEO and COO of The Nature Conservancy, she led the world’s largest non-profit conservation organization overseeing a dynamic program aimed at instituting system-level change and on-the-ground results in 50 state chapters and (then) 35 country programs. During her tenure, she used the OGSP planning tool to design scalable conservation strategies toward the goal of conserving 10% of the Earth’s land and waters, advance leadership on climate change, launch the largest conservation capital campaign of its time, and enter strategic partnerships and geographies. She represented the Conservancy with major donors, heads of state, World Bank, US Treasury, Members of Congress, and the media.
Over the past decade Stephanie has delivered more than 250 speeches and published more than one hundred columns, op-eds and articles on the topics of climate change, natural and cultural resource conservation, serving traditionally under-invested communities, and expanding the narrative of American history, among others.
She has a demonstrated track-record of creating bridges to and engagement with diverse constituencies. With her team at the National Trust, she conceived and launched the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, and while at SCA, Urban Green, an initiative to engage youth who do not traditionally have access to conservation programs. She has led cultural transformation toward the adoption of the values of accessibility, diversity, equity, justice and inclusion.
Stephanie is active in her community serving as the Vice-Chairman of the Board, Chair of the Program & Impact Committee, and Chair of the CEO Evaluation Committee of the Chesapeake Conservancy; Trustee Emeritus of The Montpelier Foundation; Chair-Emeritus of the Potomac Conservancy; and former Director of Rare. She is a certified Master Gardener and lives in a historic house in Leesburg, VA with her husband Rob Meeks, a senior commercial real estate executive. She has two sons who have graduated from RIT and the University of Tennessee, and one who attends McGill University in Montreal.
Stephanie earned her B.A. from the University of Colorado and her MBA from the George Washington University.
Click here to download a PDF of Stephanie Meeks' Professional Biography.