Lived experience is not a footnote. It’s a framework!
- Vanessa Joy Walker, MPH (UNC Chapel Hill)
I work with healthcare, life sciences, and mission-driven organizations to integrate lived experience into strategy, education, and partnerships — so it actually drives decisions, not just storytelling.
Surviving something should change how systems are built — not just how stories are told.
Trusted by Leaders in Healthcare, Advocacy, and Organizational Strategy
I work with organizations in three primary ways:
Strategy & Partnerships
I work alongside leadership teams to shape direction, structure initiatives, build strong partnerships, and support decision-making. This includes coalition development, advocacy strategy, and helping organizations navigate complex relationships across sectors.
Speaking & Communication
I speak, facilitate, and help shape how organizations communicate and make decisions — across teams and audiences navigating complexity, change, and growth. I also prepare leaders, advocates, and lived experience experts to show up with clarity and credibility.
Training & Coaching
I recruit, train, and support lived-experience experts, advocates, and leaders — helping them use their voices with clarity, credibility, and impact. I offer select one-on-one coaching for women navigating health crises, leadership, or advocacy-driven work. This is limited and by inquiry.
Resiliency is Vanessa’s Superpower!
As a speaker, adversity coach, patient advocate, and found of the non-profit Living After Crisis Inc., Vanessa has spoken frequently in front of crowds of 3K+, facilitated difficult conversations for Fortune 500 companies, and supported hundreds of individuals to overcome personal health, and career challenges.
In my book, Make Room for Joy, I use my story of cancer, betrayal, abandonment, and grief as a tool to encourage readers to choose hope, take a leap of faith, and make room for joy no matter what's going on in life. Each chapter ends with a Make it Personal section, which helps readers embrace the connection between suffering and joy and experience a new kind of joy that is impossible to contain and easy to share.
