Where’s Shani?
The following is the first installment of Totally Uncleared, which was sent out to those who’ve followed my bumbles and exploits over the years.
If you’re receiving this email, it’s because you played an essential role in what I fondly call “my past life” by subscribing to the newsletter I occasionally sent out while working as a freelance writer and journalist. I owe each of you hearty thanks for your interest, support, and encouragement over the years.
In mid-August 2021, a dear friend asked if I had any ideas to help a group of people needing to escape Kabul, Afghanistan. This turned into an ordeal filled with case spreadsheets, manifest lists, proof of life photos, and daily communication with congressional staffers and military personnel. When our group was unable to make it out of Afghanistan before American troops had fully withdrawn, it turned into weeks and months of a lot of demented yet effective strategizing and problem-solving. The two families were finally able to leave the country by the end of the year; one made it to their final destination about 18 months after that, and the other was still waiting in a third-party country for their case to complete its processing in the United States. Saying it's been a wild ride is more than an understatement.
As the situation with these cases slowed from emergency to urgency, I found myself kicking around in a realm I never really imagined for myself... that of foreign and humanitarian policy. The topics were hardly new to me, having served on advisory boards for humanitarian causes and advocated for the rights of displaced women and girls in the past. I'd always been an independent student of international affairs and a think tank fan girl, but now I was thinking it might be time to get serious about all that, so I enrolled in a Global Affairs at NYU. In the meantime, I found myself falling into related projects and research for friends and colleagues in South Carolina and Washington, and another dear friend finally said, "Shani, you've basically been consulting on various things for years now. I think it's time for you to call it what it is!"
So here I am, calling it what it is, y'all. I'm a strategy and policy consultant, and the name of my firm is SRG Strategic Consulting.
There's so much going on in the world right now that directly and indirectly impacts us all, and my newsletter, "Totally Uncleared," will help connect the dots on how and why. Sometimes, I'll send out posts as reminders that the opposite can also be true... that amid the bigness of it all, it's still possible to make an impact for good.
Sometimes, I'll share anecdotes from my journey into a life of memos, papers, funny Hill or statehouse moments, and Microsoft everything (not really, but OMG, it's a lot!) from the intersection of my massive career pivot and being a mom/wife/friend/human. I hope you'll stick with me as I continue in this new direction!
Anyway, I have some newsletters queued up for the next couple of weeks, so please stay tuned. I'm so excited to have you join me!
Best,
Shani Raine Gilchrist
