About Us
The Read Group is a public affairs and management consulting firm that serves governments, foundations, non-profits, and higher education organizations. We support leaders facing change at important moments for their organizations – helping our clients transform to achieve and sustain new levels of effectiveness for their organizations and communicate their successes. Recent projects have included serving clients in the fields of public health, environmental regulation, higher education, workforce development, and emergency and disaster response services.
Our work spans strategic communications and government relations, organizational effectiveness and design, transformational change management, and strategic planning and performance improvement. We also partner with other top consulting firms to help them complete large-scale projects for organizations nationwide.
Jennifer Read, Founder and Principal
Jennifer's passion is helping leaders solve the tough problems facing their organization. She helps her clients to pinpoint their biggest organizational challenges and works collaboratively with their teams to develop new and better ways of doing things.
Jennifer knows that no single approach is right for every organization. She works one-on-one with her clients to figure out what is working well and what needs adjustment based on their unique needs. Additionally, she realizes that improving performance isn’t enough. Effective leaders must also be able to track their progress and have a plan to clearly communicate their successes to others.
Prior to founding the Read Group, Jennifer served for many years as deputy director of a large state public health and environmental regulatory agency. In this role, she oversaw communications, legislative affairs, FOI, policy, strategic planning, risk management, quality improvement, and employee engagement for an organization with 4,500 staff operating across more than 100 service locations.
Over her decade working for the state agency, she held several progressive leadership roles including, serving as the organization’s chief communications officer, state outreach director, program coordinator for a CDC-funded division, and health systems developer. Prior to becoming a senior government administrator, Jennifer was an executive for a disability non-profit, led the grants office for a public university, and ran a public affairs consulting firm.
Her educational background includes a master’s in public administration from the College of Charleston and a B.A. in international studies from the University of South Carolina.