Our story

Our founder opened Radiate Social Impact in April 2024 to aid organizations and small businesses in strategic planning, creating healthy workplace cultures, supporting effective board and executive leadership, and designing robust leadership programs. After nine years of guiding social impact organizations through organizational development amid periods of significant change and feeling the brunt of several toxic workplaces and unhealthy leaders, Jena Kitchen decided to make a change.

Now, she and the team at Radiate partner with purpose-driven leaders to ensure their organizations are buffered from the brunt of cyclical turnover, poor performance, and depleted morale so prevalent with widespread burnout.

By encoding the values of a healthy organizational culture into strategic goals and leadership programming, Radiate equips social impact organizations and their leaders to meet their missions while prioritizing their most important asset - their people. In this way, our communities are better supported by the positive, sustainable impact of healthy organizations.

We believe organizations thrive when their people do.

Our team

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Jena Kitchen, Founder

Jena Kitchen partners with social impact organizations and their leaders through strategic change and trauma-responsive program design to promote staff wellbeing and systems change. She focuses on ensuring internal systems, processes, and practices are human-centered and align with mission and values which then enables supported staff to better serve their communities. During 2021-2024, she helped launch the program strategy and organizational systems for a peacebuilding organization, including managing a team of trauma healing leaders doing community-based reconciliation in the Horn of Africa.

She has coordinated a Participatory Action Research project with reconciliation practitioners and designed a trauma-informed leadership project for leaders in Burma. She has worked with and independently consulted within philanthropic, public health, nonprofit, and higher education organizations. Jena is a person with disabilities and has a graduate degree from George Mason University in conflict analysis and resolution focused on trauma-responsive leadership; an executive leadership certificate from Cornell University; and bachelor’s degrees in sociocultural anthropology and Latin American studies from the College of William & Mary.

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Leo Hylton, Restorative Justice Consultant

Leo Hylton helps organizational leaders build deeper trust, accountability, and community within their teams and trains them to design and implement conflict transformation pathways from a restorative justice ethos. He is a PhD student at the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, leading healing-centered research at the Mary Hoch Center for Reconciliation. Leo is currently incarcerated in Maine State Prison. His education and work are based in trauma-informed, healing-centered Restorative Justice (RJ) practices, with a vision toward an abolitionist future.

He has worked with Think Peace as a Restorative Justice Consultant in support of transitional justice work, toward truth telling, racial healing, and reconciliation and was a Visiting Instructor at Colby College, co-teaching “Carcerality and Abolition.” He was a lead facilitator of Maine State Prison’s Restorative Practices Steering Committee, served on Colby College’s Restorative Practices Team, and provides consultation to RJ practitioners in the US and abroad. Leo is a core organizer of the Carter School Working Group on Forgiveness and Reconciliation, creating spaces of co-learning, growth, and trauma healing in the context of forgiveness and reconciliation. He is also a columnist for The Bollard (formerly Mainer), where he writes a monthly column called Shining Light on Humanity.

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Kayla Ortiz, Strategy Consultant

Kayla Ortiz is a dynamic leader with a diverse background spanning startup consulting, HR, financial modeling, bookkeeping and account management. Over the past several years, she has honed her expertise at a fast-growing SaaS (software as a service) company, where she has become a champion for helping businesses thrive. Kayla is passionate about empowering others to grow their ventures by making data-driven decisions and uncovering actionable insights.

With a knack for simplifying complex data and a deep appreciation for working with mission-driven individuals, Kayla thrives on building meaningful connections with people who are passionate about creating positive change. In the spirit of learning and growth, she is currently completing a Master's in Social Innovation for Sustainable Development with the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization in Turin, Italy.

When she’s not diving into spreadsheets or strategy sessions, Kayla enjoys organizing volunteers, reading, and connecting with communities to foster innovation in Richmond, VA.

Our partners

We truly believe that collaboration with trusted partners who are aligned in purpose and values yields to an even better product or service than we could have designed on our own. Whenever we can, we seek to work cohesively with these talented partners.

Led by V Fixmer-Oraiz, we partner with Astig Planning on certain strategic planning and organizational policy projects. Their unique approach, Strategic Planning+, complements our emphasis that programs and projects ought to be participatory, generative, and action-oriented.