CREATIVE EXECUTIVE & EDUCATOR
Jessica Scruggs
I help organizations get clear on who they serve and how to serve them well.
THE APPROACH
Every organization is answering three questions, whether or not it knows it.
I came up in theatre, which is where you learn to answer all three at once. You learn to hold an audience's attention, to tell a story that lands, and to make a thousand small decisions in service of both. Then you do it again tomorrow night, because the audience is new even if the show isn't.
That training turned out to apply well beyond a stage. I have spent my career building and leading programs for children and families, managing teams and budgets, and helping leaders communicate with the people they serve. The work is the same work: know your audience, know your story, then build the steps to get there.
CONSULTING
I work with organizations in two areas. Some clients need one, some need both.
Children's & Family Programs
This is my deepest expertise. I have built, staffed, and run programs for children from infancy through high school, and I know what separates a program families come back to from one they try once.
- — Program structure and curriculum
- — Hiring, training, and retaining staff
- — Pricing, enrollment, and the business side
- — Safety, licensing, and compliance
- — Growing a program without losing what made it good
I work with independent operators, nonprofits, gyms and studios adding youth programming, and organizations rethinking programs they already run.
Leadership & Communication
Leaders are performers whether they like it or not. Every all-staff meeting, donor pitch, and difficult conversation is an audience, a story, and a service.
- — Communicating a vision people can actually follow
- — Talking to the people you serve, including how staff talk to children and families
- — Building a culture where creative work is possible
- — Professional development built for your team, not off a shelf
- — One-on-one coaching for owners, directors, and managers
How engagements work
Most start the same way. We spend a working session together, usually three hours, going deep on what you are building and where it is stuck. You leave with a written plan you can act on, not a transcript of our conversation.
From there, some clients are done. Others bring me back for a full build-out, ongoing coaching, or staff training. Every engagement is scoped and quoted individually, because a two-person studio and a forty-person nonprofit do not need the same thing.
SPEAKING
I speak to teams, boards, conferences, and staff trainings.
For availability and rates, get in touch.
ABOUT
Same craft. Different rooms.
I started in the intensity that is New York City theatre. Auditions, callbacks, rehearsals that ran late into the night, and the constant hustle of building a career in performance and entertainment arts. Like most people doing that, I took a job to pay the bills, and mine was teaching. Classes at schools, theatres, community centers, professional training programs, colleges, you name it. It was supposed to be the survival job. Instead it became the thing I could not put down.
Somewhere in there I figured out what I actually love, and it was not the applause at the end. It was the process. The rehearsal room. The training. The moment someone gets something they did not have an hour before. I love the process over the product, and I love the people in the middle of it.
Today that work looks different on paper. I lead nonprofit organizations, youth and family education programs, and community gathering spaces. I build high level budgets, write grant proposals, design professional development, and shape the programs that hundreds of families walk into every week. But it is the same craft it always was. I used to develop performing artists. Now I develop educators, leaders, and managers.
My consulting practice was never a plan. It started over coffee. People running programs would ask me how to price a session, how to structure a curriculum, what to do about a staff member who was struggling, what a family event should actually feel like. The conversations kept happening, and one day I realized I was already doing the work. So I built something real around it.
That is what I offer now. Program operations, pricing and structure, content and curriculum, youth and family programming, staff development and leadership coaching. Whether the room is a theatre, a classroom, a boardroom, or a gym full of ten year olds, the questions do not change. Who is your audience? What story are you telling? What do you want them walking out with?
I help people answer that, and then I help them build it.
I would not be the youth leader or the woman I am today without Jessica's guidance. There has not been a time of my adult life that she hasn't been guiding me and I am so grateful for her mentorship.
CREATIVE WORK
Theatre isn't my past. It's my practice.
I direct, choreograph, and perform.
For creative inquiries, use the contact form.
Excerpts from recent productions at American Stage theatre company — Into the Woods, Indecent, and Ring of Fire. Full credits and resume available upon request.
CONTACT
Tell me about your organization and what you're trying to build.
I read everything myself.
Not sure what you need? That is okay. Schedule a call and we will figure it out together.