Emily Ardell
Emily Ardell is Co-Founder and Principal of Four Corners Global Consulting Group. Her areas of expertise include program design/measurement, organizational leadership & culture, strategic visioning, and facilitation.
Emily is a skilled training and leadership specialist with 20 years of international NGO and domestic non-profit experience. Since co-founding Four Corners, she has provided specialized consulting services to overseas and US-based non-profits, philanthropies, and academic organizations. Emily regularly leads evaluations of time-bound, grant-funded programs, and facilitates (in-person and virtual) workshops and trainings on program design, monitoring & evaluation, strategic planning, and team strengthening. For eight years she served as a member of Heartland Alliance International’s (HAI’s) Senior Leadership Team, developing and managing HAI’s first-ever department dedicated to ensuring the quality of mental health, access to justice, gender/LGBT rights, and HIV/AIDS programming across Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. In her tenure with HAI, Emily also managed a complex, $10m program portfolio across three continents, and was instrumental in the creation, launch, and successful execution of HAI’s five-year strategic plan.
Prior to joining HAI, Emily worked for six years with Catholic Relief Services (CRS), including assignments in Bosnia, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Bolivia, Peru, and the US. During this period she designed programs, drafted grant proposals, managed over $12M in programming, organized capacity building workshops, spearheaded advocacy campaigns, and provided technical oversight for projects funded by USAID, the US State Department, and private donors. Prior to joining CRS, Emily held several positions with leading human rights, international development, and environmental protection organizations based in Chicago, Washington, DC, and Central America.
Emily is fluent in Spanish and English, and holds a B.A. in International Relations and Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.A. in International Development from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. When she’s not hard at work with the Four Corners team, you can usually find her playing hide & seek, listening to music, experimenting in the kitchen, and spending time with her amazing friends and family.