Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP)

June 14, 2010

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to give a strong recommendation of Ilyse Kazar (lead consultant at Adept Digital Evolution), based on my experiences with her as a consultant to my organization. In hiring her, we got many times more than what we bargained for, and Ilyse helped us in ways we had not even been aware we needed.

We brought Ilyse Kazar on-board as a consultant to CHAMP in the Fall of 2009, to serve in the role of "Administrative Manager" for a six month contract term while our organization was undergoing restructuring and transitions in leadership.

We were happy to discover we had found someone with a broad scope of experience and many high-level abilities. Ilyse is a strategist, team-player, technical pro, and a communicator. As an individual (who worked with little supervision, from a home office), she proved to be extremely hard-working and meticulously honest, and it was a relief to realize early on there would be no need to monitor her hours nor to worry about getting value for our money.

Ilyse is endowed with the ability to think creatively and out-of-the-box, and at the same time never takes a conservative and careful eye off of impact assessment for any idea being floated. She knows what questions to ask and has experience in many realms that she brings to bear on formulating her suggestions, and in planning and executing her work.

While our original concept of Ilyse's role was to be largely one of financial and administrative management, she ended up wearing many hats for us and truly helping to keep CHAMP alive and vital during our transitional period. She handled everything from making sure our bills got paid, to web site updates (both content and technical), to integrations of our e-blasts, Web site and Facebook page, to discussion-list moderation, donations tracking, and supporter communications.

She has a real roll-up-your-sleeves attitude when faced with any challenge. For example, she was tasked with producing a new publication being implemented by CHAMP and several key partners that needed to incorporate decentralized public comment. Ilyse, without blinking an eye, simply assumed the project management role, established workflows and timelines, made necessary modifications to our web site, and moved the entire project to conclusion successfully.

Ilyse also took the initiative to research, evaluate, demonstrate and, upon our approval, implement some very affordable collaborative online tools that she felt are vital to a physically dispersed staff such as ours. It also turned out that we had in Ilyse a true database professional who, on first exposure to our Salsa (Democracy In Action) database, not only quickly absorbed how to use the tool but from the get-go was able to make improvements to our use of it and to offer great recommendations for further progress in the realms of database management and social media.

One point of consciousness that Ilyse has bestowed on us here at CHAMP is the importance of organizational continuity. She put in tremendous effort, on her own initiative, to organize a wide range of CHAMP's operational and technical information into a series of online manuals. She worked out and implemented sensible access-control protocols, and spent time looking through legacy materials to identify and preserve useful information generated by former employees. She was careful to document in friendly format any systems she revised or put into place. Everything she touched during her time here she has passed back to us in an improved state and readied for someone else to keep the ball rolling.

Finally, Ilyse is politically aware and is deeply connected to issues of social justice. Her interest in our work at CHAMP made her that much more valuable, in that her recommendations and actions were always based on a good understanding of our organization's history, our constituency, our programs, and the mission we serve. In short, Ilyse puts her heart, not just her mind, into the work she does. We highly recommend the services of her company to any organization.

Sincerely,

Julie Davids

Co-Director