Experienced facilitation. Strategic research. Impactful writing.
Intellerate Consulting
Laurie Silverberg, PhD, is a strategist, facilitator, communicator, and project leader with more than 15 years of experience in higher education, intergovernmental organizations, and health care. She helps organizations develop new strategies, communicate complex initiatives, and align diverse perspectives into unified consensus documents. For every client, Laurie organizes and manages complex projects to ensure that the end result is exceptional, on time, and on budget.
Craft Consensus
Intellerate Consulting works with organizations to create consensus documents: writing that reflects a group’s shared knowledge, ideas, priorities, and values. Examples include:
- Strategic plans
- Position statements and communiqués
- Program evaluations
- Institutional policies
- Reports, toolkits, and handbooks
- Mission and values statements
Critical to driving an organizational vision and strategy forward, consensus documents require three interrelated processes: facilitation, research, and writing.
Work with Intellerate
Whether creating consensus documents or providing targeted expertise to larger initiatives, Intellerate offers three principal services: facilitation, strategic research, and impactful writing.
Target Sectors
- Research and higher education institutions
- Intergovernmental organizations
- Nonprofit organizations and foundations
Thematic strengths
- Social sciences
- Academic medicine
- Gender equality
- Research ethics
- Higher education administration
- Workplace culture and climate
Location and language
Laurie is based in Madison, Wisconsin and Berlin, Germany. She is a native English speaker with full professional proficiency in German.
Experienced Facilitation
With experience working with research and higher education institutions, intergovernmental bodies, and nonprofit organizations, Laurie offers guided facilitation that is targeted to an organization’s culture and mission—rather than general and generic.
Strategic Research
Rigorous research is the backbone of any effective report, communiqué, or policy. Laurie works with organizations to identify evidence-based best practices, analyze internal program data, interview external experts, organize focus groups, and undertake systematic literature reviews.
IMPACTFUL WRITING
Intellerate offers a full range of writing and editing services to organizations in need of high-impact written communication. In particular, Laurie is adept at translating complex academic work into concise, focused, and action-oriented prose for a nonspecialist audience.
Featured Projects
Laurie excels at managing complex projects with diverse stakeholders and competing priorities, and she is adept at shifting between long-term strategic thinking and considering minute details of implementation. She has collaborated with CEOs and leaders in higher education, international policy, human rights, finance, and academic medicine, and she is skilled in the art of engaging some of the world’s busiest people to provide focused, high-impact contributions.
2023 G7 Japan: Gender Equality Advisory Council
Served as Scientific Officer and Editor-in-Chief to 2023 Report and Recommendations to G7 leaders: supervised all stages of production, contributed content, edited full text, negotiated changes with contributors, and ensured on-time delivery of report. Facilitated meetings. Led the process of writing the 2023 GEAC Executive Summary and Communique, “Gender Mainistreaming for an Inclusive, Peaceful, and Just Society.“
2022 G7 Germany: Gender Equality Advisory Council
Served as Scientific Officer and Editor-in-Chief to 2022 Report and Recommendations to G7 leaders: supervised all stages of production, contributed content, edited full text, negotiated changes with contributors, and ensured on-time delivery of report. Organized and facilitated GEAC meetings.
Policy to Practice: UN Toolkits on Gender Equality
Served as lead author for UNESCO Sport and Gender Equality Game Plan: Guidelines for gender-transformative sport policies and programmes. Aimed at policy-makers and leaders of sport organizations, the 181-page toolkit provides guidance on developing and implementing policies and programmes that advance gender equality in and through sport.
Provided developmental editing and writing support to 112-page UNESCO/UN Women Handbook, Tackling violence against women and girls in sport: a handbook for policy makers and sports practitioners. Restructured, revised, and streamlined theoretical text and concepts into brief notes, concepts, and action items. Synthesized and integrated feedback from multiple stakeholders, including UNESCO, UN Women, and expert reviewers
Research Ethics Policy in Germany
Led creation of one of Germany’s first international social science research ethics policies and commissions, now used as a model for institutions across Germany.
Strategic Planning
Developed, wrote, and implemented strategic plans for programs in academic medicine, the humanities, workplace culture and climate, and staff governance at the University of Wisconsin. Facilitated strategic planning processes for nonprofit organizations.
Program Evaluation: HR Excellence in Research
Led the research, writing, and submission of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center’s 2023 renewal application for the HR Excellence in Research Award, submitted to the European Commission.
About
Experience
Laurie’s international career extends across a wide range of institutions and domains. Since 2022, she has worked with the G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council (GEAC), facilitating the creation of their reports and recommendations. Within the United States, she has held administrative leadership positions at the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Surgery and the Center for Jewish Studies. In Germany, she partnered with German and international social scientists at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center to develop one of Germany’s first ethics review policies for social science research.
Education
Laurie holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of Pennsylvania and was a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Columbia University. She has published on music, politics, and nationalism in the German Democratic Republic and passionately believes that the humanities are indispensable to addressing the global challenges of our time. She has been an invited speaker at programs for PhD students interested in careers beyond the academy.
