OUR STORY
Designing a liberatory professional
home for women and women of color.
OUR STORY
Designing a liberatory professional
home for women and women of color.
Our Founding
Our story begins with a woman of color who believed that work should look different – for herself, for nonprofit professionals and for leaders of color across the social impact sector.
In 2011, Laura Donald started the consulting practice that would become Axis Talent Partners, blending her passion for racial justice with an emergent vision of a more free way of work that allowed for true co-creation, autonomy, flexibility and balance. With many instrumental early collaborators and partners, the vision firmly took root when Devyn Humphrey joined as Axis’ founding Chief of Staff in 2016.
Laura and Devyn laid the early groundwork in infrastructure. Expanding team members and client partners over the years has continued to bring Axis’ mission and vision to life. As Axis Talent Partners has grown and evolved, we have stayed true to our earliest convictions about increasing racial equity and realizing a new paradigm of work that better allows women and women of color to thrive.
Our Track Record
%
Women Placements Since 2021
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Women of Color Placements Since 2021
%
Leaders Placed Since 2019
%
Retention Since 2021
Year after year, we continue and deepen our commitment to supporting social impact organizations with equity-centered hiring solutions and to increasing racial equity and diversity of leadership. We have built an unparalleled track record of placing leaders of color and others from historically excluded communities. We are proud of our renowned reputation for values-driven, personalized service and exceptional processes and tools.
The Axis approach to search is different because we are different. We are not your typical executive search firm, by design. We are a team of women who all come to search and people strategy work from a variety of roles throughout the nonprofit and public sectors. Our shared passion for supporting leaders is drawn from our fierce commitment to justice and equity and our our own lived experiences as women and women of color working within social impact organizations.
Our process works. In 2021, over 90% of our placements were leaders of color and one-third of our clients engage with us year after year. Candidates consistently report feeling supported and empowered because of our unique approach.
A New Paradigm of Work
It was never just about search work for Axis. Internally, we carry the mission of creating a new paradigm of work – and of continually building a liberatory professional home for the women who ‘live’ here. This means that we work to disrupt traditionally harmful, limiting, or oppressive paradigms in work and seek new ways for individuals to be sustained and self-actualized.
We continually reimagine how we approach and structure our work, our leadership model and practice and who we work with and how. We think proactively about how we manage, support and lead. We are intentional about how we spend and leverage our resources and how we center individual and collective well-being in all that we do. This balancing and re-examining is a daily effort to realize a professional context that is unlike any we have experienced before.
The mindset and spirit we cultivate is, ‘we are enough’ with the intention of transforming the work experience from one of unsustainability and even trauma to one of healing. Our team flourishes because we can contribute and express our full selves and our unique ways of work and thought in the manner that are authentically our own.
It is this focus and example that informs and strengthens our work with candidates and clients, supporting the conditions for other liberatory work contexts to take hold.
