Bernice Sanders Smoot, Principal
Saint Wall Street LLC
Mission: To strengthen the programs that strengthen people.
Ms. Smoot launched Saint Wall Street in 1998 to help nonprofit health and human services providers across America understand, communicate, and leverage their market value, in order to prove worthy of greater investment. A former corporate marketing executive, she brings to the company's popular sustainability trainings a sage blend of business expertise and 20+ years' experience in every aspect of nonprofit development and management. Organizations putting into practice what they learn are generating six and seven figures in new, non-federal revenues.
From humble beginnings as a small sub-contractor providing sustainability training for grantees funded by the Administration for Children and Families' Office of Family Assistance, Saint Wall Street LLC is now a growing company of strategic partners and instructors, and an approved participant in the SBA’s Women-Owned Small Business program. Its new, comprehensive Change Leaders Academy guides organizations through the internal culture change required to thrive in the new world of charitable investing. Working with local capacity builders trained in PROI, the academy targets nonprofit board and executive leaders and turns these change agents into change leaders that adopt the value-raising strategies required to master the 3 Ms of sustainability: management, marketing, and money.
The Change Leaders Academy uniquely features Program Return on Investment™ (PROI), the company’s proprietary cost-benefits model that instantly converts program outcomes into economic impacts people can appreciate and support. Understanding the importance of leadership integrity to organization sustainability, the academy also offers the option of sharing the sound spiritual principles behind the most financially successful human-services initiative ever.
Prior to aiding nonprofit development, Ms. Smoot served the marketing and public relations interests of several businesses and DC government. As a corporate-marketing manager for National Loan Servicenter, she developed a customer communications strategy that significantly increased timely mortgage payments from low-income HUD clients, nationwide. Accomplishments as a business-marketing consultant range from researching and producing for Perot Systems an accurate market forecast on the future of home-buying in America, to helping a minority-owned communications cabling firm double revenues in 18 months and a Maryland inventor achieve record sales on QVC.
While on staff with the DC Mayor’s Office of Communications under mayors Marion Barry and Sharon Pratt Kelly, Ms. Smoot produced public-relations materials, including mayoral talking points and agency reports, that helped foster positive administration-constituent relationships in tough times.
As a volunteer, Ms. Smoot has co-chaired Parents United for DC Public Schools, the city’s largest organization championing quality public education, and has taught faith-based jobs training in DC and Maryland prisons.
