Celeste Diaz Ferraro
My Story
I am the future.
I am a strategist & community leader.
I am a founder.
I co-founded a social enterprise consulting firm to support nascent mission-driven firms with tools and strategies for early-stage growth. My clients ranged from serial founders in local foods/packaged goods to not-for-profit solar advocates to small sustainable fashion firms focused on building community rather than scale. I am intimately familiar with the challenges startups and scale-ups face, the difficult choices founders grapple with, the joy of creating something of value, and the not-so-occasional anxiously sleepless night.
I am a knowledge builder & educator.
In these varied roles, I have been directly involved in issues related to corporate-level and business-level strategy, stakeholder relations, emerging markets, sustainability, micro-enterprise operations, and social innovation. Through these professional experiences I became interested in social movements, values, power, change, conflict, and processes of institutionalization and paradigm change. I bring multi-faceted management perspectives and professional networks into the classroom, where students benefit from my deep engagement and ability to connect current research and theory with real-world application. Equally important, my professional experience drives my interest in research that supports the field of management in addressing "grand challenges" while generating both theoretical and practical impact.