Alison Hight

Director

Hometown: San Diego, CA

Pronouns: she/her/hers

As a Director at Elevate, Alison serves as a strategic partner for large national nonprofits, helping them build resilient, sustainable funding pipelines. Alison works closely with executive teams and boards to translate complex organizational visions into compelling, fundable narratives and executable plans.

Alison brings a uniquely diverse background to the Elevate team, drawing on years of experience across federal contracting, international investment, and institutional philanthropy. Before joining Elevate, she managed high-stakes capture strategies for federal contracts and advised on capital deployment across the MENA and Central Asia regions, including supporting a rural girls’ school in Iran. Today, Alison uses that cross-sector pattern recognition to help Elevate’s clients navigate competitive funding landscapes and secure the resources they need to scale their impact.

Alison holds bachelor’s degrees in Economics from the University of Maryland and Visual Communications from SUNY Buffalo, and completed the Human Rights Advocacy & Campaign Fellowship at Columbia University.

Outside of work, you can find her with a dirty chai, a good book, and an ambitious kitchen experiment involving some combination of Middle Eastern, North African, and Mexican spices. She is learning to surf, unreasonably fond of both libraries and IKEA, and has been a devoted em dash user long before ChatGPT made it everyone’s favorite punctuation mark.

What is your favorite quotation?

Among my favorites, from Mark Twain, “Words are only painted fire, a look is the fire itself.” I sometimes think of my words as painted fire as a draft proposals and outreach to supporters.

Who would play you in a movie of your life?

I present for immediate consideration a selection of important, yet largely un-discovered, talent: my cat, Sunji; the trench coat with a child and a broom from Bojack; or, as co-stars, my fern and his brother, La Fern and Surely.