Allison Marker
Senior Strategist
As a Senior Strategist at Advocacy & Communication Solutions, LLC (ACS), Allison leads strategy and capacity building, communication, and engagement efforts for ACS clients.
Allison is a seasoned professional who has spent more than a decade successfully building and promoting causes that create meaningful change at local, statewide, and national levels. She has deep experience in capacity building, community engagement, state and local advocacy, and strategic planning. Allison has been an impactful leader in the nonprofit, social enterprise and government sectors. She is passionate about purpose-driven work.
Allison came to ACS from YWCA Northeast Kansas, where she spent more than seven years as the director of community engagement in charge of fundraising, marketing and communications, advocacy, event planning and donor cultivation. She increased total public support for the organization by nearly 90% over five years and secured its first six-figure donation by building the YWCA’s reputation in the community, rebuilding community trust and improving the quality and availability of its services.
Allison’s grassroots organizing and leadership for YWCA Northeast Kansas was instrumental in rallying voter opposition to successfully reject a proposed state constitutional amendment that would have eliminated the right to an abortion in the state. She credits the effort’s success to building relationships with values-aligned organizations across Kansas and utilizing social media to educate the public about the issue. The YWCA focused its efforts on ensuring individuals knew where to find resources and had effective talking points to discuss the issue with their neighbors. Kansas was the first state to defeat such a constitutional amendment, setting off a wave of similar efforts across the country. In recognition of Allison and her team’s efforts, YWCA Northeast Kansas received the Excellence in Advocacy Award from YWCA USA for achievement.
While at YWCA Northeast Kansas, Allison also led the organization’s antiracist programming, becoming one of the first local YWCAs in the country to adopt the Cleveland Racial Justice Challenge in 2021 and encouraging the city of Topeka and Shawnee County to declare racism as a public health crisis. Allison also served on the national YWCA’s Marketing and Communications Workgroup.
Prior to her role at YWCA Northeast Kansas, Allison honed her community engagement skills as director of Marketing at the Lawrence (Kansas) Community Shelter. She’s also worked for B the Change Media and the Kansas House Democratic Caucus, where she led communication, policy and development initiatives.
In addition to her professional experience, Allison is a tireless advocate. She serves as a member of the Greater Topeka Partnership Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Advisory Board and is an active Rotarian. She served on the Kansas Governor’s Axe the Tax Taskforce to eliminate sales tax on period products and diapers.
Before living in Kansas, Allison called France home for more than a decade.
Allison earned a degree in History and Public Administration from the Université Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, France. She resides in Lawrence, Kansas, with her fiancé Matt and their cat Maurice.
ACS is one of the only female- and minority-owned consulting firms in Ohio. The women-led, women-driven firm has a national reputation for its communication and strategy development expertise and deep understanding of policy and advocacy, especially for organizations in the early childhood and K-12 education sectors, including The Cleveland Foundation, YWCA USA, Ohio Means Jobs Cleveland-Cuyahoga County, Louisiana Policy Institute for Children, Summit Education Initiative, and the Arizona Department of Economic Security Division of Child Care, to name a few. Collectively, the firm has more than 75 years of experience developing and implementing strategies that help clients achieve measurable results.