Welcome to JVD Consulting

Dr. Jodi Vandenberg-Daves supports values-driven, courageous leadership in mission-driven organizations. As a leadership strategist, keynote speaker, coach, and consultant, she helps people build workplaces grounded in care, resilience, and shared purpose. Jodi brings a historian's long view to how organizations navigate change, drawn from decades of experience in higher education and nonprofit leadership.

About Jodi

With a doctorate in History, Jodi taught for many years at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Her specialties included women’s history and gender, race, and leadership. She is a nationally recognized author in the field of the history of motherhood, and her work has been quoted in the New York Times and other major media outlets.

Jodi's new book, Leading With Courage: A Career-Long Guide to Careering for Idealistic Women, offers a bold, practical framework for women seeking purpose-driven careers grounded in pro-social values and authenticity.

Jodi is a sought-after speaker on topics of women’s leadership, leading with courage and compassion, talent retention, workplace culture, supporting working mothers and other caregivers, and skill-building for leaders, including mentoring, negotiation, boundary setting, and mitigating perfectionism and imposter syndrome.

Jodi’s past leadership roles include, most recently, chairing the Department of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UW-La Crosse, as well as serving as Executive Director of the Greater La Crosse Area Diversity Council from 2015 to 2018, where she led the effort to create diverse and inclusive workplaces and communities. She previously directed large federal grants to improve history education, and later facilitated grantseeking and writing development for others as a faculty fellow in the university’s grants office. In 2019, Jodi created a “Mentoring Circles” program to link students to community leaders.

Jodi is an active writer. In addition to her book, Modern Motherhood: An American History (Rutgers University Press, 2014), and Leading with Courage, she has published a book on history research for grades 6-12 and a book of poems, as well as numerous research and popular articles on intersectional gender issues, and a book of poems. She is also a developmental editor and writing coach for non-fiction authors.

Her historian's training still shapes how she works today. She illuminates how present-day organizational challenges are not isolated crises, but as part of longer patterns she's spent a career studying.

See Jodi's published works.