The Founder
Connection is built, not broadcast.
It Starts With Me! is a woman-owned, Philadelphia-based organizational storytelling firm. We work with mission-driven leaders and the organizations they lead to close a gap that quietly costs them trust and growth: the space between what a leader believes, what a team repeats, and what a community actually feels.
Confusion is expensive. It costs trust, time, and opportunities that don't come back around. We believe trust is an organization's most precious asset, the engine behind its growth, its impact, its success. Your story will either be the ceiling on that, or the vehicle for it.
We run every engagement through three steps: Diagnose, Design, Deploy. We find what's actually true inside your organization. We shape it into something worth telling. We build the tools to carry it forward, so it holds as you scale and as new people join.
What makes us different: we prioritize alignment over aesthetics, depth over volume, and the story underneath over the message on top.
At It Starts With Me!, we help organizations find what's true, and build a story strong enough to carry it.
Meet the Founder
Nicole E. Kenney
Strategic Storyteller · Keynote Speaker · Founder
Goldman Sachs One Million Black Women Graduate · WBENC-Certified
Nicole is an award-winning organizational storytelling strategist, speaker, and founder with over fifteen years of experience across nonprofit, for-profit, and government sectors, including work inside some of the highest-stakes communication rooms in the country. She founded It Starts With Me! on a simple belief: a story can be a superpower to get into doors that were once locked. It can level the playing field, and it can drive the vision and the impact, bringing the right resources, people, and places together to make that impact real. That belief is for leaders brave enough to envision a world beyond the one in front of them, and it shows up in the work as something practical: finding the gap that's quietly costing an organization trust, or the opportunity that's sitting there waiting for momentum, and turning either one into the same thing: a story that carries growth instead of capping it.
Nicole's approach is grounded in a belief that story is deeply relational. Drawing on research, policy, and high-stakes communications experience, she helps organizations move beyond surface-level messaging into work that finds the real story hiding underneath the noise, and builds the systems to sustain it.
In addition to her consulting work, Nicole is the founder of Hey Auntie!, a nationally recognized intergenerational community supporting Black women across the lifespan. Her leadership has been featured in major national outlets including Fortune, Time, Fast Company, Oprah Daily, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and she has presented at leading universities and national convenings, including Stanford, the Wharton School, Tulane University, and Smith College, focused on social impact, innovation, and public trust. She was also named Invention of the Year by Technical.ly for her leadership of Hey Auntie!.
Earlier in her career, Nicole served as an Economic Program Specialist and Senior Communications Associate at the NAACP, where she supported national communications strategy and worked closely with local units nationwide.
A proud West Philadelphia native, Nicole holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor of Arts in Government and Psychology from Smith College, where she received the Barbara Jordan Public Policy Award. She is a former Innovation Fellow with CoGenerate and remains deeply rooted in her community, serving as a fitness instructor at her childhood West Philadelphia YMCA and as an active member of the Church of Christian Compassion.
Work featured in national media
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Fast Company: Hey Auntie! is a new social support network for Black women
There’s nothing artificial about the intelligence behind Hey Auntie!, the intergenerational wisdom sharing platform created by social entrepreneur Nicole Kenney.
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Chronicle of Philanthropy: How Burnout Led to a Novel Way to Connect Black Women Across Generations
Amid a loneliness epidemic that affects Black women at high rates, can a network of “aunties” help? Short answer, absolutely!
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TEDx: How Aunties Changed My Life
In this 17-minute talk, I share my personal journey and what inspired me to create Hey Auntie!, a wellness platform tapping the proud history and cultural legacy of Black aunties to support Black women's mental health and well-being.