“I built my career in branding for movements before I realized we were building a brand that was already moving me and thousands of other people and companies. Sometimes, the most impactful work is right under your nose.”

When Chelsea Leader Gold was a Journalism student at the University of Florida, her freshman professor stated a claim that made her classmates shudder, but that inspired her…big time. He said, “10% will work in journalism as we know it. The rest of you: your jobs don’t exist yet.”

After having returned from half a year circumnavigating the globe on Semester at Sea and reporting her way (via journals shared and an international broadcast on Sirius radio), she landed in a career that would prove her professor right. Determined to paint color in the burgeoning white space of social entrepreneurship, Chelsea became an early employee of TOMS (Shoes, at the time), steering the founding social media team into its first 5 million fans, friends and followers through the power of organic connection and creative storytelling.

She hopped Coasts to build on her career in digital storytelling for some kick-ass agencies, companies and movements, like 360i, Google, NBC and The Nature Conservancy, establishing a specialty in animating brand identities for other companies while making a side-hustle of inventing one — Campowerment — with her family. Now, she’s living her dream of growing a brand into an impactful business and appreciates  the opportunity to evolve it with her team.

In 2014, Chelsea went full-time with Campowerment — an expert-led community, powered by play — to harness the media attention it had been garnering at launch. Back then, Campowerment focused on producing women’s retreats at upscale kids’ summer camps; now, it’s camp retreats, “Fancy Camps,” culture-affirming programs for companies and orgs, and since 2020, a digital community for women to learn, connect and grow, together!

Nurturing its growth alongside incredible folks who nurture hers has been one of the greatest gifts of Chelsea’s lifetime. 

With more than a decade of experience brand-building through the lens of human connection and collective impact, in 2019, Chelsea co-founded a second brand: also to inspire bigger aliveness, this time in death wellness: Grand Exit, conversation-starting conversations on living, dying and living on. It lives now as a podcast; check it out here!

In each of her roles, Chelsea is reminded often that whatever we think we know lies ahead is a clever construct of the human imagination. In case you need to hear it: your path is for your paving.