Zainab Chaudary, Executive Vice President, is New Heights’ resident messaging nerd. Zainab has spent the last decade crafting communications strategies for mission-driven, social impact organizations. Her work has shifted public narratives and perceptions, achieved policy wins, built momentum around high-profile litigation fights, promoted political thought leadership, and helped foundations innovate to improve how philanthropy serves the world. She uses her knowledge of data, cognitive linguistics, and the science behind how people think to build big-picture strategies and execute tactics that persuade people to act.
Zainab comes to New Heights from the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice, where she served as the Communications Director. She founded her own consulting firm, Big Canvas PR, to develop strong communications infrastructure for non-profit organizations, and served as Managing Director at Megaphone Strategies. From 2015-2018, she served as Senior Media Associate at ReThink Media, where she worked on rapid response, crisis communications, messaging, spokesperson development, and tactics, working with coalitions at the intersection of national security and civil liberties. From ending torture at Guantanamo Bay to sunsetting the Patriot Act’s government surveillance to striking back against the first Muslim Ban, Zainab and her team were ready to respond every time a national security crisis hit.
Alongside her strategic thinking, Zainab is well-versed in tactics and execution. She has placed stories and opinion pieces in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, and USA Today (among others), facilitated reporter relationships at outlets ranging from Buzzfeed News to CNN to the Wall Street Journal, negotiated regular contributorships at major news outlets to elevate thought leadership, and pitched and prepared clients for television appearances on ABC, MSNBC, and CNN. An expert trainer, Zainab has coached and trained spokespeople around the country for organizations like MoveOn, CREDO, the ACLU, Indivisible, and numerous others.
A graduate of Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in Germany, Zainab is a 2022 fellow of Anat Shenker-Osorio’s Global Messaging Programme. She lives just outside of Washington DC with her husband and two sons.
