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Senior Director of Innovation, Partnership Excellence
Amanda Lawrence is Senior Director of Innovation, Partnership Excellence at StriveTogether. In this role, she helps identify partnership training and curriculum needs.
Amanda Lawrence is a change agent, known for developing creative strategies, building complex systems and executing large-scale collaborative efforts through authentic engagement and with integrity and accountability. Amanda has served in the nonprofit sector for twelve years and most recently served as the Vice President of Community Impact at Trident United Way. There, she oversaw an $8.6 million community investments portfolio and three collective impact initiatives in TUW’s impact areas of focus in education, financial stability and health.
Amanda began her career in marketing in 1995 at a niche communications and crisis relations firm owned by a South Carolina state senator. Amanda then moved into branding and promotions, rising to a national branding agency that worked exclusively for the McDonald’s Corporation.
Amanda returned to South Carolina and served as Sales Marketing Manager at a CBS television station affiliate and then transitioned to the development office of a youth-focused nonprofit that operated six diverse programs. From that role, she moved to Trident United Way, where she began serving as the Director of Financial Stability and later rose to the Vice President of Community Impact.
Amanda holds a Bachelor of Science in marketing from the University of South Carolina and a Master of Business Administration from The Citadel, the military college of South Carolina. She is an adjunct professor in Webster University’s MBA program. She is married and has two sons, a daughter and three grandsons. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with family, writing and attending Jacksonville Jaguars games.
hear from amanda
What is a place that shaped you and how does it give you purpose?
The place that has influenced me the most is my family’s homestead in the rural community of Sheldon, South Carolina. My great-grandfather was one of a group of African American men, most of whom could not read or write, who founded and funded a community school, The Sheldon Union Academy, to educate their children. Seeing his signature and the X’s representing the men, who could not write their names, on the school charter reminds me of the gift of literacy and education that families in our community received from their determination and sacrifice.
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