Our Team
Some people see problems.
Tanya Johnson sees the system underneath them.
For more than two decades, she has worked inside organizations that were doing everything right, caring deeply, working tirelessly, and still not producing the impact they were capable of. That pattern is what Impact Strategy Group was founded to address.
Tanya Johnson · Founder & CEOWhere it started
Same children. Different systems.
Our founder was bused into a magnet school while her neighbors attended dramatically different local schools. Same children. Different systems. Different outcomes. That experience raised a question: what does it take to build conditions where anyone can thrive, not just a fortunate few? It has shaped every chapter of her career since.
Proof of concept
Rebuild the foundation first.
Our founder started her career as a teacher in Compton, then taught fifth-grade math in Newark, New Jersey, where her students arrived with significant foundational gaps. She rebuilt the foundation first, before moving to grade-level content.
Proficiency on arrival
Proficiency by year endNewark, NJ (~60-point gain in one school year)
The pattern, repeated at scale.
That result wasn't a one-time win. As a staff developer in Washington Heights, she installed the same structures across an entire mathematics department, grades five through twelve — and scores rose 20% under her leadership. She took that same discipline to Brooklyn as Director of Mathematics across a network of schools, proving the model held at network scale, not just within a single building. She went on to co-facilitate a citywide instructional initiative alongside a nationally recognized architect of curriculum design theory, work that drew as much on her academic training in adult learning theory as on what she'd already proven in classrooms and school systems. As Vice President of Program Design and Staff Development for a nonprofit with a $16M annual operating budget, she built and led an entire department translating research into practical tools for educators and leaders. It was her first experience designing organizational infrastructure, not just instructional strategy.
That same pattern — talented people, important missions, underbuilt conditions — was showing up everywhere she looked, across every sector. That's what led Tanya Johnson to found Impact Strategy Group.
Years in practice
Sectors served through ISG
Years building ISG
Track record
Two decades of practice. Six years of building ISG. The same pattern, wherever the work goes.
Public Safety
Designed and tested a capacity-building model for multidisciplinary response teams, and partnered with a national award-winning social innovation initiative to take its idea from concept to a fully resourced, staffed program.
Healthcare
Partnered with a healthcare-focused organization to translate its continuous improvement practices for an education audience, building a foundation-funded digital learning library still in active use today.
Philanthropy
Guided every organization in a foundation's grantee portfolio through developing its own shared program design framework, turning individual organizational challenges into lasting clarity — and positioning several for expanded funding.
Education & Family Advocacy
Helped a family-serving nonprofit expand from local community support to statewide civic engagement around educational equity.
ISG is a WBENC-Certified WBE and NMSDC-Certified MBE.
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