Beverly Tillery has over 30 years of experience leading and helping mission-driven organizations and leaders accomplish goals while aligning with their values.

Beverly is a nonprofit consultant who is a seasoned executive, and expert strategist, thought leader, organizer, and facilitator. Her career has spanned numerous movements and issue areas including racial and economic justice, LGBTQ+ liberation, gender justice, anti-violence, human rights, and labor. She helps organizations innovate, adapt and thrive during turbulent times and circumstances.

Her longevity in the nonprofit sector and at organizations provides a unique lens of continuity. This has given Beverly the experience and insight to navigate challenges by building opportunities that translate into short and long-term solutions. She’s improved program impact and effectiveness utilizing organizing, advocacy, popular education, research, and coalition building strategies.

A key component of her success has been building meaningful relationships. She has extensive experience bringing together and inspiring diverse teams, fostering a culture of excellence, communication and care with anti-oppression, trauma-informed and intersectional practices at the center of her approach. Beverly has led staff and boards through numerous skill building, planning, and educational sessions, as well as through intensive strategic planning and executive search processes.

She has secured gifts from individual donors, private and public foundations, and funders small and large, including securing a $1.75 million gift from Jack Dorsey’s Start Small initiative. She has procured resources from and built relationships with city, state and federal agencies and overseen the management of government contracts.

Beverly served for over eight years as the Executive Director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project (AVP), the largest organization in the U.S. dedicated to addressing and ending violence in the LGBTQ+ and HIV-affected communities. Beverly led AVP during some of the most difficult times in recent history for the LGBTQ+ community including the Pulse (Orlando, FL) and Club Q (Colorado Springs, CO) nightclub shootings, the rise in anti-LGBTQ hate and anti-LGBTQ legislative attacks, and the COVID epidemic. She helped the organization implement innovative programs in response to immense needs of the community. In addition, she expanded the organization’s national visibility and impact and increased the budget from $3.7M – $5M. She also improved grant management and fiscal operations resulting in reduced cash flow challenges and the creation of the organization’s first-ever cash reserve of over $500K.

Beverly served for eleven years at Lambda Legal, a national LGBTQ+ impact litigation organization. As the organization’s Deputy Director of Education and Public Affairs, she led national educational and advocacy campaigns and community-based research projects to change policies as well as hearts and minds. In this role, she spearheaded a campaign to highlight the realities of health care discrimination which engaged tens of thousands in support of a lesbian who was blocked from visiting her partner as she lay on her death bed in a Florida hospital. As a result, President Obama issued an Executive Order banning discrimination against same-sex partners in all federally funded health care settings, and the local community negotiated policy changes at the Florida hospital.

Beverly has led several nonprofit boards. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Wesleyan University where she co-teaches “Social Justice Activism and Theories of Change”. She is also a member of the New York City Commission for Gender Equity.

Beverly received the National Black Justice Coalition Legendary Wisdom Award (2023), was included in the City and State New York Pride Power List in 2021, 2022, 2023, served on the New York Governor’s Domestic Terrorism Task Force (2021 -2023), and was named Go Magazine’s 2019 New Yorker of the Year. She lives with her partner and her 19-year-old daughter in Harlem NYC.

LinkedIn: Beverly Tillery