Helly Lee is a leadership coach, organizational consultant, and a strategist with over 20 years of experience working with mission-driven organizations toward more equitable policies and practices. She brings a deep commitment to creating spaces and opportunities for community-driven learning and impact.

Helly supports leaders, teams, and organizations to achieve big dreams and goals through practices that center equity and community impact. She is informed by a career that spans national and local social change efforts across public and private institutions. As a director on the consulting team at Frontline Solutions, a Black-led and owned consulting firm that helps organizations plan, innovate, learn, and transform, she works with non-profit and philanthropic organizations to strategize, implement, and evaluate the impact of their work. Prior to consulting, she has done stints in state government at the Minnesota Department of Human Services as their director of community engagement, and was appointed by President Obama as an advisor to the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in 2016. Helly’s first dive deep into social and systems change was as a staff assistant on Capitol Hill, and then with national advocacy organizations, Hmong National Development (HND), and the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), where she led a cross-country policy team for six years as their director of policy. Helly was also a senior policy analyst for the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), where she focused on food assistance, low-income tax credits, and workforce development policies, and honed in on how these policies specifically impact immigrant communities.

As a Hmong woman from a refugee family and community, she has spent her life navigating systems for families, creating opportunities for access, and working toward more equitable policies, practices, and organizations. Away from client engagements, and her computer screen, Helly’s toughest roles are being a mother to two young Hmong boys who are eager to hold her accountable to living out their ancestors’ wildest dreams with deep joy, and being the eldest daughter of an aging mother who lives down the street from her (lots to unpack there!).