Cheryl Buford, Principal and Founder of Signature Impact Consulting, has had a life-long passion for helping individuals, organizations and institutions change.

Early on, she realized that helping others understand their driving purpose and highest value-add is critical to individual and team success. She uses cutting-edge tools like MCODE in coaching clients, to help individuals identify their purpose and together build more effective, joy-filled teams.

In addition, Cheryl helps nonprofit organizations develop and evaluate programs, as well as offering guidance on developing the institutional infrastructure that will give life to their vision, mission and values. She has experience serving a variety of innovative organizations – from those targeting at-risk youth locally to a national initiative at United Way of America, redefining its public-private partnerships.  Her efforts have decisively engaged civic leaders and community stakeholders to tell a compelling story of impact.

Relatedly, Cheryl also recognized years ago that education and education reform impacts human flourishing for good or ill For more than 30 years she has been passionately advocating that ALL students deserve educational excellence. Cheryl started her career as a teacher and spent ten years in the classroom. She has also worked on education policy at the federal, state, and local levels. As a result, she has experience addressing today’s most pressing issues – advanced academics, closing the minority achievement gap, workforce development, and student well-being.

She holds a MPA from the University of Texas’ LBJ School of Public Affairs, and an MS and BS from Kansas State University.