I have always been a builder.
Of organizations.
Of frameworks.
Of the kind of spacious, honest conversations that allow people to actually see themselves.
Serena M. Hayes
Executive Coach • Organizational Development Consultant • Washington, D.C.
Serena M. Hayes brings fifteen years of work inside complex systems, as an attorney, ombudsman, mediator, and organizational builder, to a single, focused question: What does it actually take to move people and institutions forward?
She has spent her career at the nexus of direct service, policy, and institutional governance — on the ground with the people most affected, in the rooms where policy is made, and inside the regulatory and funding structures that shape how organizations actually function. She understands how systems are designed, but why well-intentioned policies often fail the people they were built to serve, and what it takes to bridge that distance.
She brings that accumulated understanding to two kinds of work: (1) the organizational, where she helps mission-driven institutions build the internal capacity their visions have always required, and (2) the individual, where she works with leaders ready to close the distance between who they are and how they lead.
Her clients describe her as thorough, probing, and uncommonly present, someone who grasps the vision quickly, honors the complexity fully, and delivers excellence.
FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO GO DEEPER
The longer story.
Before I was any of those things professionally, I was a child learning how to read a room. Growing up in a home shaped by instability, I became fluent in the language of energy—anticipating needs, defusing tension, holding space for people who didn’t always know how to hold it for themselves or for me. I didn’t know it then, but I was practicing the work I would one day build a career around.
THE PATH
A career built on leaps, not ladders.
My path has not been linear. It has been a series of deliberate departures, moments when I chose meaning over safety, followed my intuition, and relied on faith when the path was unclear.
I earned my Juris Doctor from Howard University School of Law and also had my first child in the final two weeks of my final semester. I passed the bar on my first attempt, with an infant. I know how to hold complexity.
The traditional practice of law wasn’t where my gifts came alive. My first real leap was to walk away from a law firm and volunteer as a mediator at a community center in Baltimore. No paycheck. No clear destination. Just the quiet, insistent knowledge that this was closer to the work I was meant to do.
That instinct was right. In that role, I saw something in the data. Families of students with disabilities weren't always calling about special education concerns. Instead, they were calling about bullying, about discipline, about feeling invisible in systems that were never designed with them in mind. But underneath many stories was a child with a disability navigating multiple overlapping crises at once, and a family that often was not being heard by the institutions. That is what unaddressed intersectionality looks like in practice. It is what happens when we build systems without centering the experiences of those least resourced to navigate them.
So I built something. I envisioned, advocated for, and constructed the DC Special Education Hub from the ground up—securing $1.5 million to create an office that has since helped thousands of families find their footing. That is the kind of work that makes me feel most alive: seeing what’s missing, building what’s needed, and watching people find their way through.
THE INTERIOR
I know what it costs to lead without coming home to yourself.
I have lived the weight I now help others set down.
I have poured myself into missions that mattered while quietly losing the thread back to my own vision. I have chased opportunities that weren’t aligned with who I actually am and sat with the heartbreak of that recognition before I could change it. I have learned, sometimes slowly and sometimes all at once, that giving my power away in moments of self-doubt is a pattern I am responsible for breaking.
These experiences are not footnotes to my professional story. They are the center of it. They are why I can sit across from a leader who is exhausted and quietly unraveling without flinching. I’ve been there. I know the terrain.
My healing has been rooted in prayer, in deep reflection, and in the willingness to let what doesn’t fit fall away without forcing it back into shape. That spiritual grounding, expansive, interconnected, not confined to a single tradition, is woven into everything I do. It is not separate from the strategy. It is the foundation on which it stands.
CREDENTIALS & BACKGROUND
EDUCATION Juris Doctor (J.D.), Howard University School of Law
EXPERIENCE 15+ years across strategic implementation, leadership development, and conflict resolution
PAST ROLES Ombudsman, DC State Board of Education • Co-Founder, Community Mediation DC • Family Mediation Practitioner • Attorney
BUILDER OF DC Special Education Hub — $1.5M secured, thousands of families served
SPECIALTIES Executive coaching • Organizational development • Conflict resolution • Strategic planning • Mediation
BASED IN Washington, D.C.
THE INVITATION
You don’t have to have it all figured out to begin.
I work best with people and organizations who are in motion, who feel the pull toward something larger than their current reality, and are ready to stop making themselves smaller in service of spaces that were never meant to contain them.
If that resonates, I would love to hear what you’re carrying.