Dr. Lakeya Cherry: From Nine Years as a Nonprofit CEO to Coaching Glassdoor, Snap and Cisco

Dr. Lakeya Cherry spent nine years as the chief executive of an international nonprofit before she decided that the most useful thing she could do for other leaders was to step out of the corner office entirely. Today she is the CEO and founder of Lakeya Cherry LLC, a leadership development and strategic advisory firm, and a partner at Evolution, the San Francisco coaching and advisory firm that works with venture-backed startups and high-growth companies. Her client roster includes Glassdoor, Snap, Cisco, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, the Gates Foundation and Seattle Children's Hospital.

Her story is not a typical founder arc. It runs from child psychology books bought with babysitting money, through direct social work in New York and California, to a tech startup in Washington, D.C., and finally to one of the most visible leadership roles in the social-work sector. What ties it together is a single question she kept asking herself: how do you build the internal capacity of a leader who has been taught to stay quiet?

Table of Contents

• From Social Work to the CEO Chair
• The Quitaversary: Leaving After Nine Years
• Building Lakeya Cherry LLC
• A Practice Built on Credentials and Community
• Why Executive Coaching Matters Now
• Closing the Racial Leadership Gap
• Lessons for Women Leaders
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Conclusion

From Social Work to the CEO Chair

Lakeya Cherry began her career in direct social work, practising for about three years after earning her master's degree in social work from Columbia University. She has said publicly that she felt her growth had stalled, and that she wanted to use her social work training in a non-traditional way. That instinct took her to a tech startup in Washington, D.C., and then, in 2013, to the chief executive role at the Network for Social Work Management (NSWM), an international organization dedicated to strengthening and mobilizing diverse social impact leaders.

She held that post for nine years, until June 2022. Under her leadership the Network expanded globally and introduced programming designed to produce better leaders and stronger organizational cultures. In a farewell letter to social-work leaders published in 2022, she recalled that her first year as CEO was dominated by self-doubt and imposter syndrome: "Who am I to lead this organization? To influence others?" It is the same question she now hears from the executives she coaches.

Credentials underpin the authority she brings to those conversations. She holds a Doctorate in Social Work from the University of Southern California, where she received the university's Order of Arête honor, an M.S. in Social Work from Columbia, and a B.A. in Psychology and Legal Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The Quitaversary: Leaving After Nine Years

In June 2022, Cherry resigned from the CEO role to focus full-time on coaching and consulting — a move she later described in a personal essay as resembling the stages of grief. She wrote about denial, as burnout made the familiar role unfulfilling; anger, as feeling unappreciated hardened into a desire for change; and bargaining, as self-doubt questioned whether leaving a known institution for an unknown one was the right decision.

One year after what she called her "quitaversary," she reported that stepping into the unknown had produced personal breakthroughs and professional growth that staying never could. The essay is worth reading for any woman weighing a senior role against her own venture, because it does not romanticise the decision: it names the grief first, and the upside second.

Building Lakeya Cherry LLC

Lakeya Cherry LLC was founded as an executive coaching and consulting business with a mission statement that reads more like a personal discipline than a tagline: "to build the internal capacity of leaders through daring leadership, clear visioning, and unwavering intentionality."

The firm works across three modes — coaching, consulting and workshops — for clients in corporate, nonprofit, healthcare, education and social-impact sectors. Her former and current client list includes Glassdoor, LA Cleantech Incubator, Snap, Cisco, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Southern Veterinary Partners, The Trust powered by the NFL Players Association, the Gates Foundation, Chicago Foundation for Women, Seattle Children's Hospital, UCSD Palliative Care, and the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute. Company logos on her site now extend to Thermo Fisher, Berklee, Clark Atlanta University and Dr. Bronner's.

In parallel she became a partner at Evolution, a coaching, consulting and investment firm serving founders and executives. One client testimonial published on her site credits her mentorship with helping an organization grow from a $9 million budget to a $21 million organization — an outcome she describes as the result of strategic insight, systems thinking and people-centred leadership rather than motivational speaking.

A Practice Built on Credentials and Community

Cherry's practice is deliberately credentialed: she is an ICF-certified coach holding the Professional Certified Coach (PCC) designation, a StartingBloc Fellow, an #IAmRemarkable facilitator, and a Certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator, the programme based on Brené Brown's research on vulnerability. She has added certifications in the iEQ9 Enneagram, team coaching, psychological safety, the EQi 2.0 and EQ 360 instruments, plus executive leadership training through the National Human Services Assembly and diversity and inclusion coursework at eCornell.

Recognition has followed. In September 2026 she was named to Black Impact Magazine's "26 of 2026 Women of Impact" list, and she has served as a commissioner on San Diego's Commission on the Status of Women, which addresses the social, economic and vocational needs of women in the city. She also speaks and facilitates nationally — including a virtual interview with the NASW California chapter in October 2026 on building a macro-practice social-work career.

Why Executive Coaching Matters Now

Cherry's timing looks less like a lucky break than a market inflection. According to the 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study, commissioned by the International Coaching Federation and conducted by PwC with more than 10,000 coaches worldwide, the coaching profession contributed an estimated $5.34 billion in annual revenue to the global economy — a 17% increase over the 2023 study — while the number of coach practitioners reached a record 122,974, up 13%. Leadership and executive coaching dominate the field: 54% of coaches focus on those specialties, and managers and executives remain the primary client group for 56% of practitioners.

The economics are equally clear. Coaches whose majority client base is executives report average annual earnings of $82,949 and a typical fee of $357 for a one-hour session, the highest of any client category in the study. In other words, the practice Cherry built is sitting in the fastest-growing, best-paid segment of a profession that is expanding faster than at any point since the ICF began tracking it in 2007.

Closing the Racial Leadership Gap

Cherry's distinctive angle is the one she wrote about in Training Industry in 2023: coaching as a lever for closing the racial leadership gap. She cites Coqual's finding that although Black Americans make up roughly 12% of the U.S. population, they hold only 3.2% of executive or senior leadership roles and less than 1% of Fortune 500 CEO positions. Being "the only one in the room," she argues, produces isolation, fatigue and imposter syndrome that in turn degrade team productivity, communication and retention.

That diagnosis is reinforced by broader data. The ILO's November 2026 report Women in Business and Management: Scaling Success, based on a survey of 11,957 enterprises in 99 countries, found that women still hold only about 30% of managerial positions globally, even though the share of enterprises with a woman board chair rose from 13.1% in 2013 to 30.9% in 2025. UN Women's 2025 Gender Snapshot estimates that at the current pace, gender parity in management is roughly a century away. Both findings point to the same conclusion Cherry built her firm on: the pipeline is not fixing itself, and leaders at the top need deliberate support.

Lessons for Women Leaders

Three lessons stand out from Cherry's trajectory for women building their own practices or preparing for the executive suite.

• Transfer the skill, not the title. She did not leave social work; she re-applied a systems lens — person, team, organization — to executive coaching. Her nine years of nonprofit leadership became the product, not the thing she walked away from.
• Name the block out loud. Her "About" page is unusually candid about people-pleasing perfectionism and the pressure placed on Black women to dim their light. That candour is commercially productive: it is precisely why clients trust her with vulnerability-based work such as Dare to Lead™.
• Build the practice inside a network. Partnering with Evolution gave her an institutional channel while her own firm retained its identity — a hybrid model that mirrors advice found in our profiles of Victoria Repa and Kristy Kim, both of whom scaled through partnership rather than pure solo growth. Our roundup of leadership lessons for women executives makes a related point about visibility.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Dr. Lakeya Cherry's career makes a quiet but persuasive case: the highest-leverage move a seasoned leader can make is often to leave the seat and learn how to fill other people's. She traded a nine-year nonprofit CEO tenure for a coaching practice that now advises some of the most recognizable names in technology and philanthropy, and she did it while naming, in public, the fear and grief that such a transition involves. For women entrepreneurs deciding whether expertise is enough to build a business on, her answer, delivered through both her client results and her candour, is that it is — provided you stop dimming the light long enough to sell it.

Sources

• Lakeya Cherry LLC — About (lakeyacherry.com, consulted 2026)
• Lakeya Cherry LLC — Speaking and client list (lakeyacherry.com, consulted 2026)
• "A Letter to Social Work Leaders," SocialWorker.com, June 2022
• "Grieving the Old, Embracing the Bold," Dr. Lakeya Cherry, Medium, June 21, 2023
• "How Coaching Can Help Close the Racial Leadership Gap," Training Industry, April 28, 2023 (citing Coqual, 2019)
• 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study, International Coaching Federation / PwC, 2025
• ILO, Women in Business and Management: Scaling Success, November 3, 2026
• UN Women, Progress on the SDGs: The Gender Snapshot 2025
• Black Impact Magazine, "26 of 2026 Women of Impact," September 2026