We are delighted to announce that Steve Kloehn, a senior leader in higher education and communications, has joined co-founders Julie Peterson and Lisa Rudgers as a partner in the Peterson Rudgers Group.

In our work at the intersection of strategic planning, leadership practices, change management, and integrated communications, one of PRG’s greatest strengths is our deep experience at the highest levels of some of the nation’s great universities. Steve, who had served as vice president at Carnegie Mellon University and an associate vice president at the University of Chicago, brought still another layer of that institutional expertise when he began working with PRG in 2018. He also brought more than 20 years’ experience as a reporter, columnist, and editor, including a dozen years at the Chicago Tribune.

Since then, Steve has worked with a number of PRG clients, helping them drive important and complex change across their campuses, facilitating strategic planning exercises, assessing key areas of operation, and providing communications counsel to senior leaders at times of extraordinary challenge.

But even as each of us brings our own particular talents and perspectives to any given project, another hallmark of PRG is the way we work together to develop the best strategies for our clients. You get the best of all three of us. A longtime friend and colleague, Steve fits right into that ethos. Adding further to our capacity are the many talented partners who team with us for specific projects, including Joselyn Zivin, Colleen Newquist, Grant Schexnider and Anthony Ruth, along with a network of individual experts and firms around the country whom we call on as needed.

Big-picture thinking, hard-earned insight, and team effort has never been more important than it is now, when many of our clients and their peers across the nation face fundamental challenges to their way of doing business. Some colleges and universities will not survive. Many will find themselves in a reduced state. But history also suggests that some institutions will emerge with new ideas, a clearer vision of how to fulfill their missions, and a stronger future.

We got into this business because we all believe in the power of our colleges, universities, schools, foundations, and consortia to lead society to new discoveries and to our better selves. Getting there is hard work, but we thrive on partnering with strong leaders to make it possible. And today our partnership is even stronger.