They say change is constant, and change is the terrain Latrice is built for. Latrice R. Dudley has spent more than a decade not intellectualizing social change, but leading it from the inside out.
She has guided organizations through transition, built the systems that carry mission forward, and held the space between where institutions are and what they want and need to become.
Full-time nonprofit leadership gave her depth: Co-Director at GASP, Operations Director at AlaQuest Collaborative for Education, Planning Specialist at Gwinnett County Community Development, and Volunteer and Operations Manager at Good Samaritan Health Center.
Alongside that public service, Latrice built an independent consulting practice, deliberately, not by accident. Consulting gave her breadth across sectors, stages, and geographies, with engagements spanning more than 65 clients in 22 states. Over ten years, she progressed from Associate to Fractional COO at a 40-year strategic planning, fundraising, and compliance firm with a legacy of more than $1 billion in economic impact. She led a $26 million capital campaign feasibility study through ribbon cutting, managed a 35-person consultant team advancing more than $150 million in client fundraising initiatives, and served as Managing Director for a major Southeast grants management firm.
For all the range and rigor of her work, Latrice calls herself “deeply Southern” and carries her Southern warmth with her. “As a Black woman, I have often found that people struggle to hold my competence and my warmth in the same body,” she says. “I have major wins under my belt, but I still lead with collaboration, curiosity, and kindness. Those qualities, competence and warmness, are not separate in my leadership.”
A Foundation in Intersectionality
Latrice describes herself as a polymath by nature and cross-sectorial in action. That orientation started at New College at the University of Alabama, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies titled Race, Gender, and Class Intersections, a lasting habit of critical inquiry that eventually brought her to Strategic Foresight before she had a name for it.
In 2024, as artificial intelligence began accelerating the pace of change, Latrice began a Master of Science in Foresight at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering, seeking needed leverage for the organizations she serves. Of this unique discipline, Latrice shares, “Strategic foresight gives leaders a way to see beyond the immediate pressure of the moment. It helps us anticipate change, navigate uncertainty, and make better long-range decisions by looking at how change typically unfolds, and the human and organizational systems connected to one another.”
Some of Latrice’s graduate research includes the Anticipatory American Worker Survey, which develops individualized foresight reports for people navigating uncertainty in labor and work.
“The survey is for the anticipatory worker, the person who can feel the ground shifting and wants a structured way to respond before the future arrives fully formed,” explains Latrice. “It looks at exposure, readiness, values, desires, constraints, access, and autonomy, then turns those insights into practical steps for the next three years.”
Disruption, Opportunity, and Change
Latrice most recently served as Operations Director for Equity in the Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit working to build a more race-equitable sector and society. Then came the disruption: shifts in the political domain, institutional fear, funding pauses. In early 2026, she was laid off, and she was not alone. Black women’s unemployment rate rose from 5.4 to 7.3 percent in 2025, and by mid-2026, 212,000 Black women had lost jobs, with another 454,000 leaving the workforce entirely.
Latrice feels that sector leaders could have anticipated some of what happened in 2025. She wants nonprofits to lead their own ethical transitions rather than get swept up in them, particularly as AI and other forces reshape labor and the nature of work itself.
“Change is constant. When opportunity or disruption arrives, I want leaders to have enough readiness to respond with intention. Scenario planning, futures thinking, and agility give organizations more choices, and less fragility, as the future becomes the present.”
Nearly ten years in public service, fifteen in the sector, made plain what that time had earned: labor that is rare, hard-won, and entirely hers to steward. She chose disruption as her season to transform. Not as resignation. As reclamation.
She is now continuing her public service through a contract federal role while launching “side quests,” deliberate ventures framed through game theory: strategies designed to maximize utility and life fulfillment. Joy, through hands-on creation. Income, through streams less tied to personal labor. Skill, through capabilities built outside institutional walls. And rewilding, through intentionally stepping outside digital routines and into analog, tactile ways of making and being.
What’s Next: Meridian Sight and “Deep South Futures”
The next chapter brings her experience, research, and foresight practice together under one premise: organizations need more than a strategy for where they are going. They need a clearer way to see what is coming. Meridian Sight is the strategic advisory practice Latrice is building to launch after she completes her graduate studies in 2027. It operates across her Five Sights Framework: hindsight, insight, foresight, kindsight, and oversight.
Deep South Futures is her 2027 graduate practicum, designed to bring futures thinking directly into institutions, governments, and communities across Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. It reflects her belief that the people living inside coming futures should have a role in imagining and shaping them. Co-creation. For human-centered world building.
She is not finished becoming. A doctorate in applied sociology sits on her mid-range horizon, alongside a body of work that bridges practice and theory. The practice is already taking shape. The research is already being deployed. And Latrice’s line of sight is already long.
Follow Latrice on LinkedIn or reach her at latricerdudley@gmail.com to connect, build community, or introduce her to someone who should know her and her work. In the meantime, she encourages institutions to connect with Spark Point Fundraising, whose mission, values, and work she supports in helping ensure organizations have the margin to sustain their missions.