A senior strategic partner, operating as a studio of one.

Stephen Jackson · Principal

Twenty years across comms, journalism, and education. A consulting practice built around AI.

I'm currently Chief of Staff, Strategy & Communications at TechSoup, where I lead the strategic communications team for an enterprise that channels $2B+ in technology resources and philanthropic funding to 300,000 nonprofits worldwide. The work spans executive communications, brand repositioning, cross-functional strategy, and editorial leadership across global teams.

The reason Sundial exists in its current shape is what I've been doing with AI inside TechSoup. Over the past two years I've led AI-enabled editorial transformation across the global comms function — rebuilding legacy production workflows, building team-wide AI fluency, and shipping the kind of operational change most comms organizations are still drafting slides about. Sundial is where I bring that same hands-on transformation to a small number of outside clients.

The path here was unusual. I spent a decade as a Special Education teacher and department chair in San Francisco public schools, where I learned how complex systems actually move (and don't). Alongside that — and continuing today — I work as a journalist, reporting and editing for SF Weekly, Hoodline, Eater, KCRW, and others, and hosting Journos, a long-running interview podcast with 100+ episodes. (2017 California News Publishers Association — Best Profile.)

I founded Sundial Studio in 2024 to take on a small number of clients in science, law, and healthcare. As AI started reshaping comms work in real time — first in my own daily practice, then in everything I touched at TechSoup — the studio's focus sharpened around helping a handful of teams and founders work through that change with senior, hands-on partnership.

I work with a small number of clients at a time. The studio exists to do the work I find genuinely interesting, for the kind of clients I'd want to work with whether or not the meter was running. If that sounds like your situation, let's talk.