About
I’m Joshua White. I help mission-driven organizations make real strategic choices, the kind that clarify what you will do, what you won’t, and why.
Nonprofits, faith-based institutions, and purpose-driven businesses face the same structural challenges as Fortune 500 companies: mergers that need diligence, resources that need allocating, operating models that need redesigning. They just don’t always have access to the advisory support that makes those decisions well. That’s the gap I fill.
Why Anselm Advisory
The organizations I work with need two things that rarely come from the same person: rigorous analytical methodology and a genuine understanding of how mission-driven institutions actually operate. I spent five years at PwC Strategy& building the first skill set and a career in public policy and church leadership developing the second.
At PwC Strategy&, I was a Senior Manager focused on driving innovation, growth, and performance in regulated industries. Much of my work related to M&A: whether deals actually make sense once you look past the headline numbers. One $3B acquisition ended with a board decision to walk away because the synergy model couldn’t support the banker assumptions. A $5B deal required Day 1 planning across every function. Cost models for utility mergers had to hold up under regulatory scrutiny and expert testimony. I came to PwC Strategy& after an MBA at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business.
Before consulting, I was a policy advisor in the California State Legislature for four years. The work was about getting competing stakeholders to agree on hard things: a $1.3B healthcare tax restructuring, Medicaid policy, opioid reform. I learned that the best analysis in the world is useless if you can’t build consensus around it. That instinct started at UC Berkeley, where I studied political science and first got interested in how institutions make decisions under real constraints.
The turning point was closer to home. Alongside the consulting work, I led a 10-month strategic planning engagement for my own parish, St. Francis in the Fields in Louisville, and wrote about the experience for The Living Church. That project made something concrete that I’d been thinking about for a while: the analytical toolkit I’d been applying to Fortune 500 clients was just as needed, and harder to find, in the organizations I cared about most.