Melinda Lackey, KNLP-16, is the director and co-founder of SEED Impact, a nonprofit organization which to-date has assisted more than 200 diverse non-profit initiatives to communicate and coordinate action more efficiently, sustain higher performance and achieve greater social impact. SEED offers sophisticated impact measurement, "coach-in-the-cloud" fund development technology, and customized coaching and strategic planning practices. With the creative engagement of many friends and partners, our mission is to make SEED practices accessible and foundational to the sector. Formerly a professional ballet dancer, Melinda holds a Masters degree in Social Research. She co-founded two successful non-profits prior to SEED. She helped expand a group of six women living with HIV to a network of 600 women doctors, lawyers, service providers, students and caregivers, and cultivated the fertile ground for collaboration that created Iris House, Inc: the first multi-service support center in the country designed by and for women affected by HIV/AIDS, located in Harlem, New York. She assisted this group, early in the epidemic, to lobby the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and they succeeded to change the CDC definition of AIDS to include the symptoms of women. Melinda also helped establish the Hunter College Welfare Rights Initiative and directed it for ten years. She developed a Community Leadership curriculum at its core that provides college credit for low income students to become effective agents of community empowerment and systemic change. WRI is now staffed primarily by women it was designed to serve.