Hola. It’s Great to Meet You.
I’m Maya Itunu Ford - a communications strategist, cultural engagement expert, and lifelong advocate for community-led development.
For more than 20 years, I’ve worked at the intersection of communication, economics, equity, and the built environment, helping institutions and communities navigate complex change. My work is grounded in a simple belief: when people understand the forces shaping their communities—and have a meaningful voice in the process—they make powerful decisions that expand what’s possible.
We are living through a profound technological and social shift. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has transformed how information moves, how power is distributed, and how trust is built. Public agencies, governments, and institutions are now required to meet new equity, engagement, and data-driven mandates—often without the cultural literacy, communication frameworks, or facilitation systems needed to do so effectively.
This is where my work comes in.
I lead multidisciplinary teams that design communication systems, shared language frameworks, and engagement processes that make complex policy, planning, and infrastructure decisions understandable and actionable. While I guide communications professionals toward common goals, I operate from the understanding that communication is not the responsibility of a single department—it is an organizational and civic practice.
My approach is guided by two core lenses.
The first is cultural inclusion—ensuring engagement reflects authentic language, values, and lived experience. This lens is operationalized through my hallmark methodology, Standard of Love (STOLO), a five-pillar framework designed to understand and organize shifts in mindset. STOLO supports self-reflection, community development, and mental well-being, while producing qualitative data that is authentic, reliable, scalable, and actionable for decision-making.
The second lens focuses on economic dignity and resource protection, informed by the MIT anti-poverty model. This framework identifies and safeguards people’s natural tools, assets, and resources, recognizing three persistent drivers of poverty: inequitable access to tools and resources, policies that reinforce that inequity, and the inefficient use or protection of existing assets.
My education at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Advanced Management Development Program (GSD AMDP) deepens and accelerates this work. There, I focus on how built infrastructure and communication infrastructure can be intentionally designed to reduce poverty rather than reinforce it. By integrating STOLO with the anti-poverty model, I apply these frameworks directly to planning, housing, transportation, climate resilience, and public investment—using communication not as an afterthought, but as core infrastructure.
Support communities to be accountable to their futures by helping them to build infrastructure that benefits their strengths.
