About

Helping mission-driven organizations move forward

Founded by Liesl Ulrich-Verderber, Castle Road Consulting grew out of more than a decade of work helping good ideas become clearer, stronger, and more sustainable in the real world. Liesl’s work has taken many forms: building mission-driven media platforms, designing education tools, leading digital product work, supporting organizational change, creating training systems, and helping teams make sense of new technologies.

A career built around ideas, learning, And change

Liesl’s career has moved across mission-driven media, education, product strategy, and organizational change, but the throughline has always been the same: helping meaningful ideas become clear, usable, and sustainable.

She co-founded The Goodness Exchange, helping grow a Vermont-based positive media platform into a global storytelling organization, and later built EWCed, an education platform shaped by conversations with teachers who wanted to connect classroom learning to the wider world.

Her work has also included innovation and cross-disciplinary collaboration at Clarkson University, product management in edtech, and a Harvard education that helped shape her interest in systems, learning, and how people make sense of change.

Today, that experience guides her work with nonprofits, foundations, universities, and mission-driven teams that are ready to move from good intentions into clear strategy, sustainable programs, and healthier systems.

Practical strategy, rooted in people

Liesl partners with organizations at moments when something important is trying to move forward, but the path needs to get clearer. Sometimes that means shaping a long-term strategy. Sometimes it means strengthening a program, rethinking a funding model, preparing for a founder or leadership transition, or helping a team adopt new tools and ways of working without losing the humanity of the work.

Her approach is practical, but deeply people-centered. As a Prosci-certified change practitioner, Liesl cares about what happens between a good idea and real adoption. A plan can be beautifully written and still fail if people do not understand it, believe in it, know how to act on it, and have the support to keep going.

She helps organizations think through both sides of change: the strategy on paper and the lived reality of the people who have to carry it forward.

Increasingly, her work also helps organizations navigate AI and emerging technology in grounded, useful ways. She is less interested in hype and more interested in the places where new tools can help people ask better questions, reduce repetitive work, make stronger decisions, and free up time for the work only humans can do.

Why Castle Road

The name Castle Road comes from home. Liesl is based in rural Vermont, in a place where the long view matters.

Roads are shaped by weather, land, use, and time. Organizations are, too. The best work is rarely about dropping in with a shiny answer. It is about listening carefully, noticing what is already strong, clearing what has become tangled, and helping people build a path they can actually walk.

At its heart, Castle Road Consulting exists for organizations doing work that deserves to last.

Liesl helps them find the next right shape for that work, and move toward it with clarity, care, and practical momentum.