Mary Edwardsen, M.Div., PhD
Consultant
Mary Edwardsen is recognized as one of the nation’s leading development officers in corporate and foundation relations. Edwardsen was born and raised in Louisville. She attended undergraduate school at Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana. She spent the majority of her academic career in New York City, earning three Masters degrees and a Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary, affiliated with Columbia University. She worked as an editor for Macmillan and McGraw-Hill while earning her doctorate. She has served on the Commission for Christian-Jewish Relations at the World Council of Churches. Edwardsen has continually lectured in Philosophy in New York, Los Angeles and now Louisville.
Edwardsen has worked in the field of corporate and foundation relations for over 15 years for academic institutions, including Caltech and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She returned to Louisville five years ago to serve the Jewish Hospital Foundation and the University of Louisville. Through her private consulting firm Rhetoric LLC, she has worked as a successful consultant for a portfolio of nonprofit organizations, often filling the role of a director of development.
Over her career, Mary Edwardsen has raised tens of millions of dollars from hundreds of foundations. She has written thousands of letters of inquiry, proposals, and related materials for projects, spanning from music therapy to cardiovascular disease, Arabian horse libraries to MRIs, and robotics to climate change. During this recent recession, in which private and state funding grew increasingly scarce, she has concentrated on federal grants, acquiring a keen understanding of value of leveraging private and public funding.
Most importantly, Dr. Edwardsen is recognized as an expert in transforming a client’s creative ideas into fundable projects.
