communications & operations for mission-driven organizations

Wendy Riker Purnell is dedicated to the free movement of goods, people, and ideas. With a background in advertising, education, international business, and public policy, she helps non-profit and for-profit clients market products and communicate ideas to new audiences.

Wendy has spent two decades advancing the ideas of a free society. In Central Europe, working with the Prague Post and the Prague Post Foundation, she created curriculum focused on media literacy and wrote a weekly column on the re-emergence of civil society post communism. In Central America, she worked on rights-based biodiversity conservation and economic development efforts with Paso Pacífico. In the US, Wendy has worked at the intersection of academia, education, and public policy with students and scholars at the Institute for Humane Studies, the Cato Institute, and PERC.

Wendy helped build the Renewing Indigenous Economies Project at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University to remove barriers to self-governance and entrepreneurship for Native nations in the former British colonies and beyond. Working with First Nations and Māori colleagues in Canada and New Zealand, she co-founded IndigenousEcon.org, dedicated to meaningful sovereignty for Indigenous nations. Now, with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, she works with Adam Crepelle on the Indian Country Private Sector Project and Joe Austin at the ACES School.

Wendy’s current homebase is an academic library where her day job centers on interdisciplinary research and student success at a land-grant institution.