Emily Kane has been the Director of Operations at BlastPoint since Spring 2018. She will be very, VERY deeply missed.
BlastPoint has never been like other data companies. And that’s the only way they could have ever gotten someone like me to sign on. Very few other organizations I’ve encountered have the boldness of vision to relentlessly pursue a woman, a mother of three, just re-entering paid work, to pluck her directly out of nonprofit leadership and into the tech sector. And it’s that kind of visionary action that defines the experience of working with our CEO, Alison Alvarez.
When I joined our newly forming team last Spring it was because I wholeheartedly embraced the mission, values, and vision of our founding team, and I am incurably curious to learn new skills. Alison was on an analytics accessibility tear, toiling to put friendly and sophisticated tools into the hands of organizations who had previously been left out of the data revolution. Deploying her expertise in building tech solutions, she’d already attracted users from across the US who were interested in changing the way they approached tackling serious challenges within their businesses and communities.
Amongst our infectious core values: be excellent to each other; show your work; give credit where credit is due; say please and thank you; use your imagination. Letting these ideas sink in as personal commitments is a deliberate practice.
As BlastPoint has matured, I’ve had the privilege of upholding our values as we engage stakeholders in our regional community, recruit new team members, and bring new customers into the fold. That we continue to be in pursuit of building a core team of people who can pivot and lead with charisma is paradoxically aligned with my reasons for moving on now. I’m one of us. And it’s time for me to pivot and lead in another direction.
The practice of our company values, that began with Alison, has become habit of being for me as well. It is with the embodiment of these values that I leap into new adventures, joining the founding team at Forward Wellness in a collaboration to impact maternal mental health outcomes in Western PA. All the more timely this week, following a heartbreaking and very public maternal death in our region.
BlastPoint has been one of the most powerful learning experiences of my life, and I’m taking every bit of it with me back into what has always been my life’s work – making space for the most vulnerable people in our community to grow in health and security. I hold the BlastPoint team in expansive gratitude. Never perfect and relentlessly iterating upon their approach, if you get a chance to join them… I can’t recommend them strongly enough.
To all of us who strive – Pa’lante!