Before the Boardroom
A violinist who saw
the world first.
Before Amanda Sherlip ever sat across a boardroom table, she sat across cultures. For over a decade she performed as a professional violinist — not on grand stages, but in communities across Asia, Latin America, the South Pacific, and North America, working in youth education, international diplomacy, and cultural outreach. She learned early that real change happens in rooms most people never enter, and that trust is built through presence, not position.
Born and raised in New York, Amanda grew up in a family shaped by the immigrant experience in the deepest sense. The war refugees who came before her did not just survive — they built. They became entrepreneurs, creators, and innovators who understood instinctively that resourcefulness and resilience were not just virtues, they were tools. That carving your own path was not a risk to be managed but a tradition to be honored. That success, when earned through hard work and ingenuity, carries a particular kind of weight and responsibility.
That inheritance is not incidental to who Amanda is professionally. It is foundational. The drive, the creativity, the refusal to accept that a problem has no solution — these are not learned strategies. They are imprinted. They show up in how she approaches every engagement: with the full weight of lived experience, the creative instinct of someone who inherited the belief that there is always a better way — and the patience of someone who has seen the long arc of what real change requires.
The Strategic Turn
Columbia, and the sharpening
of a different kind of mind.
Amanda brought her global experience to Columbia University, where she earned her Master of Science in Nonprofit Management — but she approached it less as a credential and more as a laboratory. The program attracted serious practitioners and working executives, and Amanda treated it accordingly. She designed her own educational path, combining nonprofit leadership with executive-level business and entrepreneurship coursework from Columbia Business School. She co-chaired the graduating class gift campaign and delivered a record-breaking peer-driven result. Separately, she wrote and designed a capacity building grant that secured a $600K mega-foundation gift — demonstrating, even as a student, the fundraising architecture she would go on to build for clients.
What Columbia sharpened was already there: a mind that processes quickly, sees patterns others miss, and translates complexity into clarity. The academic rigor gave it structure. The cross-sector curriculum gave it range. She left Columbia understanding that the most valuable thing a strategist can offer is not a framework — it is judgment.
Building Avant Grand
Why she built her
own firm.
After years working inside organizations — transforming a founder-led international NGO into a recognized regional institution, leading external affairs at one of the country's most respected contemplative organizations, advising nonprofits and businesses through some of their most consequential moments — Amanda reached a realization: the most meaningful work she did was always at the intersection of people, ideas, and action.
She started Avant Grand because the challenges worth solving don’t stay inside one sector. A philanthropist trying to maximize impact, a nonprofit navigating a leadership crisis, a founder trying to build something significant in Charlotte — these problems are different on the surface and identical underneath. They all require someone who can see the whole picture, move quickly, and stay in it long enough to make sure the solution actually works.
Avant Grand is the answer to that impulse. Not a large firm with layers and methodologies. A focused, senior-level practice where every engagement gets Amanda — her thinking, her network, her commitment to outcomes that last.
The Entrepreneur
She doesn’t just advise
founders. She is one.
In 2021, Amanda was granted U.S. Patent No. 11,186,946 — the result of co-founding Personal Habitat, a sustainable performance knitwear company, and directing its IP strategy, capital structuring, international manufacturing, and commercialization from concept through production. A patent is not a participation trophy. It is a documented record of creating something that did not exist.
That same record extends across her career. Amanda has forged diplomatic partnerships at the highest levels, convening global leaders, government officials, and corporate executives around shared goals and moving them to alignment, agreement, and action. She has created program models that governments adopted as national standards, built new institutional frameworks in fields where none existed, and translated complex ideas into structures that outlast any single engagement.
When she sits across from a founder or executive who is trying to build something new, she brings that record — not as a talking point, but as a lived frame of reference for what building actually requires.
Today
Raised in NY.
Rooted in Charlotte.
Built for Everywhere.
Amanda has lived and worked across an unusual range of geographies — raised in New York, lived in the Midwest and in Asia, and worked extensively across Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and both coasts, as well as across countries and continents. She has spent her career building programs that are hyper-local and community-rooted, then scaling them nationally and internationally without losing what made them work close to the ground. She knows how to read a local market and how to connect it to a much larger world.
Now based in the Charlotte, NC metro area, Amanda has chosen this region with intention and with a clear purpose: to bring global-caliber strategy to one of the fastest-growing markets in the country. Charlotte’s rapidly expanding business community, its growing philanthropic sector, and its regional founders, innovators, and leaders deserve the same quality of thinking that has shaped organizations operating on the international stage. Amanda is here to help build that — not as an outside consultant parachuting in, but as someone who has put down roots and is committed to this community for the long term.
Outside of work, Amanda is grounded by the people who matter most — her husband, their three children, her parents, and a church community that keeps her anchored in something larger than any one client or campaign. She believes deeply that the world her children inherit will be shaped by the quality of the decisions leaders make today. That belief is not background. It is the engine.