Melissa Schwartz

Founder & President of Stamina Strategies

Melissa Schwartz founded Stamina Strategies after 30 years helping leaders and mission-driven organizations navigate some of their most consequential moments. Throughout her career, she has worked at the intersection of strategic communications, public policy, law, and advocacy – helping organizations build communications capacity, respond to crisis, shape public narratives, and translate complex issues into compelling stories that move people and influence decision-makers.

Public affairs and government leadership

Most recently, Melissa served as Chief Public Affairs & Policy Officer at Democracy Forward, where she built and led the organization's communications, public affairs, digital strategy, partnerships, legislative advocacy, and grassroots fundraising functions during a period of extraordinary growth. She expanded the team from three to more than twenty professionals in less than a year while helping position the organization as one of the nation's leading voices defending democracy and the rule of law.

Melissa spent more than a decade in federal government, serving at the U.S. Departments of the Interior and Justice and in the office of U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski. She served throughout the Biden-Harris administration in senior leadership roles at the U.S. Department of the Interior, including Senior Counselor to Secretary Deb Haaland, Chief of Staff to Acting Deputy Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis, and Communications Director. In the Obama-Biden administration, she held senior communications roles at the U.S. Departments of Justice and the Interior. At Justice, she led on issues ranging from violence against women to Tribal justice; at Interior, she was recruited to manage crisis communications and help restore public confidence following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, one of the nation's largest environmental crises.

Advocacy, movement and crisis communications

In the intervening periods between administrations, Melissa spent nearly a decade as Chief Operating Officer of The Bromwich Group, where she led the firm's crisis communications practice and advised clients facing nationally significant legal, political, and reputational challenges, including former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford during the confirmation hearings for now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

She also developed public affairs and advocacy strategies for mission-driven organizations, including those working to protect public lands and the ocean, conserve the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, advance climate policy, and support a just transition for coal communities.

Melissa spent much of her time at The Bromwich Group advancing efforts to address and prevent gender-based violence. As a longtime consultant to Mariska Hargitay's Joyful Heart Foundation, she led advocacy-focused communications for the multi-year campaign to eliminate the nationwide rape kit backlog and developed the strategy that led to the creation of a multimillion-dollar federal grant program and state legislative reforms. She was also part of the team that created Hargitay's Emmy Award-winning documentary I AM EVIDENCE. For several years, she worked with the NO MORE campaign to elevate national awareness of domestic violence and sexual assault, including serving as a strategist and spokesperson for the national NO MORE PSA series that exceeded 3 billion broadcast, outdoor, and print media impressions.

Training and educating

In addition to advising clients, Melissa is passionate about developing the next generation of communications leaders. She has trained hundreds of executives, elected officials, advocates, and nonprofit leaders in media engagement, executive communications, and crisis response.

Melissa has spent ten years as a Senior Affiliate Instructor for the University of Washington's Communication Leadership graduate program. She has served as a recurring Adjunct Faculty member at Johns Hopkins University's Master of Arts in Communication program, and as an Adjunct Professor in the University of California's Washington Center for undergraduates. She has published chapters in PR News Guidebooks focused on crisis communications, media training, communications measurement, and corporate social responsibility.

Why Stamina

After three decades leading communications inside government, advocacy and legal organizations, campaigns, and consulting firms, Melissa founded Stamina Strategies with a simple belief: organizations and leaders tackling the world's toughest challenges deserve senior-level communications counsel that is both strategic and practical. Stamina was built to help clients think clearly, communicate confidently, and build the capacity to lead through whatever comes next.