There is a familiar photograph of lobbying: a corridor, a suit, a handshake, a door closing. It makes influence look like something that happens between two people in one building. J Strategies has spent sixteen years selling a different picture. In its version, the important room is much larger. It includes the local business owner, the patient advocate, the trade association, the faith leader, the reporter, the social feed and, eventually, the official with the vote.
The Albany firm calls the connective work alliance development. The phrase sounds mild, almost administrative. The work is neither. It means finding people whose interests genuinely overlap, understanding what matters in their communities, and giving a policy argument more than one credible voice. Traditional lobbying aims at the decision-maker. J Strategies tries to shape the information environment around the decision-maker too.
“Movement is not momentum.”Christian Stellakis, vice president of public affairs
01 / The overlooked room
A coalition is an argument with witnesses
Julie Miner Mosley and Jaime Venditti founded J Strategies in 2010 after careers that taught them how formal power and informal persuasion meet. Mosley had worked for Senator Chuck Schumer and became the first woman political director for the Empire State Regional Council of Carpenters. Venditti had managed lobbying, legislative affairs, public relations and alliance work at another government-affairs firm. Both studied political science at Syracuse University. Their bet was that clients should not have to hire one shop for the State House, another for the newsroom and a third to locate people who could speak from lived experience.
That integrated model now covers government affairs, strategic communications, media relations, social media, event production, corporate social responsibility, reputation management and crisis communications. It is a service business, not a platform: the product is judgment applied by a small team. Public descriptions put the staff between 16 and 20 people, with headquarters in Albany and a presence in New York City, New Jersey and Massachusetts. The work extends through the Northeast and into Washington, DC.
The argument gets stronger as the map gets wider.
J Strategies' service lines are most useful together: local intelligence informs the coalition; the coalition makes the story credible; the story changes the context for policy.
02 / What clients actually buy
Not more noise. Better choreography.
The customer might be a corporation entering a difficult policy debate, a nonprofit seeking a legislative change, a trade group facing a rulemaking process or a local employer trying to become useful to its community. Publicly identified clients span very different worlds: Unchained At Last, Compassion & Choices, the ACLU, The Arc New York and the New York Housing Conference sit alongside Ford, Google, Tesla, McDonald's, Walgreens, Pfizer and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
That list reveals the real market position. J Strategies is not simply a PR agency that occasionally calls a legislator, or a lobbying shop that treats communication as a press release attached to the memo. It sits between the two. The firm can map stakeholders, educate policymakers, recruit third-party validators, prepare a media pitch, run a lobby day, manage the social channels and build a response plan if the issue turns into a crisis.
The economics are classic specialist-agency economics: bespoke work sold through client engagements, not licenses or mass-market products. That makes expertise and trust the inventory. It also explains the firm's emphasis on long relationships with officials, reporters, business groups and community leaders. A database can tell you who belongs to an organization. It cannot tell you whether that person will return a call, carry a message or object to being treated as decoration.
03 / The eventless year
The first thing to fail was the room
In 2020, the most literal piece of public affairs stopped working first. People could not gather. Press conferences, seminars, community meetings and large advocacy events lost their physical venue. J Strategies moved small and large events online and helped clients operate digitally. The adjustment was less alien than it might have been because the entire staff already worked from home every Friday.
That small habit is more instructive than a grand resilience slogan. It gave the firm a weekly rehearsal before remote work became compulsory. The format changed, but the underlying sequence did not: identify the audience, locate the trusted messenger, choose the channel, follow up. The firm also launched a Diversity Fellowship Program that year, aimed at widening entry into political and media consulting.
The case for alliance work became especially visible in the campaign to end child marriage in New York. In a 2022 interview, J Strategies executive Ashlee Palmieri described the women-owned firm's role as building relationships between advocates and elected officials. The survivor-founded organization Unchained At Last supplied experience and moral authority. The policy campaign supplied the goal. The firm's contribution sat in the connective tissue.
Later profiles credited J Strategies with work tied to legislation involving health equity, consumer protection and women's rights. Awards and power lists followed, but the more telling achievement is repeat recognition across both lobbying and public relations. That is where the firm wants to be judged: at the seam.
04 / The copyable part
Start with the people, not the channel
A communications team can borrow this method without pretending to own J Strategies' relationships. Start by writing down every group that will experience the decision, every person who can make it, and every source those people already trust. Then ask a harder question: where is the honest overlap? If the answer is merely “they might repeat our line,” there is no alliance yet.
List interests, relationships and local pressure points before choosing the public language.
A hearing, an op-ed, a community forum and a social post should not be copies of one another.
A small recurring remote habit gave the team useful muscle memory when every event became virtual.
Count changed positions, recruited allies and concrete deliverables, not calendar activity.
There are limits. Coalition-building cannot rescue a client with no legitimate shared interest to offer, and third-party voices lose value when they sound rented. Government access does not replace evidence. Media attention does not substitute for votes. The model also depends on local knowledge; a playbook transported into a community without trusted relationships can look less like organizing and more like choreography performed for an empty house.
This is why the phrase “alliance development” deserves its unglamorous name. It does not promise a viral moment. It promises the slower work of finding who belongs in the argument and why they might choose to enter it. In public affairs, that can be the difference between a meeting that happened and a decision that moved.