Sandra Abrevaya’s career has the shape of a relay race conducted across institutions. A congressional office hands the baton to a presidential campaign. The campaign runs it into the White House. Washington gives way to Chicago, city government to nonprofit leadership, advocacy to entrepreneurship. The venues change. The work does not. Again and again, Abrevaya enters systems full of talented people, worthy intentions and incompatible clocks - then tries to make them move together.
She was born and raised in Chicago, studied English at the University of Michigan and spent more than a decade in government in Washington. Before the sleek vocabulary of startups arrived in her résumé, she had already learned the durable vocabulary of institutions: message, constituency, legislation, coalition, budget, deadline. She served in the U.S. House, spent three years as press secretary to Senator Dick Durbin and worked at the U.S. Department of Education. She joined Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign in New Hampshire, then worked in the White House.
This is an unusual apprenticeship for a founder, which is precisely why it is useful. Campaigns teach velocity. Government teaches consequence. Communications teaches that a sentence is not merely a sentence when hundreds of people must act on it. Public service also teaches the less romantic lesson: good intentions are plentiful; coordinated execution remains rare.
The campaign was a classroom
On the Obama campaign, Abrevaya met Brian Wallach, then a relative newcomer to politics. She was the seasoned one. They later worked near each other in the White House, where a small ritual made bureaucracy human: when work became stressful, they would take a lap around the Executive Office Building and talk through whatever was stuck.
There is a whole management philosophy hidden in that walk. Change the scene. Make the problem conversational. Put two minds in motion before asking an institution to follow. The setting was grand; the method was wonderfully ordinary.
Abrevaya remembers Wallach proposing, at seven in the evening after a day that had begun at five in the morning, that they get salads and return to their desks for a few more hours. The detail is almost suspiciously Washington: ambition, exhaustion and leafy greens. It also captures the working partnership that would follow them home to Chicago and, later, into the organizations they built together.
“At the time we were government nerds.”Sandra Abrevaya, describing the policy fluency she and Wallach brought to their work
“Government nerds” is a playful phrase for a serious capability. They knew where authority lived. They understood how legislation proceeds, how federal funding moves and how public narrative can create room for policy. Expertise, in their version, was not knowing impressive nouns. It was knowing the verbs: who can convene, approve, fund, measure and change.
Coming home, then building the room
Back in Chicago, Abrevaya carried that institutional fluency into city government and youth-serving organizations. She became executive director of Urban Alliance Chicago, worked on education policy in the mayor’s office and later led Thrive Chicago, a collective-impact organization designed to align government, philanthropy, schools and nonprofits around better outcomes for young people.
Collective impact is inelegant work. Nobody controls the entire system. Every partner arrives with its own budget cycle, language, incentives and theory of change. Progress depends on creating a shared definition of progress, then surviving enough meetings to make it real.
At a 2019 youth summit created with the Obama Foundation, Abrevaya described the job in practical terms: bring government, nonprofit and philanthropic leaders together, put young people’s ideas in front of them and ask for commitments. The key word is not “ideas.” It is “commitments.” Listening becomes useful only when someone owns the next action.
“We need a movement that resources and incentivizes collaboration.”Sandra Abrevaya, 2019
That line could be the spine of her career. Collaboration, to Abrevaya, is not a temperament or a cheerful panel discussion. It needs resources and incentives. In other words, it needs design. She argued that sectors lose opportunities because organizations do not share information or align. Her answer was not to ask everyone to be nicer. It was to change the conditions under which they work together.
One operating system, many rooms
From movement to mechanism
In 2019, Abrevaya and Wallach co-founded I AM ALS, a patient-led advocacy organization. In 2021 they co-founded Synapticure, where Abrevaya serves as CEO. The two organizations are separate, but the founder overlap makes the progression revealing. Advocacy can name a failure and concentrate attention. A company can hire a team, build workflows and deliver a service repeatedly. One changes what people believe is urgent. The other changes what happens on Tuesday afternoon.
Synapticure operates a national virtual-care model built around specialist access, coordination and continuing support. Abrevaya describes the company as having two complementary arms: care and cures. The useful business lesson is broader than the sector. A founder who sees a systemic bottleneck can build on both sides of it - the immediate customer experience and the longer-term institutional partnerships that may alter the system itself.
The company announced a $25 million Series A in 2024. Funding is not an ending; it is an obligation with nicer typography. It buys the chance to make a service more available, and it raises the cost of fuzzy thinking. Abrevaya’s old training becomes relevant again: explain the mission clearly, align people who hold different pieces and keep the machinery visible enough to improve it.
Her public style is direct, occasionally wry and suspicious of comfortable delay. Yet the deeper pattern is not impatience alone. It is agency - the insistence that complicated systems are made by people and can therefore be remade by people. That belief has connected her jobs more faithfully than any industry label could.
By 2025, that argument had carried her onto stages at the Milken Institute Global Conference and the New York Brain-Computer Interface Symposium, where her announced keynote focused on keeping public voices close to innovation. The stage is different from the old press room, but the assignment is familiar: make expertise answerable to experience. A platform can widen an audience; it cannot substitute for the operational work waiting when the microphone goes quiet. Abrevaya’s résumé is full of public moments, yet its logic lives in what happens afterward - the follow-up call, the assigned owner, the next hire, the partnership reduced from a pleasant promise to a working process.
The founder’s actual product
Founders are often described as product visionaries. Abrevaya’s story suggests another description: translator between clocks. A family’s clock is immediate. A legislature’s clock is procedural. A nonprofit grant runs on a fiscal year. A startup’s cash has a runway. A large partner may schedule change by quarter. The leader’s work is to keep one clock from erasing the importance of another.
Her background in communications helps because translation is not simplification for its own sake. It is the craft of preserving meaning while changing form. A personal account becomes a public argument. An argument becomes a policy proposal. A proposal becomes an operating model. At every handoff, something can get lost. Abrevaya has spent a career trying to keep the human point intact.
This also explains the apparent leaps in her résumé. English to law. Press secretary to nonprofit executive. Public servant to founder. Each role asks the same questions in a different accent: What is happening? Who needs to understand it? Who has the authority to act? What would make action easier?
The stealable idea is modest enough to use tomorrow. Before asking for a grand solution, draw the room. List who holds trust, information, authority, money and execution. If one person or institution holds none of them all, stop waiting for a hero. Design the handoffs.
Then test the handoffs in language ordinary enough to repeat. Can the person with information reach the person with authority? Does the person promising money understand what execution costs? Has anyone with firsthand experience been given more than ceremonial airtime? Abrevaya’s communications background makes these questions feel less like branding and more like quality control. Confusion compounds. So does clarity. The difference appears in missed meetings, duplicated work and plans that belong to everyone in theory but to no one by Friday.
Abrevaya’s career offers no fantasy that this is tidy. Coalitions are slow until suddenly they are not. Institutions are frustrating until a well-placed lever moves. Campaigns end; the problems remain. A company can make an access point faster, but only by doing thousands of unphotogenic things correctly.
That may be why the image of the White House walk lingers. Two people, a hard problem, one lap around the building. No podium. No grand reveal. Just movement, conversation and then another attempt. Large systems often change that way - not all at once, but because someone refuses to let the next useful step remain vague.