From the White House National Economic Council to King County, Washington, Paige Shevlin’s career has centered on labor markets, workforce development, and the policy levers that shape economic opportunity.
Paige saw early on how big of a difference stable work and a strong safety net can be for a family. Growing up, her parents navigated the labor market in a changing world, and while helping refugees prepare for job interviews as a volunteer for the International Rescue Committee in college, she saw how pivotal a job opportunity can be to ensuring families thrive. She saw, up close, where the system fell short for people who needed it most.
Paige’s philanthropic giving has historically been global in its scope, but when a mentor suggested that a donor advised fund through a community foundation might be a way to “think locally,” it landed differently than she expected.
“We’d both had federal-level careers doing national-level thinking,” she recalls. Opening a fund at ACT for Alexandria became a way to invest deeply in a single community with the same intentionality she’s brought to that larger-scale work.
Paige met ACT President & CEO, Heather Peeler (a fellow Wellesley alumna) and was impressed by her, the staff, and the organization’s commitment to racial equity. She also noticed something about Alexandria that surprised her: despite its wealth, there’s more economic inequality here than she initially realized. It felt like a place where focused, local giving could matter.
In 2025, Paige launched Paige Ahead Consulting, channeling her volunteer experience and policy expertise to support nonprofits and mission-aligned organizations that focus on workforce and economic mobility. She built giving directly into the business model, committing 20% of Paige Ahead’s annual revenue to charitable organizations focused on workforce, education, housing, and food access, and pledging to name those recipients publicly each year.
Those for-profit clients, she realized, could generate the revenue that allows her to do more pro bono work and fund that 20% commitment. “For profit for good,” as Paige puts it.
Paige is clear-eyed about the limits of philanthropy. When she gives, she’s looking for impact and evidence, either through rigorous research or through the kind of knowledge that comes from visiting an organization and understanding an organization’s model firsthand.
She’s less interested in innovation for its own sake. “Our society isn’t meeting basic needs for people.” Solving that, she believes, ultimately requires policy; no individual organization or donor can do it alone. But she does believe that charitable giving has a role: meeting urgent needs now, investing in organizations that are effective, and supporting the most vulnerable populations while the harder systemic work continues.
It’s a philosophy that aligns closely with ACT for Alexandria’s own economic mobility agenda: the belief that a thriving community depends on stable footing for the people who live and work in it, and that businesses, nonprofits, residents, and government have to work together to get there.