Welcome

Having served as the chief executive of several nonprofit organizations, Arlene is highly experienced in operations, human resources, program development, budgeting, fundraising, grant writing, policy, training, and development of events such as press and fundraising events for hundreds of people, corporate conferences for thousands of people and community festivals for tens of thousands of people.

Arlene started her career writing for the business pages of a daily newspaper. She was known as the person to turn to when no one else could figure a way to get something done, or when someone needed to understand trends, demographics or statistics. In addition to her ever-changing assignments, she had a monthly column that compared the prices of life necessities across the multiple counties in the area, and was tapped to lead the creation of a series of articles that evaluated newly-released census data.

After investing years into the Hollywood entertainment scene, Arlene decided she wanted to focus her time on making the world a better place, so she become the Director of Public Affairs at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden (budget size $10M). Arlene ran their publicity and marketing efforts, and produced massive community events. She wrote press releases and pitched to the media, securing millions of impressions in the busiest media market in the country, including coverage in the NY Times and CNN. She oversaw advertising and developed a marketing strategy that drove historic levels of traffic to their website. She managed fashion and celebrity photos shoots on the property. Additionally, she promoted their volunteer training event in way that quadrupled enrollment. Upon hearing volunteers tell conflicting stories about the Garden, Arlene wrote a garden guide training manual to ensure consistency of messaging which is still in use to this day. Arlene was also liaison to elected officials and government offices.

Arlene moved from the Garden to The Leukemia Society of America (budget size $200M), where she was the National Director of Public Affairs. She developed the marketing/communications plans for the agency and oversaw the communications work of 72 chapter offices across the US. She helped launch the organization’s second-largest annual nationwide fundraiser, Light The Night. She also developed and rolled out the marketing/communications plans for re-branding the organization to The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, developing a multi-tiered strategy which targeted multiple audiences, and redeveloped the website, annual report, and visual and language guidelines for rollout to the chapters. She developed the organization’s first nationwide communications plan that provided templated press materials to chapters in order to ensure consistency of messaging. She also developed and taught the agency’s first communications seminar at their national conference–a session which ranked #1 by attendees as most valuable. Additionally, she was the organization’s liaison to the National Institutes of Health, and worked with the VP of Government Affairs to create leave behinds for lobbying visits.

When The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society relocated out of New York City, Arlene decided it was time to return to Pennsylvania to aid her ailing father. Until his passing, she was a freelance journalist, writing for a local newspaper group in northeastern PA. She covered a variety of issues, developing relationships with and interviewing elected officials, township and borough staff, federal agency staff, and business owners.

Arlene then joined Planned Parenthood of Northeast PA, as the Director of Public Relations and Advocacy. ln addition to running the publicity, branding, advertising, annual reports, emails and newsletters, Arlene also ran the separate 501(c)(4) political nonprofit organization. She built a corps of activists who would speak out about women’s right to reproductive healthcare. They joined Arlene on lobby days Arlene scheduled in Harrisburg and DC, wrote letters to the editor, attended rallies, and launched petitions. She was in charge of fundraising for the 501(c)(4) organization, thus developed an independent donor list and events. She worked with those donors to hold a series of house parties that educated the public on the issues, and to raise funds. Her direct mail solicitation letters elicited substantially higher response rates than the national average, and those of the 501(c)(3) organization’s fundraising department. She also built several coalition groups to coalesce people around issues they cared about, launching a Republicans for Choice group, a Clergy for Choice group, several college campus groups, and the CARE Coalitions for leaders of rape crisis centers in 15-surrounding counties. With Arlene’s extensive event production experience, she launched Republicans for Choice by enrolling community members then holding two launch receptions (to cover two distant areas of Pennsylvania) featuring Christie Todd Whitman, who Arlene secured at no cost to the organization. When launching Clergy for Choice, Arlene brought together clergy from a wide variety of faith traditions for a luncheon where they were able to learn more about the issues and openly discuss their individual challenges and successes in leading congregational life when such issues were on the table. When launching the CARE Coalition, Arlene developed an advocacy manual and brought together the EDs of all the rape crisis centers to teach them how to engage their community in the issues. There were only a couple of activists when Arlene started. She built a large and engaged group of politically active people, dedicated donors, and high-profile community influencers. Additionally, Arlene worked with the Planned Parenthood statewide PAC to help manage the political endorsement process, produce voters guides, and decide to whom the state PAC made political donations. Finally, Arlene was once again tapped to develop plans for re-branding an organization when the affiliate underwent a merger.

Arlene was then appointed the Executive Director of Civic Theatre of Allentown, where she was ran the organization, overseeing finance, facilities, human resources, fundraising, grant writing, marketing, communications, and external relations. Arlene was also ran the art house cinema, including film programming, and the theater school, including selecting scholarship recipients. She joined the organization weeks before the banking industry collapse of 2009 and led the staff through the financial turmoil without having to lay off anyone. She reworked many aspects of the organization to lower costs and increase income in order to recover from debt in prior years. An example of this was remaking the theater publications in a way that improved the quality of the publications while strengthening the brand image and saved the organization $20,000 per year. She launched a membership circle to increase fundraising, kicked off with a cocktail reception at the home of one of the city’s most notable residents. She produced several street fairs, laid the groundwork for government funding for theatre renovations, lobbied to change the name of the area to the “theatre district” and dramatically increased grant income. She led the renovation of the organization’s website and development of a new logo for improved branding.

Arlene then took on the Executive Director role at Mayfair Festival of the Arts, a multi-day community music and arts festival attended annually by approximately 25,000 people. Arlene was in charge of all the business aspects, from finance, administration, marketing, publicity, communications, branding, government affairs, human resources, fundraising, grant writing, and external relations, as well as the event production, creating a 3-day city in a park with hundreds of temporary structures for food, vendors, and stages. After years of debt accrued under previous executive directors, Arlene rebuilt relationships in the community to restore fundraising, partnerships and attendance. She organized press conferences to announced new alliances and new programming. She developed a donor base and dramatically expanded grant funding. Then, after yet another year of flooding in the park where the festival had always been held, Arlene took on the massive challenge of moving the event to a new location that offered attendees indoor spaces along with the traditional outdoor booths. She created artist coalitions to engage local artists in the development of the new indoor art gallery and stage, while still offering all the outdoor fun of the festival once held in a park. Within four years of joining Mayfair, Arlene’s leadership allowed the organization to pay off all their debt.

Arlene then took on the role of Executive Director of Keystone Opportunity Center, a poverty-fighting social service organization helping people develop independence through numerous programs focusing on access to food, housing and education. These programs included rapid rehousing for those experiencing homelessness, managing donated rental properties for our clients to increase the amount of affordable housing in the area, case management for seniors, veterans and other community members, high school equivalency education, English as a second language education, family literacy programs to improve the intellectual and social development of children, a food pantry serving two counties, and a mobile no-registration food pantry. Arlene was responsible for all business and programmatic aspects of the organization, as well as application and management of federal grants, which grew so much over her tenure that the organization underwent its first single audit, and it’s first monitoring session by The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The HUD monitor mentioned that it was the most organized she had seen any organization be during monitoring. Arlene was head of this institution during COVID and had to lead the staff through complete overhauls of every aspect of every program.

Due to Arlene’s reputation as a good federal grant manager, she was offered a job with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, where she helped grantees manage their federal grants, developed and led training sessions for grantees, held one-on-one trainings with grantees, created community round table discussions between HUD and elected officials, worked with federal legislators to help them answer constituent questions about HUD programs, conducted training sessions for staff of federal legislators, wrote press releases, and organized events to raise awareness of HUD programs. In March 2025, however, Arlene’s division was alerted that their workforce would be eliminated by a Reduction In Force.

• Arlene has taken the helm of organizations in a deficit and brought them into the black.
• She has broken down walls of workplace silos to knit together disparate employees.
• She has built community alliances that helped all involved.
• She served her country with hard work and dignity by helping numerous nonprofits and local governments do their best work.

Arlene Daily Solutions can now help you do your best work.