“A resourceful and innovative leader.”

“A brave and confident educator.”

“A creative, steady powerhouse.”

These are the words our team uses to describe Alissa Christensen, Alpaca’s Head of Customer Success, Queen of Little Wins, and Resident Educator, who celebrates two years at Alpaca today!

The words that came up the most? CREATIVE and STEADY. Do you know how hard it is to be both creative and steady?!

At Alpaca, we come up with a lot of big ideas. (Small team, big dreams!) So it was perhaps no surprise to Alissa at our March 1:1 meeting that I wondered aloud “I’ve always dreamed that we could host a summer camp for teachers.” Alissa took approximately one half second to say “I think we could make this happen.”

And with those words, committed herself to an extraordinary undertaking.

Camp Alpaca required so much creativity. Alissa got right to work — she enlisted Kimberly, myself, and our team to come up with an internship program for educators that felt more like a creative conference than a summer internship. But the program was a paid internship, so it also had to produce content, product design, and educator voice into our company.

With Alissa’s educator mindset, she built a plan for Camp that she knew would resonate with teachers, complete with fun icebreakers and warm-ups, activities with partners, lunches and ice cream socials, and opportunities to truly LEARN big things in the creative space.

But nothing that big gets built just because it’s fun, creative, and a great idea. Building something great requires consistent, steady execution.

Nowhere was that more true than Camp Alpaca, and it’s where true magic happened under Alissa’s leadership. As the planning got going, Alissa taught us how to craft and teach lessons to educators in a way that felt like true professional development, not just slides on a screen. She and Kimberly built templates, brand kits, guidelines, and a SYSTEM for educators to build and contribute truly valuable resources for Alpaca.

And because of that steady planning, everything at camp worked like clockwork. The lessons were delivered, the work was reviewed, the feedback was delivered, the end results were produced, and the campers were recognized and celebrated, all without the process feeling stuffy or strict or overbearing. Trusted, joyful, and rewarding is what it felt like. One of our campers said the experience “gave her a new outlook on what it means to go to work every day.” That’s steady, creative leadership at work.

This combination of creative and steady is the hallmark of everything Alissa does. She is an endless source of creative ideas for Alpaca Resources (which she now creates alongside a team of educators that she has built), and every new resource surprises and delights our community of 11,000+ school leaders.

Plus, she steadily publishes those resources every single week, on time and at great quality, in our Little Wins newsletter. It’s never been late, and it’s always excellent. One of her coworkers explained it like this —

“Alissa is always ready to try out new ideas and brings them to life so well, even when time is limited.”

I couldn’t be more grateful that Alissa chose to bring her brilliant ideas and her steady execution of those ideas to Alpaca’s product, customers, and team. Our team members said it best:

“She has a rare ability to take care of people (our customers and our team) and deliver insanely high-quality work—fast. Alissa’s teacher brain + creative engine = magic.”

We’ll keep you fueled with iced oat milk lattes, Alissa, if you keep bringing your creative, steady leadership to the world — we’re looking forward to another year of magic ahead!

KB

Team Letter

Creative, steady leadership: Alissa…