Cassius Johnson

West Palm Beach, FL
Perceptist
LinkedIn
Contact: cassius@perceptist.com
he/him

Most often works with: Private Foundations, Community Foundations, Intermediary Grantmaking Organizations

Challenges most often addressed:

• Perceptist helps foundations and nonprofits navigate strategic planning, organizational and leadership transitions, and change management.

• We are most effective when organizations are facing complexity or inflection points—clarifying strategy, strengthening communications and organizational capacity, and designing participatory, discovery-driven processes that share power and center the people and communities closest to the work.

Cassius Johnson is a strategist, facilitator, and advisor with expertise in strategy design, change management, and communications capacity for the social sector. He is the co-founder and CEO of Perceptist, a firm that helps foundations and nonprofits translate complexity into coherent, values-aligned strategy—work grounded in a conviction that the people and communities closest to a challenge should hold real power in shaping the strategy meant to serve them.

Cassius has held a range of leadership roles during almost three decades spanning philanthropy, workforce development, government, and the private sector. As a Program Officer at Carnegie Corporation of New York, he supported national grantmaking in education and economic opportunity. Earlier, at Jobs for the Future, he advanced state and federal policies to expand economic mobility for young people and under-skilled workers.

Much of Cassius's recent work centers change management as a primary strategic intervention. With the Missouri Foundation for Health, he helped the foundation evolve from siloed, issue-area grantmaking toward an integrated, ecosystem-building strategy—supporting the internal "letting go and taking on" that meaningful transitions require. With Axim Collaborative, he guided a multi-phase engagement that moved from strategy design to grantmaking approach to the tools of implementation—a "what, how, and with what" arc.

A frequent voice on strategy and equity in the social sector, Cassius has testified before the U.S. Senate HELP Committee and was named a Barbara Jordan Scholar in graduate school. He has served on the Massachusetts state workforce development board. He currently chairs the Education Advisory Board for the city of Greenacres, Florida, where he is raising his 11-year-old daughter.