Imagine Another Way.™
Every era reaches a point when yesterday's answers are no longer enough. Organizations lose coherence. Communities become divided. Leaders carry extraordinary responsibility while navigating uncertainty, complexity, and constant change.
The question is no longer whether disruption will come. The question is what kind of leadership will emerge because of it.
TubmanWalker exists to answer that question — a leadership, advisory, and creative practice helping executives, institutions, philanthropies, cities, and communities transform disruption into clarity, imagination, resilience, and lasting impact.
Our work sits at the intersection of strategy, culture, spirituality, creativity, and human flourishing, because the challenges leaders face today are no longer merely operational. They are deeply human.
The Meaning Behind Our Name
TubmanWalker is more than a name. It is a philosophy of leadership — built on two women whose lives continue to shape how we understand courage, creativity, and transformation.
Harriet Tubman teaches us that courageous leadership changes lives. She carried light through impossible circumstances, helping others find freedom when no path seemed visible. Her legacy is moral clarity, resilience, stewardship, and unwavering action.
Alice Walker teaches us that imagination changes culture. Through story, art, and truth-telling, she expanded what people believed was possible. Her work reminds us that transformation begins when we learn to see differently.
The courage to move. The imagination to create. TubmanWalker lives where those two forces meet.
Our lantern symbolizes that inheritance — light carried through uncertainty until others can see the path for themselves.
Rev. Dr. Shelley D. Best
Rev. Dr. Shelley D. Best M.Div. (Yale Divinity School) · D.Min. · RYT-200 · MMTCP-Certified · Founder & CEO, TubmanWalker
Rev. Dr. Shelley Best builds frameworks for leaders and institutions navigating disruption — and she has spent three decades doing the work herself, at the intersection of ministry, art, and organizational leadership.
She holds a Master of Arts and Doctor of Ministry from Hartford International University and a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School, where her essay "Grateful for a Savior Who Declares: We are Beloved" was published in Reflections, the school's national theological magazine, in its Spring 2025 issue. In 2020, Yale Divinity School honored her with its Alumni Award for Distinction in Congregational Ministry — watch the video feature; in 2019, sixteen of her abstract paintings, collectively titled "What Is Black?," were exhibited at YDS. She is an ordained elder in the A.M.E. Zion Church.
Her leadership has been recognized publicly and repeatedly. Hartford Business Journal named her one of Connecticut's innovators in its Innovators Issue cover feature and placed her at #26 on its Power 50 list, citing her work transforming Greater Hartford's arts and culture sector. Earlier in her career, colleagues in Hartford's nonprofit and faith communities publicly described her as "an innovative visionary who looks out and sees what's possible."
Dr. Best has led at the highest levels of Connecticut's nonprofit and civic sectors — including as President & CEO of The Conference of Churches and CEO of the Greater Hartford Arts Council — and has stewarded more than $25 million in philanthropic and civic investment over her career. At The Conference of Churches, she led the purchase and transformation of a former Hartford arts center into the 224 EcoSpace, a 30,000-square-foot venue Yale Divinity School has called "one of the most distinctive office spaces in the city" — work that earned a 2020 Traditioned Innovation Award from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity and a featured interview in Faith & Leadership. A gubernatorial appointee across multiple Connecticut administrations, she served as Connecticut's leader in faith-based initiatives during both the Bush and Obama administrations, directing the state's Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. For twenty-two years, she has hosted Rich Answers, a Sunday morning radio program reaching more than 75,000 listeners across Southern New England.
She is the author of Creative Disruptor: How Artists and Innovators Build Influence, Drive Change, and Shape the Future, and the creator of Creative Disruption®, a registered framework now taught through her studio, TubmanWalker. Her art has been exhibited at Yale Divinity School ("What Is Black?," 2019) and in a solo show at the Norfolk Library in Norfolk, CT (2021). She is a co-producer of Making a Difference: Children Betrayed, a 1994 WFSB documentary special on child welfare, produced alongside Matthew Mixon and hosted by Al Terzi, which earned a regional Emmy nomination. She is also a certified mindfulness teacher, trained under Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, and a registered yoga teacher (RYT-200).
Today, through TubmanWalker, Dr. Best works with CEOs, foundations, universities, and civic institutions ready to move from disruption to vision.
