Writer, Strategist & Fractional Chief Impact Officer
"The most important thing I carry forward is a commitment to do good even better."
There are people who walk into a room already prepared to give. Kristi Porter is one of them.
I first met her through our mutual friend Aisha, founder of Universal Inclusion, whose work in diversity, equity, and inclusion both Kristi and I deeply believe in. We were in a working session together and I watched Kristi operate. The way she listened, the way she contributed, the resources she had already thought to bring before anyone asked. I knew immediately I wanted to know her better.
She co-hosts Logistics With Purpose®, the only podcast dedicated to supply chain's positive impact on the world, now well past 150 episodes of spotlighting organizations doing meaningful work from the inside out. I was the 150th guest. It was a conversation that went places I did not expect, which is exactly what happens when someone is as genuinely curious and present as Kristi is.
Kristi describes herself as a Fractional Chief Impact Officer and her mission in four words: do good even better. Her Christian faith is, she says plainly, "my reason for being. It guides the work I do, the clients I help, and the causes I serve." Writing has been her instrument for twenty-five years, a gift she discovered in her early twenties when she realized, with something close to disbelief, that people would pay her to do it. In an era when AI can generate text on command, she still tells every young writer she meets to keep going. Keep crafting. That skill will always find a home.
She is also one of the rarest things in professional life: a woman who will bring up your name in rooms you are not in. Who racks her brain to hand over every resource she can think of, and digs for the ones you didn't know you needed yet. She is present and curious enough with people that they leave feeling genuinely heard. Leave a conversation with her and you will walk away with a book recommendation, an introduction she is already planning to make, a question you cannot stop turning over. She calls it free advice. It's actually a form of love.
The work that animates Kristi most began with frustration. For years, she watched talented friends lead nonprofits and social enterprises without the support they needed. They were brilliant at their missions and constantly stretched thin, caring for people on their worst days, building programs, keeping the lights on. Their stories weren't being told clearly, and that meant fewer people understood, engaged, or gave. "It woke me up to how many good missions stay hidden simply because they aren't communicated well," she says. That frustration became a calling. In 2016, she founded Signify. The name is intentional. To signify: to make known. That is the work.
But the through line of her career runs deeper than Signify, and stretches back further than 2016. Around 2010, Kristi began volunteering with Not For Sale Georgia, learning how buying decisions affect human lives in ways most people never see. A group of them created a guide called Purchase With Purpose in 2012, to help people make more informed choices about what they bought. She kept learning about human trafficking and slave labor in supply chains throughout the years. "It's funny to me that I now work in supply chain as a Fractional Chief Impact Officer," she says. "I never saw that coming." The origin story was Not For Sale. The invisible made visible. She has been doing that work ever since.
Today she serves as Chief Impact Officer at Vector Global Logistics, an award-winning company whose mission is to change the world through supply chain, where she oversees all social and environmental impact efforts including Logistics With Purpose®. And on March 5, 2024, she opened an email she had spent two years working toward: Vector had earned its B Corp Certification™. "It is still one of my proudest professional accomplishments," she says. But what moves her most is a requirement she finds quietly profound. To become certified, companies must update their legal governing documents to state that leadership must always consider impact on both people and the planet. "This protects the mission," she says. "No matter what else happens around us, we decided not only to think of ourselves. Even if that was the only step we'd take, it still would be a win."
Kristi returns often to the impact report as a tool, describing it not as a glossy document but as a mirror and a lighthouse at once. The first one she created for Horizon Services, an organization providing alcohol, drug, and mental health services to adults and adolescents, has never left her. While working on it, she interviewed people whose lives had been changed by their programs. One man's story she has never been able to set down. He had returned to their sobering center 126 times before getting clean. "I had to ask myself honestly," she says, "would I be patient enough to show care and kindness 126 times, knowing he might relapse and come back again? I don't know if I would. But they did." In the depths of his addiction, that man knew exactly where he could go. He felt safe enough, seen enough, to keep returning. They were there until he was ready. "That's impact you can't always capture in a spreadsheet," Kristi says. "But you can feel it in the room."
For more than ten years, Kristi has lived with chronic health issues and a largely undefined diagnosis. It touches every part of her life. It was one of the reasons she launched her own business, and it remains her biggest hurdle. She is a doer by nature, a workaholic by instinct, and the illness has tested both harder than she anticipated. "There is still a struggle between what I want to do and what I'm able to do." For a long time it meant being stuck at home far more than she wanted. She jokes she should have designed her own loungewear line for all the hours spent in bed or on the couch. The illness taught her something she admits she learned later than she should have: no one is going to force you to take care of yourself. "It's called self-care for a reason. You have to advocate for it."
What she didn't expect was that the illness would also deepen her work. Every person and organization she serves feels limited in time, energy, and resources. Living inside those constraints herself made her more genuinely empathetic, less theoretical about it.
"Reminding leaders that they are not alone is sometimes the most important thing I can do."
Underneath all of it runs a cause she has carried for nearly twenty years. In 2006, she sat in a conference room listening to Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission speak for fifteen minutes before lunch. When everyone else got up to eat, she sat there unable to move. Slavery still existed. Nearly fifty million people worldwide were trapped in modern slavery. Human trafficking had been reported in every state, every zip code, every community in the United States. "I sat there, stunned, wondering what I could do," she says. "Instantly, I knew I would dedicate myself to this cause." She has not wavered. She is an abolitionist, involved as a volunteer, advocate, donor, and researcher ever since. Someone once asked her how she could stay close to something so dark. She answered without hesitating: "I guess that's how I know I was called to it."
Four years ago in November, Kristi gave up her permanent address and hit the road. It was not a lifestyle choice. It was a removal of excuses. "Vacations felt like a luxury and something I just didn't have energy for, no matter how long I'd wanted to visit a location," she says. "So through full-time travel, I removed that feeling from the equation. I take the vacation with me." She still works during the week and goes sightseeing on weekends. She believes in rhythm over balance, in seasons of fullness and seasons of rest, in paying attention to the tide rather than fighting it. As of July 2026, she has visited all 50 states. People ask how long she'll keep going. Her answer never changes: until it stops being fun. For now, it's still fun.
Kristi inspires my sense of exploration and adventure while grounding me in what actually matters. She expands your world and focuses it at the same time. What amazes me most is her capacity for all of it, the connecting, the caring, the advocating, the showing up, while quietly managing a body that doesn't always cooperate and a world that keeps asking more of people who are already giving everything. She has spent twenty-five years showing up for work that most people never see, for leaders who are running on empty, for people whose freedom was stolen, and she does it with the same steady care she brings to everything. "The most important thing I carry forward," she says, "is a commitment to do good even better: to serve with empathy, protect my own capacity, and use my skills, voice, and freedom to amplify others, especially those on the frontlines of hard, holy work."
She is a true advocate for life and freedom. And I'm grateful she's out there doing it.
