Interim Chief of Staff
Adria is The Interim Chief of Staff at Centre for Public Impact.
She joined CPI in 2021.
Adria Finch received a BS from Ithaca College, where she studied physiology. She then went on to study Biomechanics at East Carolina University, where she earned her MS. Adria also received her MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Most of Adria’s academic work has been in the scientific field, but she took her love of science and applied it to government work. She always approaches work by using the ‘scientific method’, like she did in school. This means trying to understand a problem, looking at the data, forming a hypothesis about how to address the challenge, conducting an experiment, measuring the impact of it, and then either scaling up or going back to the drawing board.
During her time as Chief Innovation Officer at the City of Syracuse, Adria focused on solving both external public facing challenges, as well as internal operations challenges. Adria also led the strategy work for the Mayor’s Office. Her personal favourite project was in the behavioural economics field – she changed the way the delinquent tax letters looked, and handwrote “You must read this! -Martha” on the envelopes. This resulted in the city collecting $1.5 million in back taxes, bringing back hundreds of people from tax delinquency.
Adria loves to figure out how to make things work, and how to make them stick. She started getting into this when she worked for the City of Syracuse, and has carried it over to her work at CPI. In the programmatic world, she did this with the i-tems programme, where her team worked directly with six cities to develop innovation sustainability plans to help ensure that their innovation function worked well for their own city, and that it would stand the test of time. Internally, she loved working on the North America Strategy, redefining the global values, streamlining processes, and increasing transparency for the rest of the staff.
Adria also dedicates a lot of her time focusing on work related to Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, which is a rare, muscle-wasting disease that her son lives with. Adria participates in advocacy work, partners on academic studies and educates people about the disease in order to encourage advancements in science.
In her leisure time, Adria loves to travel, ride her bike and eat good food. Her perfect day would be riding her bike around town with her children, stopping at local cafes, the farmers’ market, and hopping in the lake.