About Mac Cordell

Mac Cordell has spent nearly three decades moving between roles rarely seen in the same person: journalist, policy advisor, pastor, education leader, crisis communicator. That's the foundation Cordell Advisory sits on.

A superintendent doesn't need someone who can draft a clean press release. They need someone who's actually sat in more than one seat at the table when a decision goes public, and knows what's really at stake there.

Mac began as a freelance reporter in college. After school, he became Director of Publications for the Pennsylvania Builders Association, then Director of Communications for an international nonprofit.

Journalism pulled him back after that. He worked his way up to editor-in-chief over the years that followed, and learned what actually makes something newsworthy, how a good leader can steer even a difficult narrative, and what it looks like when a leader gets caught unprepared.

For more than a decade, alongside that newsroom work, Mac was also a bivocational pastor. Journalist and pastor put him in the same room, over and over, with people on their worst day, a family getting bad news, a community trying to make sense of a tragedy. He learned when to stay quiet and just listen, and when someone needed the truth said plainly but gently. People walked away feeling like they'd been cared for, not handled.

Along the way, Mac has done freelance PR for law enforcement agencies, religious organizations, business startups, and nonprofits. He currently serves as communications and policy director for national organizations, doing federal and state advocacy work for refugee and immigrant students.