Holly Carlson

I've been with the Department of the Army for four years, working in two different organizations in vastly different roles. For the past two years, I've served as a Ready and Resilient Integrator, where I implement suicide prevention programs, holistic health and fitness programs, and integrated prevention programs throughout the Army. My expertise is really recognizing that not one person can be everything, so I look for opportunities to be the bridge between departments or sister organizations. At the end of the day, my goal is just to take care of that soldier on the ground. Before coming to government, I grew up in the marketing world and self-taught social media marketing right as it was coming into play, before it was too big. Social media and I grew up together. I came to government from the nonprofit world, where I was used to wearing four hats at one time. I really went from social media marketing and graduated to digital media strategist, and from there, jumped to government. One of my most notable achievements has been creating a cross-functional team in an organization with 7,000 employees. When I came on board, we had organizations with very similar work, but it's very easy to get siloed in your work and your data when you're busy. By making friends and influencing people, I really got buy-in so that between the different prevention people seated at the table, we all know each other's jobs. I may not be a sexual assault response person, but I know their job, so if I'm out in the field and somebody has questions, I know how to answer it. Creating that really tight-knit team in such a large organization is really hard, but also really important.