Grounded in experience. Designed for real-world change.
SoWell Education Partners was founded by former school and system leaders who spent years inside the realities of growth, change, and continuous improvement, and wanted to do the work differently.
What we learned from the inside
SoWell started with a question we kept asking inside our own buildings: how do we expand impact beyond one classroom or one counselor session? We had spent our careers inside the education system as teachers, counselors, leaders, and school founders, and we kept landing on the same answer: it wasn't a new initiative we needed. It was the conditions underneath one. The schedule, the meeting structure, the support system, and whether the adults doing the work were supported or simply expected to absorb it.
So we started a practice built around those conditions. We look hard at what is actually happening in a school, name the root causes in plain language, and stay long enough for new practice to hold. We take the piecemeal initiatives a school is already carrying and pull them into one approach, tied back to a single vision with wellness built in from the start.
We have led buildings through turnaround, opened new schools, balanced budgets that did not want to balance, and sat with staff on the hardest days of the year. What we recommend, we have already done ourselves.
Three beliefs that shape every engagement
Supported Adults
Students cannot be well in a building where the adults are running on fumes. Culture work that skips the staff experience does not last past the first hard work.
What this looks like in practice: We start with the adults in the building before we ever talk about student outcomes.
Academics & SEL
Schools that run wellness, social emotional learning, and student support as separate systems apart from academics end up with a disjointed and reactive system that impacts every condition in your building.
What this looks like in practice: We examine all aspects of student support and integrate it with academics and climate inside the same engagement.
Sustainable Systems
A partnership that leaves a school dependent on a consultant has failed, however good the plan looked on paper.
What this looks like in practice: We leave your team able to run the work without us, then we step back on purpose.
Kate spent nine years building a Colorado charter school from the ground up, starting in a church basement with 96 students and growing it to a top-performing school serving 580+ students and 80+ staff. As Founder and Executive Director, she held ultimate responsibility for vision, strategy, fundraising, board partnership, operations, finance, and compliance, and led a sustainability strategy that generated over $30M in public, philanthropic, and community support, including $13M in bond financing for long-term growth.
Under her leadership, the school earned a five-year charter renewal and recognition as a Colorado Department of Education School of Excellence. In 2025, she was named Colorado Charter School Leader of the Year and inducted into the Titan100 Hall of Fame, an honor given to a small group of business leaders who have demonstrated sustained excellence over multiple years.
Before founding her school, Kate worked as a founding teacher and instructional leader with Uncommon Schools Network in New York, and taught math, special education, and ELA with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and Teach For America. She holds an EdD from the University of Colorado Denver, a MEd from Relay Graduate School of Education, and completed a Senior Executive Fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School.
At SoWell, Kate brings the operational and financial depth of someone who has actually run a nine-figure nonprofit through startup, growth, and sustained performance, not just advised on it from the outside. Her background as a classroom teacher and instructional leader also means she knows what strong academic instruction actually looks like in a building, not just how to fund and govern around it. She leads coaching and support for executive board members, executive directors, and nonprofit leaders navigating the same challenges she solved firsthand: building systems, securing funding, and leading through change without losing sight of the people the work is for.
Kate Mullins, EdD
Ashley started her career as a school counselor in Illinois, working across several districts including Title I schools, where she saw firsthand how much a student's ability to learn depends on whether they feel safe, seen, and supported. That early experience shaped everything that followed.
After moving to Colorado, she spent three years as a counselor in Aurora Public Schools, then took on bullying prevention and student support work at Mapleton Public Schools before joining a Colorado charter school as Director of Student Support, a role she held for four and a half years. There, she built school counseling and student support systems from the ground up and pushed for a model where mental health carried equal weight and equal resourcing alongside academics, rather than functioning as a side initiative that had to fight for a seat at the table.
Ashley holds an EdD in Urban Education and Leadership from the University of Colorado Denver, a Master's in School Counseling from Roosevelt University, Bachelor’s in Psychology from the University of Iowa and a Mental Health Studies certificate from Capella University. Ashley is also a National Board Certified Counselor. She also serves on the leadership team for SEL4CO, Colorado's social emotional learning alliance.
At SoWell, Ashley brings the lens of someone who has done the work most school counselors who move into leadership never get the chance to do: operate as an equal leader alongside academics, not underneath them. She leads coaching for school counselors, mental health teams, and culture leaders like deans of students, as well as principals and other building-level administrators, drawing directly on the systems she built and led herself.