Kerrie Brinkman White
Director of Institutional Advancement, First Americans Museum Foundation (Fundraising, Development, Marketing)
I hired Cricket Kaya into a role that didn't yet exist at First Americans Museum. The position was written to manage our grants and streamline our financial processes, especially our contributed revenue, but Cricket’s work provided the infrastructure to move from capital-campaign survival mode into critical and stable strategic growth, answering a need we didn’t even realize desperately needed to be addressed. Cricket understands that thoughtfulness, trust, and thoroughness are critical to nonprofit work.
Cricket built our donor database and gift-processing system from scratch, while also turning prospect research from an occasional task into something the fundraising team relies on daily. It is not common to find someone equally suited to precise financial work and to the relational work of fundraising, and Cricket moves between the two without missing a step.
All of the grants at FAM are managed by Cricket, from identification through the final report. This process requires tracking dozens of deadlines across different funders, holding program staff accountable to commitments made in a proposal months earlier, and communicating clearly and diplomatically with funders, board members, and colleagues. This year Cricket carried that portfolio from $124,800 to $857,000 for the year, past an $800,000 goal, with active support secured from the Getty Foundation, the Terra Foundation, and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences.
First Americans Museum was built around one principle: thirty-nine tribal nations, each with its own sovereignty and its own history, presented without being flattened into a single narrative. Donor relationships at FAM work the same way. A gift is often an act of belonging, and trust gets built one relationship at a time, never assumed. Cricket carries judgment and discretion into every relationship they hold, with donors, foundations, Tribal partners, and colleagues across our organization. I recommend Cricket Kaya without reservation and with great confidence.
Direct Supervisor
Dr Emma Colven PhD
Funding Research Analyst at Climate Finance Solutions; Professor of Global Environment and Geography at Kings College London
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In my 8 years of teaching college courses, Cricket has been one of my most brilliant students. Cricket took several classes with me in her time at OU, including a demanding capstone course, for which she delivered a polished and sophisticated analysis of the 2021 ice storm that hit Texas using perspectives from political economy and political ecology. The paper demonstrated Cricket's command of research methods, epistemologies and ontologies, as well as her expertise in disaster studies and scholarship on energy justice.
Cricket is a highly talented writer and strong researcher, with an ability to weave theoretical concepts and empirical data into compelling analytical narratives. Her honors research on the politics of wind energy in OK was especially impressive. Cricket interviewed local residents in her hometown of Kingfisher, and conducted archival research at the local library, which required the laborious task of searching through microfilmed holdings over period of months to compose a 90 page document of relevant news articles for analysis.
Notably, Cricket's honors thesis was selected from 80 submissions for inclusion in the 2021-22 edition of The University of Oklahoma Honors Undergraduate Research Journal, which publishes 8 to 12 of "the best undergraduate research papers from the previous year written by Honors students, as determined by an editorial board of their peers."Cricket is also a talented designer and illustrator. She co-designed and executive a highly effective infographic as part of a group project for my Environmental Justice and Global Cities course. Impressed with Cricket's science communication skills, I have since asked her to prepare illustrations based on my research to help communicate my findings to the public.In addition to her communication, research, and writing skills, Cricket is an excellent colleague to her peers. Generous with her time, Cricket excels at giving constructive feedback and working with others.Cricket was a joy to have in my courses, and I appreciated her passion for energy, climate and immigration justice, which drove her work. Any company or institution would be lucky to have Cricket join their team.
Research Advisor