Through Amplify Impact, Melissa Duclos Turns Up the Volume for Progressive Changemakers

A Q Center Standing on Business Spotlight

The founder and principal strategist at Amplify Impact–one of Q Center’s Standing on Business partners–has an unexpected background for a marketing consultant. Melissa Duclos is a published novelist, essayist, and critic with an MFA in creative writing and more than 15 years experience teaching and facilitating writing workshops. 

“This year of business exploration with Amplify Impact has been so much more fun than I expected it to be, because I’ve combined my love of creative writing and teaching with everything I learned over a decade working in marketing and communications.”  

In her work with Q Center, Melissa piloted a new approach to sharing the impact of our programs with our growing audience. Using transcripts of her one-on-one conversations with Q Center program volunteers and community members, Melissa is creating stories for our blog and social media accounts that center our voices and perspectives. 

“Once I finish collecting stories, I shape them into compelling first-person narratives, a process that’s different from a more journalistic approach that would use these conversations as background to inform an article. Maintaining the immediacy of the first-person voice telling me the story is important, and it’s a skill I’ve honed over decades writing, teaching, and editing creative nonfiction.  

“When I thought about where to pilot this approach, I immediately thought about Q Center because of how important LGBTQIA2S community support is to me, my family, and so many people I love. My conversations with everyone at Q Center throughout this project were so full of joy, love, and community care. It’s been an honor to craft these stories (coming soon to this blog!) and I sometimes can’t believe I’m lucky enough to do this work for a living.”

Community writing facilitation and digital storytelling are only one facet of Melissa’s work through Amplify Impact. She’s also building marketing coaching cohorts with the goal of making strategic, ongoing marketing coaching affordable to individual authors and other creators, small nonprofit organizations, and mission-driven small businesses. She’s currently enrolling small group marketing cohorts and will be offering drop-in monthly coaching beginning in 2027. 

The coaching program, like all of Melissa’s consulting and teaching artist offerings, was developed in collaboration with the types of clients she hopes to work with. “My writing camps and clubs for middle school students were developed with middle school students. My coaching for authors and small business owners was developed with authors and small business owners. I love this kind of collaboration because I have so much to learn from every client I work with. Next year, I’m excited to develop a low-cost marketing coaching cohort in partnership with small business owner and Ms. Black Portland, Ebonee Beauty PDX, who is using her platform to make beauty and wellness services more accessible to Black people and to inspire more Black aestheticians.”

All Melissa’s clients through Amplify Impact share a commitment to advancing equity and justice, creating communities of care around marginalized groups, or otherwise resisting facism and the erosion of human rights. “I love collaborating with people who are, in the words of John Lewis, making ‘good trouble’. If you’re speaking up to advance justice or oppose facism, I want to help amplify your voice and your impact.”