KEENE, N.H.—On a Tuesday morning, Molly Ola Pinney might be on a Zoom call coaching an ABA clinic owner in Miami on how to read a P&L at the $10 million mark. By afternoon, she’s reviewing partnership applications from an autism center in Rwanda. By evening, she’s back home in rural New Hampshire, where the nearest neighbor is a quarter mile down the road and her toddler doesn’t care about any of it.
Pinney is the founder and CEO of the Global Autism Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has spent more than two decades building autism service capacity across roughly 20 countries. She is a board member at Gracent, a national ABA and pediatric therapy platform backed by KKR and Altamont Capital. And alongside her wife, Aja Davis, she runs ABA Business Coach, a consulting practice that helps clinic owners scale from startup to multi-location operations. Three ventures. Three completely different operating models. One throughline: a philosophy she articulated in a 2017 TEDx talk that has quietly shaped everything she’s built.
“Doing things for others doesn’t help,” Pinney told the audience at TEDx New Bedford. “Doing things with people—that’s what changes the world.”
A Babysitting Job, a Flight to Accra, and a Line Out the Door
The origin story sounds almost accidental—until you realize every decision was deliberate. In the early 2000s, Pinney was working as an ABA therapist in Seattle for a six-year-old boy with autism. The job had an expiration date: the family was moving to Ghana in nine months. Pinney had plans of her own. She was going to become a developmental pediatrician. Ghana was not in the picture.
She moved to Ghana anyway.
Once there, something shifted. People in the community started showing up at her door—families asking for “the lady who knew about autism.” The stories were devastating and consistent: children believed to be possessed by bad spirits, mothers who told Pinney they would have preferred a terminal diagnosis. One mother confided that the stigma of autism was worse than the condition itself. Pinney met “Auntie Serwah,” a local parent who had started the Autism Awareness Care & Training center in Accra, and saw something she couldn’t walk away from: a community that wanted to learn, not be saved.
In 2003, at 23 years old, she founded the Global Autism Project. The goal was simple and enormous: start in Ghana, then go everywhere.
20 Countries, 200 Leaders, and a Model That Outlasts the Visit
The Global Autism Project, headquartered in Keene, New Hampshire, is built on a model Pinney calls “do with, not for.” The organization partners with existing autism centers around the world—in Ghana, Peru, India, Kenya, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, China, Uganda, Nigeria, Rwanda, Japan, Ecuador, and others—and provides clinical, administrative, and leadership training designed to persist after the Global Autism Project team goes home.
The flagship program is SkillCorps®, a two-week immersion that sends teams of BCBAs, SLPs, occupational therapists, self-advocates, and family members to partner sites. Each volunteer fundraises a minimum of $5,000. Before traveling, teams attend a two-day orientation with 75 to 100 other SkillCorps members. Partnerships are designed to last five to seven years, long enough for centers to operate independently and disseminate training within their own communities.
The organization also runs Responsive Skills Training™, a curriculum that prepares practitioners for the RBT®, IBT®, and ABAT® credentials. Its Leadership Academy—a six-week online program—has trained more than 200 participants from around the globe. The Autism Knows No Borders® podcast, launched during the pandemic, features episodes with autistic self-advocates, clinicians, educators, and families. And through the RAISE program (Real Advancement, Independence, Social Skills, and Empowerment), the organization has employed adults with autism at its former New York City headquarters, training them in transferable job skills.
The Global Autism Project holds consultative status with the United Nations. Pinney has spoken at the UN General Assembly on World Autism Awareness Day and has addressed audiences at conferences and universities on four continents.
From the Conference Floor to the Board Table
Pinney’s presence in the ABA industry’s business and investment circles has deepened significantly. At the Autism Investor Summit in April 2025, she sat on a panel alongside Jason Barker, CEO of ABA Centers of America, and David Harbour, CEO of Centria Autism, discussing M&A strategy, PE capital deployment, and what standardized care outcomes might look like in an industry still fighting over how to measure quality. At BHASE 2025, she led a breakout session called “The CFO at Scale: What Does Financial Management Look Like at $1M, $10M, and $50M?” At BHASE 26 in Miami, she moderated a panel on clinical excellence and value-based care alongside leaders from ERPHealth, HopeBridge Autism Therapy Centers, and the Allied Trades Assistance Program.
She also serves as a board member for Gracent, a national provider of ABA and pediatric therapy services backed by FS KKR Capital Corp. and Altamont Capital. Gracent operates under two brands—North Shore Pediatric Therapy in Chicagoland and Pine Cone Therapies in Texas—with more than a dozen centers offering ABA, speech, occupational, and physical therapy, mental health services, and neuropsychology. The company’s other independent board members include Amy Kennedy, co-founder of The Kennedy Forum. Gracent launched in 2022 after KKR and Altamont retained the autism therapy assets from Sequel Youth & Family Services.
The board role is notable for what it signals about Pinney’s range: she bridges the nonprofit world, where sustainability is an ethical imperative, and the PE-backed world, where sustainability is a financial one. Few people in the ABA space can speak fluently to both audiences.
Coaching Clinic Owners at Scale
ABA Business Coach, the consulting practice Pinney runs with Davis, targets a specific gap: BCBAs and clinic directors who are excellent clinicians but have never been taught to run a business. The practice offers one-on-one coaching, a Mastermind cohort program, and ABA Start-Up Lab for practitioners in the early stages of launching a practice. Clients have reported doubling revenue while maintaining clinical quality—a claim that tracks with Pinney’s BHASE session on financial management at different revenue thresholds.
“You started this clinic because you saw exactly how things could be better,” the ABA Business Coach website reads. “Kids getting the support they truly need. Families feeling heard and understood. And clinically? You’re knocking it out of the park. But behind the scenes, it’s a different story.” The framing is deliberate: clinical excellence without operational competence is a recipe for burnout and closure, two outcomes the ABA industry can’t afford.
Dublin, New Hampshire, and the Rest of the Story
Pinney grew up in Dublin, New Hampshire—population 1,532—and returned to the region after years in Brooklyn. She and Davis, who holds a Psy.D. from Georgetown University, are married with a young child. Davis previously ran New Body Boot Camp NYC and served as Director of Operations at the Global Autism Project before the couple pivoted to ABA Business Coach. The two also co-founded “White People. DOING Something,” a Facebook community that grew to more than 40,000 members after the murder of George Floyd, focused on actionable racial justice education.
In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Pinney flew to Poland with a small team to coordinate support for displaced Ukrainian families with autistic children. She received hundreds of messages from families who had spent weeks in bomb shelters, then crossed borders with children who had lost access to every therapeutic routine they depended on. The Global Autism Project partnered with Operation White Stork to provide emergency housing vouchers and connect families to autism services in Poland.
The Throughline
Pinney earned her BA in Sociology with a concentration in Neuroscience from Columbia University’s School of General Studies. In 2019, the university awarded her the Medal for Excellence—given to one alumnus or alumna under 45 whose record in scholarship, public service, or professional life is outstanding. In 2012, she rang the NASDAQ closing bell with her team, broadcast live on national television. She has been recognized with the Comcast NBCUniversal Leadership Award as a City Year alumna and the Autism Light Foundation Award.But the accolades are not the story. The story is this: at 23, people started showing up at her door in Ghana, and she didn’t leave. Twenty-two years later, she’s still answering the door—it’s just that the door now opens onto investor summits in Beverly Hills, therapy centers in Nairobi, coaching calls with clinic owners in Dallas, and a Gracent board meeting where the conversation is about scaling pediatric care across the Midwest. The venues change. The instinct doesn’t.
When your career starts with a babysitting job in Seattle and winds through Accra, the NASDAQ floor, the UN General Assembly, and a KKR-backed boardroom—and you’re still running the nonprofit you founded at 23—the throughline isn’t ambition. It’s the rare ability to do with, rather than for, at every altitude.
Global Autism Project
Website: globalautismproject.org
Headquarters: 31 Central Square #15, Keene, NH 03431
Programs: SkillCorps® • Responsive Skills Training™ • Leadership Academy • Global Summit™
ABA Business Coach
Website: ababusinesscoach.com
Programs: 1:1 Coaching • Mastermind Cohort • ABA Start-Up Lab
Gracent (Board Member)
Website: gracentcares.com
Brands: North Shore Pediatric Therapy (IL) • Pine Cone Therapies (TX)
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/mollyolapinney
Podcast
Autism Knows No Borders® — Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart
Conference Appearances
Autism Investor Summit (2025) • BHASE 2025 & 2026 • Autism Investor Summit East (2026) • TEDx New Bedford (2017) • United Nations General Assembly
Awards & Recognition
Columbia University Medal for Excellence (2019) • Comcast NBCUniversal Leadership Award • Autism Light Foundation Award • NASDAQ Closing Bell (2012) • UN Consultative Status
