Concordence | Issues Management & Advisory for Data Center Development

Data centers get built where communities agree.
We broker agreements that hold.

Concordence is an issues management and advisory firm for data center development. We help developers, hyperscalers, their capital partners, and communities reach agreements everyone can stand behind. Our advantage is simple: we hear what others miss.

Community opposition is now a site-selection variable and risk.

More money, louder ads, and longer hearings haven't worked because the industry is answering community objections in the wrong currency. Residents raise questions of safety, fairness, voice, and trust. The industry responds with dollars.

If you've already spent on consultants, campaigns, and community relations, and your project is still stuck, the problem isn't effort. It's strategy. Flawless execution of the wrong strategy is how projects end up in year three of a fight they could have avoided in the first three months.

Look at any project diligence checklist: power, interconnection, water, cooling, capital. Every line is math: modelable, solvable, priceable. Community engagement needs to be on the list, but addressed differently than the other items. Treating it the same is why projects fail. We are your partners for the one risk you can't model from a desk.

2026 Industry State of Play

75+ projectsworth roughly $130 billion, blocked or delayed by local opposition in a single quarter

833 groupsactive opposition organizations across 49 states, more than double the prior quarter

7 in 10Americans oppose a data center near them; officials who approve projects are losing elections across both parties

Behavioral scientists who understand capital projects and human dynamics.

For more than 15 years, our founder has been the strategist behind how some of the world's largest companies confront contested public issues across energy, food, aviation, financial services, and technology. The campaigns had many hands. The strategy had an author. Concordence exists so that developers can hire the author directly.

We know why communities say no, and they often have fair points. Our work is twofold: we work with you to restructure projects to make them a yes, and we lead a process where both sides can actually hear each other while deciding. We understand the risks from your side of the table: capital timelines, entitlement, time to power, and the cost of every month of delay. We work to remove friction and reduce or eliminate these costs.

Concordence engagements are led personally by our founder from diagnosis through outcome, executed through a hand-picked bench of field, research, legal-coordination, and creative specialists. Assembled for your project, directed by one strategist, accountable to one standard.

We work with data center developers, hyperscalers, and their capital partners to:

Launch projects that proceed with little to no opposition when we're hired in advance

Win approvals for planned projects in skeptical jurisdictions

Resolve conflict around projects that have stalled, and rebuild trust where it's been lost

Structure community agreements that hold through hearings, elections, and litigation

De-risk site selection before land is committed, including telling you early when a site is unlikely to work

Our approach is grounded in published, peer-reviewed behavioral science on how people in genuine disagreement come to hear one another and find consensus to move forward.

Retained by developers. Trusted because we earn it.

Our clients are developers, hyperscalers, and their capital partners. We say this plainly, to everyone, including at public hearings. We are only valuable to our clients if the process is one communities can trust. So:

We disclose who retains us. Always.

We don't run front groups, manufacture supporters, or pay people to speak at hearings.

We tell our clients up front when a site is simply unlikely to work.

We only bring agreements to the table that residents can respect, both privately and among their neighbors.

Data centers are today's power plants. She's won these campaigns before.

Felicia Joy

Founder & CEO

Felicia Joy is the founder and CEO of Concordence.

For more than 15 years, she has been the strategic architect behind how several Fortune 500 companies and global institutions have navigated contested public issues. As an Executive Vice President at Edelman, the world's largest communications firm, she founded and built its Behavioral Science practice from a blank page into a global offering, creating the discipline of applying rigorous behavioral research to real-world corporate problems: opposition, distrust, stalled approvals, and reputational siege. Her plans were executed by teams across the world's largest agency. At Concordence, she leads engagements end to end.

Her training ground was the predecessor to this industry: power. She led strategy in one of the country's most contested power plant conflicts, where years of opposition from a determined, well-organized community had stalled critical construction. The engagement ended in a truce that let long-stalled environmental upgrades move forward. Data centers are new. These dynamics are not.

She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where her research focuses on conversational receptiveness for organizations: the science of how businesses and hostile audiences come to genuinely hear one another. She holds a master's degree in behavioral science from Harvard University and is an expert on the human dynamics that determine whether organizations succeed.

She founded Concordence on a simple observation: data center projects die because the industry answers the moral objections of communities with financial arguments. Concordence exists to change what's being offered, how it's heard, and who benefits so that when a project is approved, it's because the community decided, in its own interest, to say yes. And when the honest answer is no, everyone learns it early, before years and fortunes are spent.

Request a confidential consultation.

Tell us where your project stands. Initial consultations are confidential, without obligation, and typically 30 minutes. You'll leave with our candid read on your situation, whether or not we work together.

We take a limited number of engagements at a time, so every project has our founder's full attention.

If your project is planned, contested, or stalled, the earlier we talk, the more options you have.

Prefer email? Reach us directly at consultation@concordence.com. All inquiries are held in strict confidence. Everything you share stays in the room.