Jill Lipski Cain '02, '10
Owner and Strategist
BS ’02, MPP '10 (College of Liberal Arts and Humphrey School of Public Affairs)
Alumni Association Member
About Arch Empathy
Arch Empathy is your strategic "do-it" studio, here to help you focus, lead your team, and reawaken the soul of your business. We work with battle-hardened business owners who care deeply about what they're building, but are dog-tired from the chaos. We help teams work better together towards the future they want and help creative businesses grow while taking good care of people. Services include strategic planning and implementation, customer and fan experience design, branding, and marketing.
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About Jill
Jill Lipski Cain is the founder and lead strategist of Arch Empathy, a strategic studio working at the intersection of customer experience and creativity — built specifically for the creative, unconventional, and people-first businesses that don't fit neatly into anyone else's framework.
She's been a consultant for 15+ years across nonprofits, arts organizations, economic development, community organizations, state and federal programs, and higher education — 150+ projects deep. She holds a Master's from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, a professional certificate in user experience design, and extensive training in group facilitation and data visualization. But she leads with what's real, not what's on her résumé.
Since the early 2000s, she's also been riding shotgun as a punk rock anthropologist — what you get when you combine a tour wife life with social science training. The load ins and load outs. The first sold-out venue. The hard endings with people who were in it from the beginning. She's watched creative people build, sustain, and nearly lose the thing they love most. That world is in her bones, and she's spent her career figuring out how to make it better for the people living it.
The tension of trading security for aliveness isn't abstract to her. She knows it from the road, from backpacking into the desert and the northern forest, and from the day she started Arch Empathy. It's not a tradeoff she made once. It's one she keeps making.
She's the kind of optimist who's earned it — not blind to the hard parts, but convinced there's a way through. Grounded. Energetic. Genuinely lit up by people who are ready to do something with what they've got. Jill also serves as a business advisor through Elevate Hennepin and WomenVenture, because accessible expertise isn't just a value. It's how she shows up. She's based in Minnesota. She is 5'2".
