Who We Are
Shawn VanDiver spent twelve years in the U.S. Navy, most of it as a Fire Controlman and later an AEGIS Weapons System Supervisor aboard the USS Chancellorsville. He deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, the Global War on Terrorism, and the War on Drugs, and spent years training the sailors who came after him. The Navy taught him that discipline and improvisation aren't opposites, and that "we've always done it this way" is rarely a good enough reason to keep doing it that way.
When he left the service, he carried that instinct for civic engagement into a new kind of leadership: as chief operating officer of the Three Wise Men Veterans Foundation, and as founder of the San Diego chapter of the Truman National Security Project, where he built a network of veterans and national security professionals committed to turning military experience into civic leadership.
He then spent nearly six years at Deloitte, leading business development for public sector clients and learning, from the inside, how government actually procures, decides, and moves. It gave him a rare vantage point: enough time in the private sector to understand its discipline, and enough exposure to government to understand its constraints, without losing patience for either one.
Along the way, Shawn became a straight-talking voice on foreign policy and national security, writing for outlets including USA Today, The Guardian, and the San Diego Union-Tribune, and engaging directly on binational issues along the U.S.-Mexico border. He has advised members of Congress, state legislators, and White House officials, always pushing past the talking points toward what would actually work.
In August 2021, as Kabul fell, Shawn didn't start from nothing. He activated a network of veterans, policy professionals, and civil society leaders he had spent years building, and founded #AfghanEvac to organize that network into a coalition that could work with the U.S. government at scale. That coalition now spans more than 250 organizations across the political spectrum, and it has helped relocate and resettle over 195,000 Afghan allies, one of the largest civil-society humanitarian partnerships in American history. It earned #AfghanEvac a formal partnership with the U.S. Department of State and recognition from the White House and the Secretary of State, and it is a model for how civil society and government can move together, fast, without waiting for permission to innovate.
Gaslamp Consulting is the next chapter of that same throughline. The Navy, veteran leadership, the private sector, government affairs, foreign policy, crisis response: every stop taught Shawn the same lesson, that civic engagement and innovation aren't opposites, and neither one has ever come from doing things the way they've always been done. Gaslamp exists for organizations and individuals who are ready to stop asking for permission and start shaping outcomes.
Shawn VanDiver, Principal