“I lead design projects on diverse teams to build better social & civic infrastructure, environments in both the physical & social sense, that foster the conditions necessary for learning & personal growth.”
I am a sponge for learning in community, and am here to write and share the stories that got me here, gain new perspectives on the issues that keep my mind bubbling all the time, and incite the quiet joys of synthesis, curiosity, and wisdom-building for readers.
Unbeknownst to me, that first sentence was already 205 out of 250 characters. Attempting to start telling my story, forged on, unaware of a word limit, drafting and refining what I share with you below, in hopes of being enough through the past to begin more directly sorting through the present:
At 40, my experiences are pretty eclectic, and that's made me a person I mostly enjoy hanging out with.
The story begins really with a bookish, sunny, and spiritual rural-turned suburban 80s 90s childhood spent caught in the throes of a stormy divorce and its endless blended family aftermath. My first real boyfriend was the 25 year old Oaxacan dishwasher at the restaurant where I worked in Columbus Ohio during high school, a scandalous move for the girl who had been voted into the school's yearbook as "third most involved", bassoon-playing, National Honors Society service coordinator. I broke the poor gentleman’s heart by leaving it all for college, where I designed my own double-major concentration, which I sheepishly inform you was in "Printmaking as a Catalyst for Social Change for Women in Latin America." Studying in Chile, I fell for a fine art photographer who had an all-orange kitchen, exquisite patio garden, and had lived and practiced through the dictatorship. I interned with the American Baptist Sandanista Liberation Theologian and lefty pastor who got his church kicked out of the sect for marrying gay people and supporting women's rights. I started meditating, and hung out with a chicken and solar panel-tending, mandola playing practicing Buddhist older man. I walked through the trees a lot, and had a desk all my own tucked into the florescently lit stacks of a grand old library with long and majestic walnut tables below, still more paper than digital, a desk that somehow didn't have a computer on it.
Despite these diverse, stormy, and beautiful exposures, I met my true college sweetheart and first big love at an intentional community focused on living more sustainably off the land. I went on to spend my twenties devoted to this cheerful and funny bi-racial piano, djembe and ngoni playing griot, who took me to West Africa and then moved home to New York, trained to be a holistic health counselor and then a naturopathic physician and acupuncturist while we were broke and supporting each other, learning together about sustainable food systems and politics, and building a fuller understanding of wellness and prevention. His mother is one of my heroes, introducing me to Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Zora Neale Hurston. She also taught me how enjoy my own intellectual life, to really cook and throw fabulous dinner parties and dance in the kitchen, and to not feel bad about having money or being happy while working every day for social justice.
After finishing that liberal arts degree, I went to work as a bilingual K-3 teacher in the Bronx with Teach For America. Thinking about it, stories with big echoing stairwells and small hands, spreadsheets that change color as students get on-level with reading and math, the phrase for "small hand on a clock" in Spanish, tamales and the subway and cockroaches and tearful Martin Luther King read-alouds and bocadillos and bachata and plaintains from the corner store, and bad haircuts and cheap kitten heels waft through my mind. After two eye-opening and tearful years, I left to a whole other world a few miles south, to the isle of Manhattan, to cram in a year of study of communication design at a fashion school in Chelsea, interning for the hot summer afterward with a hardcore rock guitarist turned Yale Professor who helped me make real sense of design as a broader profession I could get excited about.
When we moved to Seattle in 2009, after some serious struggle with perfectionism, hiring freezes for teachers, failed entrepreneurship, undiagnosed depression, trauma, ADHD; recovery through nannying and being utterly broke, I became a user experience (UX) designer for a recently-purchased ed-tech startup designing for teachers, and learned 3,000 things in three years. So much growth is about creating, learning, and sharing language given to abstract ideas. After a year so heartbreaking at the end of my twenties that my gut biome gave us chronic IBS, despite taking salsa dance lessons, I landed on the shores of data visualization analytics software company Tableau in Seattle, where I polished by UX skills on core analytics product teams and later switched to designing learning experiences for the engineers internally. Over those six years from 2014-2020, the company was in such hypergrowth that it felt like working at three different companies. I learned tons about data visualization, paid off my soul-crushing college debt, moved three times, began to ride bikes like woah, and finally got to visit Europe, several times in different cities at that.
In Seattle through my thirties, I served on a neighborhood council and a community foundation, as a bridge between the tech millennials and the alienated-if-landed boomers. I volunteered running urban art workshops for disadvantaged youth, and got really into civic advocacy and processes to increase viability of cycling as transportation for everyone via better infrastructure. I got into the long distance, unsupported endurance cycling sport called randonneuring, and in 2019, rode 780mi in 90 hours from Paris to the coastal down of Brest and back, among many other adventures, all recorded via Strava and charted in Tableau. I experienced so much complex intersectionality as a cheerful, extroverted, anxious neurodivergent white woman from the liberal arts in tech, riding a bicycle around and looking for love and ways to contribute to all kinds of justice beyond making a tool to democratize data analysis.
In Q1 of 2020 right before everything got extra weird for everyone, despite being a labradoodle and a pregnancy test away from becoming a Phinney Ridge Mom, I left the urban world of tech in North Seattle to start my own learning experience design consultancy and social innovation venture in a rural town in south-central Washington. I ended up working with a local non-profit and school district to start a full-blown co-curricular STEAM program for the local migrant farming families' kids, and creating an inclusive community space in an old auto-service garage on the town square. It's going great, stabilizing for sustainability after scaling rapidly to meet need. The story of that epic pivot and subsequent journey over the last three years is LOD for another day. (The other pivots have been good fodder for stories too, but I've got some recency bias, and am still processing this one myself. Doing so is one of my central hopes for interacting on this platform.) When not fending off hawks or stray roaming huskies trying to attack the chickens I had named for feminist authors, putting lids on markers or channeling my inner Mister Rogers, I had time to write for myself, to read and synthesize as I experienced such a different swatch of American life that I felt like I was traveling internationally every time I drove the three hours back to Seattle to see a friend or sit in a park and eat a pastry. A balanced breakfast of yoga teacher training, life coaching, therapy, and finally meds helped me out of finally-diagnosed severe depression and milder ADHD. I developed a lot of personal strength and synthesized a lot of wisdom about who I am and what I want to be, the layers of what's really going on in 2023, what prerequisites and boundaries I need in order to contribute effectively, sustainably, and happily.
I've spent the last year falling in love with a spunky, strategic, and hilarious amber-eyed and curly-haired Chicano farmworker turned lobbyist turned wildly successful apple salesman turned ultra-runner turned Master of Public Administration turned cooperative agriculture expert and manager of a future town-sized teaching and innovation regenerative BIPOC farm in super-rural SoCal. After finding luck in love through a fluke on Bumble, for months, we did the distance thing and sent each other real letters and care packages in the mail. We moved in together in Seattle this fall, and I've been commuting back and forth across the mountains every few weeks, between the temperate rainforest world and the riparian shrub steppe world. His family has accepted me as family, and we are looking to extend that family starting very soon.
Ever-interested in improving nested systems and getting to the heart of matters, I've joined the small town's planning commission as an appointed volunteer and am working to make recommendations city council will use to update zoning and other code to preserve human scale, walkability, and new urbanist principles, preventing displacement and focusing on environmental justice as the town grows and rural gentrification looms large. I have also become board president of the foundation for the county's library system. Both such new and different deep dives, with their own sets of keywords, nerd crushes, new faces and perspectives. Nonprofit management and fundraising and refining Atomic Habits fill my days, and I try to apply my design thinking and critical pedagogy without everyday colleague squads with deep experience in either.
What of all this interests you, dear reader? Thanks for making it this far! Please consider helping me write for both of us, by writing for you. So often, better questions are better than answers. What are your questions?