(Click the title above to view or print my resumé, or for online viewing of my curriculum vitae, click here.)

At the age of 20, I co-founded a state-level office of the national environmental organization, the League of Conservation Voters.  

By the end of our start-up year, my colleagues and I had built the organization to 20 full-time paid staff and 200 active volunteers, while fundraising our budget.

We reached over 200,000 community members several times over with our strategic messaging, using several methods including direct outreach and targeted mass communications: door-to-door canvassing, phone banks, direct mail and radio advertising.  

Together, we created a lasting and measurable impact in our community.

Since that beginning, I’ve worked in many capacities of designing, implementing and managing community outreach projects in the U.S., Niger, Kenya, the Philippines and Tanzania.  

Much of my work with community based and non-governmental organizations has involved innovative program design and some has been first in its field.  

My base of experience is rooted in working with all kinds of people, including men, women and children, from all income levels and many social and cultural groups, within the U.S. and around the world.  

I’m experienced in staff training and capacity building in classroom settings and hands-on workshops.  My work has included teaching, training, and training community trainers. Training content has included academic and theoretical material, practical aspects of programming and administrative skill building, computer and web-based marketing and livelihood development, hands-on vocational trades and other.

Communications skills are important.  I’m a skilled manager, a comfortable public speaker, a presenter and teacher as well as a writer and web based graphic and content designer.

My project management experience includes socio-economic, environmental, agricultural, public health, disaster management,  and gender and youth related targets. 

I’m experienced in creating and engaging different kinds of monitoring and evaluation tools for measuring and demonstrating a project’s impacts and results, including M & E design, digital survey and information gathering tools, and participatory inquiry and community situational analysis models. 

(Click the title above to view or print my resumé, or for online viewing of my curriculum vitae, click here.)

I studied psychology at Seattle’s Private School for Human Development.

That education informed my professional future in many ways, directly and indirectly.

I’ve worked with youth in many capacities, including mentoring behavior-challenged kids and designing outreach interventions for at-risk street youth in the context of HIV/AIDS prevention.  I’ve trained youth organizations in non-profit development and helped them to implement community based programming to form their own organizations.  

I co-founded an environmental organization and developed fundraising messaging and other targeted communications that reached over 200,000 community members. Our campaign work changed the future of that community.

I worked as a private consultant designing a sexual education curriculum tailored to the developmentally disabled.  This sexual education class was considered an important innovation in the group’s developmental disability programming, and is still in use years later.

Besides informing my counseling and intervention work, my psychology studies fortified my practical experience in a team setting, for purposes of communicating, collaborating, problem solving and designing programs while working with counterparts and colleagues.

Much of my later work in public health, disaster management and community outreach has involved developing educational tools, materials and training curricula. I’ve delivered many training sessions for all kinds of audiences and subject areas, from community members to skilled professional colleagues, using different delivery methods based on the demographics and culture of my audience.

Understanding and working well with people is the basis of working within community organizations, and effecting change.

(Click the title above to view or print my resumé, or to view a longer and more detailed curriculum vitae that will include a full list of disaster deployments and related certifications, click here.)

In 2005 I received an unexpected phone call from a US Crisis Corps recruiter. Hurricane Katrina had struck the city of New Orleans, and the group was preparing for its first ever domestic deployment, to the disaster zone.  I was asked to be among the first small group deployed in this historic initiative.

After this assignment, I was hired by our partnering agency, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Through my work experience in the disaster area I earned three specialist qualifications:

IA or Individual Assistance casework of disaster victims, HMCEO or Hazard Mitigation Community Education Specialist in many areas of community education programming, and DHOPS or Disaster Housing Operations Specialist.

Besides these I completed around 50 certification courses of the US Emergency Management Institute (EMI), University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill 

Besides working in the U.S., I’ve also worked internationally in Disaster Management, in the areas of research and policy development, public health and disaster management, special protections for women and children, and applied socio-economics of disaster management and global warming, in Kenya, Tanzania and the Philippines.

(Click the title above to view or print my resumé, or to view a longer and more detailed curriculum vitae, click here.)

In between assignments with non-profit organizations, I built a small business in residential construction and renovation.  

My construction website is the #1 search return on Google, worldwide, for the search phrase of “Carpenter Artisan”.

My construction tradeskills include journey level carpentry, plumbing and electrical work among others.  

These technical skills supported my disaster related work, where I’ve been a consultant and educator with homeowners and government officials in reconstruction and hazard mitigation.  I’ve also worked in the siting and construction of emergency shelter parks in the disaster zone.

I’m also a skilled project manager and foreman and I’ve managed multiple projects while working in challenging environments.

In order to build the business, I taught myself the web and internet skills to create all of my own content.

I’ve shared my web and marketing skills with community and youth organizations, and I’ve taught hands-on construction trades to young people and volunteers.

My small business management translates broadly to the organizational work that I do: working with customers and staff, collaborating with colleagues on the design of large projects and hands-on implementation, managing people and projects, organizing and projecting budgets and the flow of tasks, and multi-tasking in a teamwork environment are all part of getting the job done.