Over the past fifteen years, I’ve worked across sectors at the intersection of immigration and resettlement, youth employment, housing-first models and addiction recovery, childcare access and women’s economic mobility, domestic violence intervention, and access to justice systems. In these roles, I led research, data, and evaluation initiatives alongside government partners, nonprofit organizations, and community stakeholders with widely differing perspectives.

Working inside these systems gave me a rare vantage point: I was able to see not only how programs operate, but how the broader structures around them shape people’s daily lives. Again and again, the same patterns emerged. Outcomes we often attribute to social services—employment, educational attainment, safety, belonging—were deeply influenced by the design of cities themselves.

Through this work I saw how the placement of public housing could affect job stability and economic mobility. How families living in isolated neighborhoods struggled when basic infrastructure—transportation, childcare, public space—was not designed with their realities in mind. How architecture, planning decisions, and access to mobility could quietly enable people to thrive or create barriers that even strong social programs could not overcome.

At the same time, much of my work involved designing trauma-informed and culturally responsive evaluation approaches, facilitating dialogue across stakeholders, and building alignment between frontline staff, leadership teams, and community partners. These experiences strengthened my ability to bring people into complex conversations, navigate differing perspectives, and ask the questions that move systems toward meaningful collaboration.

Over time, this work shaped the lens I bring today: cities and institutions function as interconnected human systems. Decisions about infrastructure, planning, policy, and programs are not separate—they collectively shape the lived experience of communities.

My role is to help teams working on civic and urban initiatives understand those connections, integrate community insight into decision-making, and design systems that produce measurable, human-centered outcomes.