My Practices

In facilitation, I emphasize relationship-building and getting people to see their connections to one another. This is important because a lot of the time, people assume that consensus is key, but actually, it’s not that key! Better outcomes are actually achieved through the understanding that we all ultimately want similar or the same things as each other — and shared goals are more important than the ways in which we get to solutions. I lead my facilitation practice through trust- and community-building, so that there will be an easier process for us (my clients, myself, and stakeholders/community members) to evaluate where we are at and where we want to be.

I lead with a RSJI (Race and Social Justice Initiative) and EEI (Equity and Environment Initiative) focus on every aspect of this work. A deep and complex understanding of the many often opaque ways institutional racism affects the lives and environments of communities of color is just the first step toward achieving racial equity and justice. In my advising and consulting work, I guide my clients toward depth of understanding — of who is at the table, who is truly being served, who is being left out at any given moment, and what needs to be the next steps in addressing gaps or broadening out future phases of a policy or project. I am flexible in how we achieve this, because I believe in custom-solutions that take people, current skills, knowledge, and systems into account.

I thrive and am most effective in creating structured environments when it comes to doing work (though I also really enjoy dwelling in the theoretical and love having deep conversations with people!). Creating systems and processes is important because so much of this work can be ambiguous and thus a little hard for us to keep a handle on. I counterbalance the natural ambiguity with an organizational development style that is very organized when it needs to be and very flexible when it needs to be. A clear and continual flow of communication is how I like to lead. I also truly enjoy and bask in coming up with work processes that are easy to adopt, easy to learn, accessible, and fun to use.

I know that every organization, business, and entity is so unique in the work that they do. I don’t believe in using boilerplate templates in grant writing. As a grant writer, what I do is listen for stories with connections to environmental justice — that deeply resonate. I approach storytelling in a process-oriented way that is also deeply collaborative. We’ll sit together, we’ll talk, I’ll record copious amounts of information. From there, we figure out what goes where, what can be strengthened, and what are the most effective ways to share information — and we don’t stop at just one grant. I co-create systems that build grant capacity for clients, so it’s not just one grant they’re able to apply to in our work together, but also many other grants that my clients can do themselves in the future. Nearly all the grants I’ve applied for have been successful — I’ve earned more than $200,000 in awarded grants for my client organizations.

It’s hard to read reports that are dry, and so many of them are! Yet, reports are great opportunities to go into a lot of depth about important environmental justice issues happening in our communities, a document to hold a repository of information, facts, and statistics. With my background in research and my passion for storytelling, I take care to ensure that the voices of