Community Engagement & Facilitation

The bridge between communities, experts, planners, and government such that everyone understands the problem, and everyone shapes the solution.

Some of the most important knowledge a project needs lives in the community, within  stories, memory, and lived experience. This knowledge also lives in data, models, and technical analysis. Too often, these two sources of knowledge never meet, and solutions are made without one or the other. This is the work I do best: translating between them. I take qualitative insight and give it quantitative weight, and I turn technical findings into language a community can genuinely weigh in on such that both the takeaways and solutions are understood by everyone involved.

HOW I HELP

• Strategic planning: shaping the path forward with the community, not just for them

• Project management: guiding community-centered projects from vision to delivery

• Community engagement coaching: walking companies and organizations through the engagement process, available on a retainer basis

• Facilitation & convening: bringing communities, government, funders, and experts into the same conversation

• Engineering firms new to community work: partnering with technical teams entering community engagement for the first time, translating fluently between their world and the community's

What you walk away with: Solutions that everyone understands and because they are developed collaboratively, solutions that are more grounded and come from a foundation of trips are therefore ultimately more impactful.

Engineering Advisory

Technical preservation guidance helping  owners, firms, agencies, and organizations make sound decisions about the heritage structures in their care.

WHO I HELP

• Homeowners with historic properties: guidance on how to rehabilitate, repair, or care for a historic home the right way

• Engineering firms without preservation expertise: a specialist to consult when a project involves historic or heritage structures outside your team's usual scope

• Nonprofits and organizations with a historic property or land:  help understanding what you have and how to approach its preservation, reuse, or stewardship

• Municipalities and agencies with historic assets: technical guidance on preserving and maintaining the heritage structures in your jurisdiction

HOW I HELP

• Peer Review Guidance

• Existing Conditions Assessments

• Damage Causation Assessments

• 40-year Building Safety Inspection Program (BSIP) recertification

• Retrofit and repair guidance

What you walk away with: clear, technically direction on your historic structure or site such that you can move forward with confidence, and protect what makes it worth preserving.

Speaking & Education

Sharing the work and preparing the next generation to do it well.

I speak and teach on what it means to build with communities rather than for them. My philosophy of reciprocal engineering including community-led resilience, heritage, and equity are at the heart of this work. Whether it is a keynote, a panel, a workshop, or a classroom, I bring both technical depth and lived experience to audiences ready to think differently about how we design for and with people.

HOW I HELP

• Teaching & Instruction: Visiting or guest faculty instruction.

• Curriculum Development Advisory: This is especially reserved for experiential programs that seek not only to combine variety of disciplines and mix-method approaches but more so placing students in direct relationship with the communities they design for.

• Keynotes Address: 45 min to 60 mins either on reciprocal engineering, community-led resilience, biocultural heritage, equity in the built environment and mix-method approaches or customized to your specific mission.

• Lectures, Panels & Moderated Talks: Up to 60 mins presentation or serve as a panelist or moderator on more structured talks such as in conferences and seminars

• Workshops & trainings: hands-on sessions for organizations, teams, and practitioners learning to do community-centered work

• Mentorship & Coaching: supporting the next generation of engineers, planners, and practitioners committed to this work. Retainer options are available.

What you walk away with: not just information, but a shift in how you think about the relationship between expertise and community as well as for the next generation, the foundation to carry this work forward.