projects

PROJECTS

Much of my work involves traveling to communities across the world and listening deeply to understand the contexts that they work within. It’s my job to then package these stories, identify mechanisms of support (be it financial, technical, or capacity-related), and articulate these needs to those who decide how to allocate resources. The ultimate goal of my career is to diffuse wealth and power, and to support locally-led organizations with achieving their missions.

FUN

GLOBAL EXPERIENCE

Hover over highlighted countries for additional context, and keep scrolling for a couple deep dives!

FUN

RESEARCH

WORK

I have worked, studied, or traveled on personal time in countries across five continents. Through these experiences, I bore witness to the many ways people live, communicate, and experience joy. There are many issues, such as gender equity and climate change, that cross borders. I am passionate about designing tools that promote global idea sharing and collaboration.

Note: all projects in 2020-21 conducted virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT AGENDA

I joined the Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina during my senior year of undergraduate study. During my year as a fellow, I had one focus: to oversee the development of the Foundation’s Civic Engagement Agenda. I worked with a consulting firm to manage three dozen community listening sessions across the Foundation’s nine-county service region. I then analyzed 40+ hours of audio recordings, distilling the poignant stories and calls to action shared by more than 400 community members into one final report with three overarching themes:

Access to economic opportunity

Affordability

Education

After a 12-month design process, the report was delivered to our Board of Directors. To this day, the Civic Engagement Agenda is a central element of the Foundation’s strategic grantmaking pillars. It remains one of my proudest achievements to-date.

SAFE ABORTION ACCESS IN NEPAL

I was working with a senior program officer at a private foundation in 2019 who had just completed Stanford’s Executive Design Bootcamp. She wanted to use what she learned to create a multi-sectoral funding strategy for increasing safe abortion access across Nepal.

What followed was a series of design sprints with public and private health providers and nongovernmental organizations. We asked folks what they thought could revolutionize access and availability of maternal health services. We imagined what a world would look like with no constraints, and how we could move forward together given the vast cultural and geographic makeup of Nepal.

The product of these sprints was a multi-year funding strategy for safe abortion services across Nepal’s seven provinces. Central to the strategy was a “vision of success,” endorsed by the Nepal Ministry of Health, which created mechanisms to collaborate efforts across sectors and geographies. I co-authored our internal funding strategy document (which, unfortunately, is not publicly available), and worked closely with in-country partners in the coming years to implement the vision of success.

“safe abortion site”

“Safe abortion site”

INCLUSIVE

GRANTMAKING

Many private foundations provide grants by invitation only, and do not read unsolicited grant proposals. There are major limitations to this approach—if organizations aren't within the same network, direct service nonprofits will be ineligible for much-needed funding, and funders will miss out on opportunities to build relationships with local changemakers.

Earlier this year, the Global Climate Initiative team at the Packard Foundation launched an open proposal process to support youth movements for forest and climate justice in Indonesia. We received over 400 applications from this one open call, demonstrating the enormous capacity of youth-led movements in Indonesia.

I served on the advisory committee that selected the two finalists, and worked closely with our legal and compliance team to create an entirely new grant structure to accommodate the informal organizing nature of Indonesian grassroots movements. A commitment to inclusive grantmaking, and creative mindset for addressing legal requirements, was crucial to the success of this open proposal process.