I'm interested in the systems we inherit – and what happens when we redesign them around people instead.

The Longer Story

How I got here

1. 01

   Story

   Everything in its place

   There's a phrase you learn early in any professional kitchen: mise en place, everything in its place. For a few years after finishing my liberal arts degree, I lived by that discipline as a chef in Sonoma County. Outside the kitchen, though, very little actually felt in place.

   I'm autistic, with combined-type ADHD. I didn't have that language yet in my twenties. What I had were vivid memories of school: kids around me treated as problems to manage rather than people to understand, expected to adapt to institutions that never had to adapt back. Those memories didn't fade with age. They kept adding up, slowly turning into questions about power, belonging, and who gets to decide what "normal" even means.

   In 2014, I left the kitchen for a special education credential program. It looked like a career change. In hindsight, it was the start of something longer, and it started right there in the classroom.

2. 02

   Systems

   The questions got structural

   Teaching made one thing hard to ignore: educational inequity rarely comes down to individual teachers' intentions. I kept running into thoughtful educators working inside systems shaped by staffing shortages, funding formulas, and policy decisions made far from any actual classroom. Teaching, I realized, was never just instruction. It was also where a lot of older, bigger power struggles played out.

   So in grad school, I built a track that didn't quite exist: special education alongside public administration. I spent a couple of years in rooms with school board members, administrators, and policymakers, watching how funding actually gets decided and priorities actually get set. It changed the scale of my thinking. The classroom was still central, but it stopped being the whole picture.

3. 03

   Community

   Then came the fires

   In October 2017, the Tubbs Fire tore through Sonoma County. I volunteered at evacuation sites, mostly trying to keep kids safe and steady. That's where I found another kind of failure: disabled children and their families being turned away, because shelters and child-care sites said they weren't equipped to accommodate them.

   The language was administrative, citing a lack of capacity and a lack of staffing. The effect was plain: families shut out of the one place that was supposed to be about safety and care. A shelter supervisor connected me with Belle Sweeney at the Schoolbox Project. Seventy-two hours after that first conversation, we opened Project Skylane, a temporary, trauma-informed space built specifically for disabled kids and their families.

   What's stayed with me is what Skylane proved: a community pulled together care, food, safety, and support in three days flat, once it decided those families mattered. The system's limits weren't inevitable. They were choices, and choices can be unmade. I've stayed on the Schoolbox Project's board ever since.

4. 04

   Access

   Which is the work I'm still doing

   Advocacy was never really a separate chapter. It's been there since I was a teenager, long before any of it had a professional name. Teaching got me asking questions about systems. Those questions turned into research. And the research keeps circling back to the same thing: who gets to belong, and who gets to decide.