Why Field Notes, Why Now
I am beginning this site at a moment when my professional curiosity is becoming bigger than any single role, project, or institution can hold.
For much of my work, I have been focused on strategic communications: how we explain complex issues, how organizations build trust, how public messages move people toward understanding and action. The longer I do this work, the more I find myself drawn to the deeper terrain beneath communications — the systems of power that decide whose stories are heard, whose knowledge is trusted, whose places are treated as central, and whose futures are imagined as worth investing in.
That is what I want to explore here. These field notes are a way of thinking in public about an evolving stage of my professional life: a stage that asks me to look beyond message strategy alone and more directly at narrative, philanthropy, place, and power. I want to understand how institutions can communicate with more humility, how philanthropy can support community-defined change without reproducing extraction, and how stories can help people see not only problems, but possibility, dignity, agency, and relationship.
This curiosity has been building for me over the past decade+. My work in Colorado philanthropy cracked open a view on community voice and social change that is interconnecting across the continuum of my life so far.
I am also a traveler and explorer, fortunate to have seen some parts of the world that fundamentally shifted who I am. In 2018, I began visiting South America, a place I feel a gravitational pull to. My time in different part of this country have inspired this next step in my professional journey. In November 2026, I will embark on yet another opportunity that will bring me to northern Chile, where I will spend four weeks immersed in the Atacama Desert, learning about local life, and writing through an artist residency with La Wayaka Current. This residency is part of my professional development work through my current employer, and I could not be more grateful for this creative opportunity to expand my thinking, skills, and experiences in understanding the cross-sectionality of philanthropy, land, equity, and narrative.
Being in a desert landscape shaped by water scarcity, Indigenous knowledge, tourism, extraction, climate pressure, and deep cultural memory is sharpening questions I also carry in Colorado. What happens when rural places are asked to absorb the consequences of decisions made elsewhere? What does it mean to listen across difference without turning people’s lives into lessons? How can those of us working inside institutions become more accountable to place, relationship, and community authority?
I do not expect these notes to arrive as polished answers. I expect them to be provisional, reflective, and sometimes unresolved. They may take the form of essays, observations, interview reflections, reading notes, or questions I am still learning how to ask. My hope is that they become a record of professional formation — a way to trace what I am learning about influence, leadership, storytelling, equity, and the responsibilities that come with working in proximity to institutional power.
I am calling them field notes because that phrase gives me permission to pay attention before I conclude. To observe patterns. To notice contradictions. To stay close to place. To write from practice rather than certainty. And to keep asking what more ethical, relational, and imaginative forms of philanthropy and public storytelling might require from us now.
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