Community & Economic Development Strategic Consulting
I work with nonprofits, small businesses, and place-based organizations building stronger local economies and more resilient communities.
My approach is shaped by more than a decade of work across economic development, nonprofit leadership, community revitalization, and civic engagement in communities navigating growth, instability, disinvestment, and transition. I’m especially interested in the institutions and local systems that quietly determine whether people are able to stay rooted, connected, and economically stable where they live.
The work itself is practical: funding strategy, organizational development, partnerships, systems, sustainability, and implementation. But the goal is larger than operational success alone. Healthy organizations help create healthy communities.
Who I work with
Nonprofits
Funding strategy, grant development, organizational systems, program design, partnership building, and long-term sustainability planning for organizations serving communities in complex and changing environments.
Small Businesses
Community-centered business strategy, partnership development, programming, and local economic initiatives that strengthen both business sustainability and civic life.
Place-Based Organizations
Support for Main Street programs, downtown revitalization efforts, district management, community development initiatives, and place-based economic strategy in both rural and urban settings.
How we work
Discovery
Understanding the realities of your organization, community, and goals — not just what exists on paper.
Strategy
Developing practical, context-specific plans grounded in sustainability, capacity, and long-term impact.
Implementation
Supporting the systems, partnerships, and operational work required to move strategy into practice.
Sustainability
Building structures that continue working long after the initial project is complete.
The Exchange
The Exchange is where my long-form writing lives — essays, personal narrative, commentary, and field-based reflections on belonging, mobility, civic life, local economies, and the changing experience of American community.
Some pieces are deeply personal. Others are practical. Many sit somewhere in between: the lived experience of moving through communities alongside the systems, institutions, and economic realities shaping them.
Subscribers also receive:
- grant opportunities for nonprofits and small businesses
- funding and organizational strategy resources
- implementation guides and case studies
- reflections drawn from years of work in community and economic development
Because the story and the strategy are rarely separate.