I conduct research and support organizations in implementing new technology that allows them to understand their outcomes and impact in communities. I provide program management, outcome evaluation, change management, and academic research services.
I help nonprofits and climate-focused organizations build the data systems they need to actually use the information they're already collecting — without hiring a full IT department to do it. Most of this work is the unglamorous middle distance between a spreadsheet and a strategic plan: governance, architecture, and the policies that keep both honest.
Leading staff and organizations through the adoption of new systems and ways of working, including new policies, training, and the comms it takes to make a change actually stick.
Scoping and standing up new systems for an organization — for example a CRM and connected data warehouse — from vendor selection through rollout and staff adoption.
Setting data quality standards, validation rules, and definitions so an organization's data answers the questions it's actually collected for.
Power BI reporting connected to live data sources via Microsoft Fabric, scoped to decisions staff and funders actually need to make.
Building the logic, metrics, and definitions that let an organization track long-term outcomes, not just activities.
Designing evaluation frameworks that tell an organization, and its funders, whether a program is actually working.
I grew up in the mountains above Los Angeles. I came up into adulthood during the 2012–2016 drought, the hottest and most severe in California's recorded history. My favorite oak trees started to wither, and eventually, die. These trees survived many prior droughts, raising generations of Californians, and I didn't want to be the last generation with them. Water is life, for the trees and for humanity.
The more I thought about the challenges we were facing, the clearer it became that they weren't always scientific challenges. So while I got the hydrologic training, a BS and M.S. from UC Davis, I focused much more on governance in grad school. I researched how people, agencies, and institutions collaborate, or don't, to protect water resources for all beneficial uses and users, and evaluated the impacts of those governance decisions on vulnerable water users.
That focus carried into my research. At the Pacific Institute, I authored a report on public supply well vulnerability under California's groundwater law, finding that 42% of public supply wells in the San Joaquin Valley are likely to run dry under the minimum thresholds set by the state's own sustainability plans. I also led a multi-organization study, with RCAP and RCAC, on customer debt and revenue loss at small community water systems during the pandemic.
At the Rural Community Assistance Partnership, I led an evaluation of rural infrastructure and policy programs and built the data pipelines behind it, served as Executive Editor for Rural Matters magazine, and contributed data visualization, mapping, and editing to an earlier issue as well. My research from that period also supported a UCLA Luskin Center scoping report on national drinking water quality compliance, and contributed to the US Water Alliance's work on community-driven utility consolidation. Alongside that work, my own research looked at why thousands of domestic wells face failure despite California's groundwater reform, later covered by the Los Angeles Times, at what it would take to build a research and policy agenda for the millions of people relying on water systems outside regulatory oversight, and at how a single modeling assumption changes who counts as vulnerable in statewide well-failure analyses.
I've carried that same governance focus into my current role as Data and Impact Manager at Rural Community Assistance Corporation, where the questions are less about hydrology directly and more about building the systems that let an organization act on what it knows. I led the data analysis that helped support passage of SB 18, California's first Tribal Housing Grant Program, and provided technical expertise to a California Public Utilities Commission hearing on water utility acquisition regulations. I've also taken part in national efforts including the Aspen Institute's Funding Rural Futures Call to Action on flexible funding for rural and tribal communities, and a UCLA workshop on water systems' wildfire fighting capacities. Most of my work now is less visible than any of that: building the CRM, the data warehouse, the governance standards, and the dashboards that let a rural development organization actually know what it's doing and whether it's working.