Work with me
Fixed-fee proposals. No surprise invoices. No off-the-shelf anything.
STRATEGIC PLANNING
A plan your whole organization can see themselves in.
A plan built in a conference room dies in a conference room. Mine get built in your warehouse, your break room, your community. A typical engagement runs five to seven months and includes multiple week-long visits — riding routes, sitting in on meetings, talking one-on-one with the people who'll have to live with the plan. I'm looking for two things: the strategy that gets to your outcomes, and the process and people barriers that would quietly stop it.
What you get: a board-ready multi-year strategic plan; an implementation plan with owners, timelines, and measures we define together; and the systems to run it — SharePoint workspaces, dashboards, training — so the plan lives where your team already works.
Recent work: A five-year strategic plan for Second Harvest Food Bank of East Central Indiana — seven months, three on-site weeks, with their Service Area Assessment, Operational Response Plan, and Product Sourcing Plan woven in. Now underway: a three-year strategic plan, three-year budget framework, ORP, and PSP for Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County.
DISASTER RESILIENCE & RESPONSE
Ready before it matters.
Disaster response isn't abstract to me. I've volunteered on it in my own community since the 2017 Oroville Dam crisis, and I was a founding member of the Camp Fire Long-Term Recovery Group after the deadliest wildfire in California history came through Butte County. That ground-level experience is why my national work looks the way it does: I designed Feeding America's Disaster Services Learning Continuum and presented it at the National VOAD Conference — and I build plans that work when it's real, not just on paper. I facilitate honest after-action reviews, build disaster response plans your team will actually open in a crisis — interactive, linked, and drilled, not a binder — design tabletop exercises, and create the documentation and training that make response assets usable by real people under real stress.
Recent work: Recent work: Hurricane Helene after-action and a fully interactive disaster plan for Feeding the Carolinas; interactive disaster plans for Second Harvest of Northwest North Carolina and Golden Harvest Food Bank, a mobile response disaster kitchen technical manual and training program for Northwest North Carolina; an ERP-outage tabletop exercise for the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank.
FEEDING AMERICA NETWORK PLANNING
I helped design these processes. Let me help you complete yours.
I've partnered with Feeding America's national office from 2021 to 2026 on a wide range of work — and among it, I helped develop the Product Sourcing Plan process and the Service Requirements process, the Service Area Assessment and Operational Response Plan templates, that network food banks use today. If your food bank is facing these requirements, I'll facilitate a process that satisfies the agreement and leaves you with something better than compliance: a sharper picture of your service area, your sourcing, and your operations.
These are my most structured engagements — defined scope, fixed fee, predictable timeline — and they pair naturally with strategic planning if you want to knock both out together.
Recent work: A five-year strategic plan for Second Harvest Food Bank of East Central Indiana (seven months, three on-site weeks, with their Service Area Assessment, Operational Response Plan, and Product Sourcing Plan woven in); a three-year plan for Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County; strategy and organizational culture work for Second Harvest of the Big Bend.
GRANTS & FUNDING
The money to do the work.
Strategy without funding is a wish. I write and win grants for the programs that fund this sector — Feeding America capacity grants, federal programs like USDA Rural Development and FEMA, and state funding — and I know the work from both sides: I've built the plans grants pay for, and the systems that keep funded programs compliant. I can run a funding landscape scan, get your organization grant-ready, write the application, and build the implementation and reporting structure after the award.
Recent work: A $750,000 Feeding America retail agency capacity-building grant for Second Harvest of East Central Indiana — written, funded, and structured for reporting from day one; currently supporting a major state disaster-resilience application for a community coalition.
IMPLEMENTATION SUPPORT
The person you call when you're stuck.
Here's what I've learned: once a plan starts moving, that's when the interesting problems show up. A tracking system that needs to exist by Friday. A grant deliverable in a jam. A process that worked on paper and stalled in the warehouse. Every engagement I do includes some implementation support — and my clients kept asking for more of it, so now it's its own offering: a defined block of ongoing thought partnership where we build the tools, work the problems, and fix what isn't getting results.
You don't need a jam to use it, and you don't need to be a strategic planning client first. If you're mid-implementation on something hard and need a partner who can think AND build, that's this.
Recent work: After Second Harvest of East Central Indiana's strategic plan and retail grant were in hand, I stayed on to build the SharePoint and Microsoft Lists systems that run their retail program day to day — real tools their team opens every morning, not recommendations in a deck.
EVALUATION, CULTURE & LEARNING
Prove it works. Teach it forward.
Underneath everything I do is applied research: interviews, focus groups, survey data — compiled into things people can actually act on. I evaluate programs to find out what's really working. I assess organizational culture — employee engagement surveys, staff interviews, trust-building strategies, and the SOPs that end interdepartmental friction. And I'm an educator at my core, with a master's degree in agricultural education and over a decade designing learning for organizations from The World Bank to the National FFA Organization — interactive e-learning, self-assessments, learning continuums, and train-the-trainer programs people genuinely use. I still teach, too: three courses at Chico State just last year.
Recent work: An applied research project for Feeding America — deep dives on three Boundless Collaborations, with on-the-ground staff interviews and published case studies; an internal evaluation and redesign of a Feeding America cross-department program; an employee engagement survey and culture assessment for Second Harvest of the Big Bend — three on-site weeks, interviews with every staff member, CEO coaching, and the operating procedures that came out of it; and interactive national guides, from rural mobile pantries and workforce partnerships to health equity and child hunger.
