May 9, 2026

As part of a broader strategy I am working to implement, I am going to begin writing and posting a thought piece every Saturday morning for The Change Campaign’s blog and repost on LinkedIn. I have wanted to share my thoughts in the past and have done so sporadically, but writing consistently has always been a bit tougher for me. This is a good opportunity to push past my comfort zone and develop new skills. 

All growing up, I had teachers try to correct my writing style. Perhaps, I am learning, that is just a reality of writing, that it is always a process and can always be improved. But I definitely was more sensitive to feeling that it was something I was bad at. Fortunately, I have had support from some very successful writers who have encouraged me to journal regularly over the last several years, which helped me find my voice. They have also encouraged me to get my voice out there more, giving me opportunities to write in books and featured articles. Now I will put my thoughts out there on a consistent basis about lots of topics. 

It’s definitely vulnerable, but there is something beautiful in that. When we share vulnerability there is a fear of appearing weak and being hurt, which is definitely a possibility; but it also creates the opportunity for real connection and to realize we are not alone in what we feel. 

My skills will strengthen as my practice continues. While this statement is specific to writing here it is also pretty obvious because this is true of just about everything. I am not sure if anyone will read, I am not sure if anyone will care, but I have felt for a long time that I would like to influence broader social discussions and putting myself out there is the only way that will happen. I have done many speaking engagements and podcasts and will continue to do so, but I hope these regular writings elevate my voice and ideas to new levels. 

For this first piece, I will orient around what I will generally be writing about, and to do that I figured that some background context about The Change Campaign would be helpful. 

I went to college with the hopes of becoming a baseball player. Perhaps a bit naive, but then again I was just a kid. That dream lived through my freshman year, but a combination of injuries and bad habits made the already implausible an impossibility, and by my junior year that dream was gone. The reality of it hit me hard, really being in denial until I got hit in the head with a ball during warmups from a teammate's errant throw, and as I healed in my dorm room from that concussion, I became fully aware that not only was I not going to become a professional baseball player, but that I was responsible for never having the chance to reach my full potential as a baseball player, whether or not I would have gone pro, because of the habits I developed at college. Healing from a concussion looks like a lot of time with nothing but groggy thoughts, but as I healed it started with radical honesty about where I had fallen off the tracks, and then from there creating a story about where I wanted to go in life given the realities of my life that I had come to accept. This story began to illuminate a pathway that I could move through about how I wanted to change, and while I had not come up with the name yet, I credit that process as the birthplace of The Change Campaign. 

It was not until my senior year that I came up with the name. I spent a lot of time volunteering for Oberlin Community Services and created The Change Campaign as an initiative to raise coins and small dollar donations (“change”) from across the campus to regularly donate in support of the broader Oberlin community. Though the initiative was not nearly as successful as I wanted it to be in terms of raising money nor its sustainability on Oberlin’s campus, its development enlivened a socially entrepreneurial spirit within me. 

As my career began with Philadelphia nonprofits, The Change Campaign always followed. My first job was at a Philly public high school working with students on post-secondary pathways, and I saw the need for financial literacy. The Change Campaign evolved to try raising money to fund student bank accounts, which would incentivize kids to engage in healthy, prosocial development, both in and out of school, while teaching financial literacy with real money that they could use as they began the transition process from childhood to adulthood. When I was Director of Development at a community center in Philadelphia, we implemented this concept of The Change Campaign into our summer camp and workforce development programming. 

Those ideas were good and exciting, and I think may have made a difference in some people’s lives. It was not long into my career in direct service, though, that I felt pulled to work on system transformation. There is a Randy Pausch quote, “luck is where preparation meets opportunity”, that I feel describes the pathway that got me not just into systems transformation work, but to getting to lead it at an early stage in my career. 

When I was building the financial literacy program, I worked with a couple high school friends who had different skills than I had (one was good with computers and the other worked in financial services). One of their dads, who had always been kind to me from when he was one of my little league coaches, told his friend about the work we were doing, who had just been appointed as an Executive Deputy Attorney General under Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. He was working to develop (what we called at the time) the Pennsylvania Trauma-Informed Care Network. I met him at the beginning of my first master’s degree in educational leadership, and he told me I could work with him on that project as a student intern if I wanted to. 

Not only did I learn a lot about trauma-informed care at a macro level, but I met the leaders of the field itself. Many of the trauma-informed leaders in the United States had recently formed an all volunteer nonprofit organization called the Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy & Practice (CTIPP), and the chair of the board happened to be close friends with my boss. I got close with CTIPP’s board chair, who introduced me to the rest of CTIPP’s board, and I became an early, if not the first, intern of the organization, and my connections through CTIPP granted me access to the best trauma-informed professional development that was available. 

When I got a job as Director of Development at another nonprofit, CTIPP’s board voted me to become a member to run the fundraising committee. Once on the board, I became the right hand man for the heart and soul of the organization, a semi-retired attorney who combined his knowledge of Congress with his passion for trauma-informed care. We worked with a team to launch a national campaign that officially started in February of 2020. This timing was not ideal for the original purposes of the campaign we had developed, but had generated momentum for CTIPP leading into COVID, which coincided with philanthropic interest in the organization. 

By April of 2021, I became CTIPP’s first executive director, on loan as a contractor from a think tank that was supported by a philanthropist. The title was nice, but it was really an opportunity to work more in my role as the right hand to CTIPP’s primary advocate and strategist. Within a few months of starting in that position, he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and given a year to live. He made a generous donation that enabled CTIPP, alongside some other philanthropic support, to hire its first paid staff. I helped develop and manage the organization’s growth while its leader grew sicker, and naturally fell into the role of leading CTIPP when he passed away.

Throughout this process, the philanthropist who supported my salary incorporated her giving under a foundation and I could not be paid as a contractor anymore, but needed to be paid by a nonprofit organization. CTIPP’s board decided it preferred me to remain in my role on loan, so I had to start a nonprofit of my own, and naturally I named it The Change Campaign. I gave the organization the same mission I had developed for myself when I was healing from my concussion in college: To create a sustainable planet and a better future for all.

Over the next three years, I continued serving as CTIPP’s executive director on loan and grew The Change Campaign. While CTIPP serves the important role of building the trauma-informed movement nationally and to some extent globally, The Change Campaign became a space where I was able to work to advance more targeted policies and initiatives. When I began my master’s in public administration degree in the fall of 2024, I told CTIPP’s board that I could no longer work two jobs for one salary, and told them by the time I graduated they would need to hire a full-time executive director. I transitioned from my role with CTIPP in April of 2026, five years to the day after starting as executive director, to be full-time with The Change Campaign. 

I am now one week away from graduating with an MPA, exactly a decade after graduating from Oberlin, excited about where my career is heading. It has not followed the trajectory of the story I wrote for myself as I healed from my concussion, there was so much that I didn’t know at that time, which humbles me to know that I will continue learning so much as time moves forward. But I have also learned that making strategic steps and reassessing throughout the journey can open up new doors that were not available. 

So as I find myself in another transition period, I am excited to bring in the new practice of writing, hoping to not just amplify myself but also the work of The Change Campaign. There is so much to do and I am humbled by the ambition of my mission, but am regularly made hopeful by the work that is being done. I am excited to share more about that as time moves forward. The writing may not be perfect, but it will get better. Nobody may read this post, but I hope someday that millions will read and engage with the content being produced. We need something hopeful to work toward and I hope to play a role in supporting our society toward becoming better and stronger than it is today. These writings are not all the work, but they will be part of the work, and this is just the beginning.