How I got here
It’s hard to choose a starting point for the story of how I got here. I could start with the deli where, as a teenager, I learned how to make 300 burritos in four hours, or with studying economics and discovering economic development—the place where my fascination with complicated systems finally became practical.
Looking back, the throughline was there all along: I’m a systems thinker. I see the individual pieces of complicated things and instinctively start figuring out how they connect, what isn’t working, and what can be moved. Throughout my career, that has meant turning ideas into things that actually exist—from helping bring Eureka’s Friday Night Market to life, to guiding small business owners through complex systems, to building and administering child care programs that put millions of dollars directly into our local child care ecosystem.
Then life gave me a very different kind of project. Less than 24 hours after my second daughter was born, an electrical fire started in our attic. Suddenly, I was navigating insurance, contractors, temporary housing, a major reconstruction, a newborn, another small child, and eventually a return to work. When I couldn’t see the whole path forward, I fell back on what I knew: structure. One problem, one spreadsheet, one phone call, one decision at a time. Eventually, we turned a burned house back into a home—but the experience also changed the way I thought about work, capacity, and what good systems are actually for.
Rooted Momentum grew from that realization. Good systems don’t just make us more efficient; they give us something to lean on. They keep things moving when life gets busy, make big ideas manageable, and create room for people to step away without everything falling apart. Today, I help good people do good work by building the structure underneath it—managing projects, producing events, organizing operations, creating workflows, or simply becoming the extra brain a team needs for a while.
My goal is to make it easier to be busy without making being overwhelmed the price of doing meaningful work.
