From an early age, I’ve asked, “What if?” I habitually envision improvements—from more delightful daily experiences to an overall better world. “What if?” means going beyond dreaming—to learning how to be effective, impacting both people and the systems we live by.

Language was a persuasive tool that came naturally to me: By high school I’d been published several times, elected class president, voted Best Writer, and graduated first in a class of five hundred. But many life lessons awaited me about converting words to impact. 

From the laws of physics and religion, to the dysfunctions of criminality and disease, to the energy to heal bodies and inspire climate action—I’ve been broad in my exploration and left no stone unturned in formulating how we make real impact—so we can be audacious in dreaming our “what-ifs” and confident in answering, "here's how." 

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In college, I set out to reconcile the two great languages of truth I saw around me: physics and religion. One explores the measurable world; the other interprets the unseen. I majored in both, convinced that somewhere between holy texts and the laws of motion, thermodynamics, and quantum behavior lay universal principles that could guide social progress and human fulfillment. Faculty recognized that drive with the Hannah Arendt and Drescher Scholarships, awarded for “high moral and intellectual stature.”

Then came disruption. When my grandmother was murdered during my senior year, I expanded my studies to anthropology and sociology to understand the societal and personal forces behind crime. I volunteered with the New York Theological Seminary’s in-prison degree program and conducted ethnographic interviews with prisoners inside Greenhaven Correctional Facility, producing a 170-page thesis on the intersections of social systems, opportunity, and agency, and laying the foundation for the Bard Prison Initiative. Listening to prisoners account for their trajectories into crime, and the new directions that were crystalizing for their post-release lives through theological reframing, I encountered how ingrained stories shape behavior and can impact the world—either for damage or redemption. 

The contacts and context from prison work opened doors for me in New York City after graduation. I shaped messaging and communications with an ex-prisoner-led reentry organization, while also working as creative director for a boutique marketing/advertising agency. I set up some of the earliest online retail sites for NYC electronics shops and hired ex-prisoners, unfamiliar with computers, to move from re-entry to data entry. 

A marketing client, OnlyMorocco, hired me to draft a business plan, which came out so comprehensive the founders invited me to serve as executive director—presenting the concept to investors on location in Morocco for a planned cultural showcase at Lincoln Center. When 9/11 derailed those plans, I returned to purpose-driven work with the Osborne Association, where I helped launch a family hotline and contributed to a multimillion-dollar grant proposal expanding prisoner-family services.

Then, another life disruption: A rare bone marrow disease brought my blood cell production to a standstill—along with my budding career. With no known treatment, doctors gave me 50-50 odds of surviving the decade. Returning home to Seattle, I lived on others’ blood transfusions and slept 16 hours per day, until I encountered a Korean hybrid of yoga and tai chi that restored my vitality and introduced me to the deeper workings of how energy, attention, and action interact. I became a certified Master of the discipline and opened new studios, setting revenue records and helping students overcome injuries and illness that had plagued them for years. I learned that like society, the body contains structures that can embed dysfunction; but diverting energy from entrenched pathways—as in rewriting stories—enabled healing and change. 

With my newfound energy, I entered Harvard Divinity School and began a Master of Theological Studies, intending to reconcile eastern/western cosmologies and eventually become ordained as an Episcopal priest. Sermons had always fascinated me for their narrative recasting of old ideas into relatable modern frames, and my study across faith traditions led me to think of religions as simply different marketing campaigns from God. My Vietnam-veteran ordination mentor helped me discern my calling was more prophetic than priestly: speaking truth to power rather than shepherding individuals.  

While cross-enrolled at the Harvard Kennedy School, I spoke truth to our power grid—developing a term project that envisioned energy utilities funding on-the-ground climate action. The yearlong Social Entrepreneurship Collaboratory culminated in a business plan that I submitted to a funder—resulting in a $100,000 seed grant to launch ITSCOOL (Innovative Tactics for Sea-Level and Climate-Change Outreach & Opportunity Leaders). I leveraged this to engage a number of partners, including a major public utility which awarded us $400K to run our program over the next three years. The win-win-win model had students replacing candy and magazine fundraisers with the sales of energy-saving lightbulbs for their communities, donated by the utility that could postpone costly new power-plant construction due to the efficiency gains. 

The youth and teens ITSCOOL engaged shared climate messaging at their neighbors’ doors leading to prevention of over one million pounds of CO₂ emissions. I designed the curriculum, content strategy, partnerships, and systems that effected large-scale change from simple, local action. The 2010 economic downturn ended our funding, but I left convinced that a powerful story, when given even a small platform, can stimulate collective action and move the needle on our most entrenched societal ills. 

Having caught the bug of steering individual actions toward collective impact, I joined Habitat for Humanity, to see how their combination of volunteer labor and homeowner “sweat equity” made them the #1 nonprofit brand. 

Habitat engages thousands of volunteers, working alongside future homeowners, to stand up low-cost homes. Habitat then sets the cost of the mortgage at a price the low-income family can afford. This alternative economics opens homeownership to a new sector, asking not what markets can bear, but what communities can. 

My first task was to increase capacity by growing the government grant and team of AmeriCorps members who guide volunteers, and then oversee the 20,000+ annual service hours they donated collectively. From there, I served as Habitat’s first Director of Gifts-in-Kind, securing hundreds of thousands of dollars in donated materials and services. Finally, as Development Director, I nurtured corporate relationships and led interfaith initiatives through hands-on construction events. 

My greatest contribution in my eight years with Habitat was adding to their well-regarded narrative. Banks, insurers, and financial institutions were uniformly funding “financial empowerment” programs, which did not include housing support. In response, I researched and wrote the white paper that recast Habitat as the most impactful financial empowerment program around—where participants were 99.7% successful in saving an average of $82K, with kids who were 4x more likely to graduate from college. This spin on the value proposition unlocked new funding streams, boosting corporate giving by 70%.

During this time, I realized that the emerging discipline of content strategy described what I’d been practicing instinctively all my career, so I completed the University of Washington’s nine-month Certificate in Content Strategy and Digital Storytelling. 

A strategic approach to stories doesn’t just look at how an organization talks about itself; it considers each individual user’s story as they engage with the product, company, or societal system. Centering users means hearing and opening our hearts to them—which in turn unearths pathways for trust, brand loyalty, and collective impact. 

From what I’ve seen, this principle holds across corporations, nonprofits, religions, and the energy that circulates through the universe. 

No industry needs more help centering its users than healthcare. The well-documented problems with our U.S. care system often focus on its costs, coverage, and crowded appointment queues. These glaring problems hide the pains of patients’ healthcare journeys, which are chronically confusing, opaque, and distressing. Our unnavigable system holds patients hostage when they are at their most vulnerable. Having seen this firsthand through my rare disease, and later walking my mother through her cancer, I joined Providence Health to bring the healthcare conversation back to a human level.

First at their subsidiary PacMed, and later as Regional Communications lead for one third of all outpatient clinics, I undertook content strategy and design of brand websites and intranets, produced the first overarching outpatient Welcome Guidebook, built industry-first comprehensive insurance-accepted pages, grew regional reputation through rebranded health campaigns & executive voice-craft, and implemented scores of multichannel communications plans for change initiatives and tech rollouts. 

My work quadrupled sub-brand media impressions to 81 million in one year, supported 120,000 staff through novel disease outbreaks, and saved the organization millions of dollars. As a result of my impactful focus on patient-centered content, I was asked by system leaders to develop an overarching patient-experience roadmap and action plan, which was referenced by top executives in developing Providence’s next three-year strategic plan.

Navigating the inner workings of a massive, matrixed national brand, in arguably our most complex industry, I encountered many obstacles to making widespread frontline change for patients. The impact I was able to achieve drew from principles learned in earlier roles—leveraging a patient-impact narrative to open hearts and build coalitions; engineering strategic systems to magnify seed efforts; and channeling a consistent energy to flow through, past, and around barriers. 

Looked at one way, my career experiences may seem like discrete particles. But like the vibrational laws of wave physics, I’ve been beating a consistent drum of discerning and applying the principles that penetrate structures, touch malleable hearts, and ripple into change. 

The next quantum snapshot may show me publishing my book, launching a patient-navigation app, helping worthwhile projects strategize for impact, or contributing clarity through the professional practices of content strategy, content design, or communications. Whatever the domain, I’ll be watching closely for how humans and structures co-create each other—and how to intervene to make the next iteration of this exchange even better. 

Rather than pinning down what the next stage in one’s career might look like, perhaps we can ask, “What if?” And join together in answering, “Here’s how.”