For an overview of my professional experience, please see my profile on LinkedIn. You might also take a look at my profile on Portland on Fire.
I help businesses generate profit without sacrificing social and environmental commitments. I also conduct research and synthesis on sustainability issues, acting as a translator for how "green" ideas play out as business and social opportunities.
My passion is really in leveraging emergent web technologies to address nasty, complex social and environmental problems at the intersection of business strategy, communications, brand identity + operations.
I was born and raised in Boulder, Colorado and moved to Portland in 1998 to attend Reed College, where I studied Sociology and focused on the social construction of technology. My thesis was on the history of the US wind power industry, trying to understand how we shape technology – and are shaped by it – and how innovation happens in risk-averse industries. When the academics became too much, I stayed sane by spending hours in the darkroom making images or gardening and building Rube Goldberg-like devices in the backyard for watering the garden.
In 2003 I joined an energy consulting firm in Portland, learning the ins and outs of forensic economics. By day I'd investigate and research Enron’s manipulations of the Western electricity markets and help prepare expert testimony against Enron in federal regulatory court. By night I learned how to handle and sift vast amounts of data by indexing it and searching it rather than actually reading it.
Come 2005, I was tired of spending all my professional time looking backwards at things that went wrong with Enron and wanted to be more proactive to build solutions. I came on board with Ecotrust, one of the coolest and under appreciated sustainability think-and-do tanks in existence. The kind of place you learn about and think: “wow, they do that to?”
At Ecotrust I helped grow a generous brand for the meme of Salmon Nation by facilitating the passions and interests of the people who call this bountiful pacific northwest bioregion home. At the same time I started an MBA program in sustainable business at Bainbridge Graduate Institute so I could learn how to grow economic value by restoring social and environmental capital. My capstone MBA project was a business plan for an online trading platform enabling direct transactions between buyers and sellers for locally made food products called Beeline.
I have consulted with private and public organizations to conduct CO2 emissions inventories, to identify investment opportunities in the emerging low carbon economy, and to refine business strategies that enable individuals to better understand their environmental footprint.
