Chief Strategy Officer
Camp Fire National Headquarters
Mercer Island, WA
Highlight any employment, volunteer, or other experience relevant to NAA's mission, vision, values, core competencies, and strategic focus areas.
If I were to consolidate my professional experience into one sentence, it would be this: I strengthen out-of-school time organizations’ ability to create welcoming spaces, meaningful experiences, and positive outcomes for young people.
Flash back to 2011. I am sitting at my desk at Thrive Foundation for Youth. I am mapping out program models for an organization called Camp Fire, a grantee in my portfolio, as they bridge research on thriving to practice. It becomes clear that Camp Fire is in need of a consistent, research-based program framework and methodology to unify its programs and outcomes across its network.
It’s now 2013. This is where the grant period ends and my role at Camp Fire begins. In the two years prior, we created Thrive{ology}, the science of thriving. I have led the network in achieving its goals to 1) align and further unify the organization’s culture and practices around a common language and methodology; 2) secure support from local and national funders, grant makers, and educators; and 3) gain recognition as one of the first youth organizations to integrate social emotional learning (SEL) principles into all its programs. We completed the redefinition and redesign of Camp Fire’s youth program outcomes. According to La Piana Consulting, “In many ways, these approaches have both contemporized and codified longstanding council best practices.”
And then in 2018, my charge became this: Implement a “next phase” of the program framework supported by program outcomes and further integrate the principles of Thrive{ology} in program curricula and design. In other words, how do you take an organization, founded in 1910, and modernize it to ensure a consistent, relevant and research-based program framework for young people today?
And today, in 2021, I am listening to those individuals whose voices have been silenced or ignored. I’m listening for how we can expand our notions of thriving to design from the margins. I am listening and gathering in order to build: to build a strategic vision and plan that asks not what those in power want the afterschool experience to encapsulate but, instead asks young people what is hard for them today and how can we, as skilled individuals in the organization, and as an organization in the broader field, listen and respond to their needs, their wants, their desires for a brighter future.
While my efforts over the last decade have largely focused on one organization, they are representative of the challenges and changes the afterschool field faces.
Based on your skills, dispositions, and expertise, explain how you see yourself contributing to NAA's strategic focus areas: Field Leadership, Professional Development, Advocacy, Community Building.
In support of field leadership, I bring my facilitation skills. From my time facilitating afterschool programs in New York City to my time facilitating a NAA Convention session in Atlanta, I lead through facilitation. I am a facilitator of inspiring ideas and approaches. I facilitate partnerships that bring together new perspectives. I am skilled at drawing out of conversations a vision, values, strength-based approaches, and strategic plans. In all my efforts, I look for new ways to apply system-wide standards.
In support of advocacy, I bring my heart. From my first job in high school to my current job today, I have both given and received a love for the afterschool profession. It is the field I have dedicated my career to, one in which I show up passionately and purposefully for each day. And yet, I recognize how easy it would have been for me to leave the field and why so many others do. That drives me to act as a voice of the profession: to build the partnerships, policies, and programs that support those facilitating afterschool programs to not to see it as a job or detour, but instead as a professional journey that keeps them in the afterschool profession.
In support of professional development, I bring my creative thinking. Innovative, experiential afterschool programs require innovative, experiential professional development. In developing a learning management system for youth development professionals, I created partnerships, policies, and programs that resulted in meaningful professional development opportunities for the Camp Fire network. I prioritize professional development for my team and myself, continuously looking for and showing up at new kinds of professional learning. Professional development is the driver behind my professional associations, my eagerness to volunteer as an external reviewer, and my commitment to show up and present at conferences. This is because I see professional development not only as the driver of learning and professional growth but also as a means of acknowledging the power of afterschool. As a NAA board member, I look forward to contributing to the recognition and promotion of the important contribution of the field and its professionals.
In support of community, I bring myself. From (what would have been) the mainstage in Washington, DC, at NAA’s 2020 Convention, to guest editing Afterschool Today, I have looked for multiple approaches to participate as a member of the vibrant community NAA has and continues to create. My professional efforts related to equity and inclusion have required culture change, which does not happen in isolation, it happens in community. And as a leader, it requires showing up. Fully. When I bring myself, I bring my heart and soul, my passion and commitment, to participating in community, the networking among community, and growing this community I feel so privileged to be a part of.
Review the NAA Board Job Description. Using the job description as a guide, describe your experience, skills, and dispositions that prepare you to be an effective board member of a national professional association.
When reflecting, young people in Camp Fire are asked to use a symbol to represent what they learned or how they will use the information from their experience in the future. I am reminded of this reflection strategy as a means of describing my skills, dispositions and experiences that prepare me to be an effective board member of NAA:
Head: I have spent time crafting my leadership approach in order to lead with intentionality and transparency. Participating in the American Express Leadership Academy helped me to develop my philosophy of leadership. In turn, whether it is developing and reviewing operating budgets, seeking out new funding opportunities, or identifying new ways to connect individuals and organizations in pursuit of strategic goals, my leadership approach may vary but my commitment to intentionality and transparency never wavers.
Eyes: I look for opportunities to create. I have looked for ways to create my own and utilize others’ professional development as an approach for others to see a way forward, for themselves professionally, for the organization, and for the young people we serve. At Camp Fire, I have utilized cross-sector strategies for engagement and motivation among peers. I am constantly and consistently looking for new approaches, strategies, and stakeholders to address needs, grow membership, create and expand programs and services, and diversify revenue. I’d plan to do the same as a board member for NAA.
Hands: I am hands-on. I have spent time strengthening my ability to cultivate relationships and solicit contributions as I prepared for an executive level leadership position. In the role of board member, I will take advantage of this opportunity to continue rolling up my sleeves, taking a hands-on approach, and diving into new responsibilities and ways to support NAA while scaffolding my skill development approaching areas of growth.
Back: I have built a network of role models, inside and outside of the field of afterschool. As an emerging leader, I expanded my professional network for this next stage of my career. In joining the NAA board, I am eager and excited to cultivate a network of afterschool professionals that inspire professional growth and build from a foundation of mutual support.
Why are you interested in being a member of the NAA Board of Directors?
In the Guest Editor’s Note I authored in the Winter 2020 edition of Afterschool Today, I talked about a highly skilled afterschool professional, a former teacher of mine, who asked me to help him run a sports-based afterschool program. I reflected in the note, “Looking back, he recognized in me, his former student, my potential as a youth worker. Through him, I recognized the power of afterschool programs in the lives of young people.” To this day, I credit him with my falling in love with this field.
The story I did not tell in the Guest Editor’s Note is the one in which I talked to him for the last time. At that moment in time, I had moved away for college, and began working at another afterschool program in between my college courses. I came back home during a school break and met him for coffee. As our conversation flowed from one topic to another, he shared how he might react negatively if his own (hypothetical) child came out as LGBTQ+. What wasn’t said in that conversation is that I was questioning my own sexual orientation. It was one moment in one conversation that has led to a lifelong commitment.
That relationship, the good, the bad, and the ugly, shaped a lifelong commitment to creating high quality afterschool experiences, where all young people, regardless of their identities, feel safe, seen, and heard for who they are and who they want to become. This personal experience shaped a lifelong commitment to developing the skillsets and mindsets of afterschool professionals that feel prepared and purposed in their development of high-quality afterschool programs and to advocate alongside the young people they support. It inspired a lifelong commitment to lead in this field by example. To acknowledge the ways in which my experiences are informed by the identities I carry and where my privileges limit my understanding. Because of this, l am committed to learning and unlearning, both individually and in community, with honest examination about how systems of oppression, systemic racism and white supremacy are present and ways in which they can be dismantled. I am committed to vulnerability, deep humility, boldness and grace, showing up as my whole self, listening and seeing others as their whole self without judgment, so that in turn, we can encourage young people to do the same.
What positive outcomes might have come from that conversation if my former teacher had the support, the professional development, and the advocacy that NAA provides? It is not a question I will ever know the answer to but it is one that drives my desire and interest in being a member of the NAA Board of Directors.
