Experience

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  Greenlight America

  • Washington DC-Baltimore Area

  • Chief Communications Officer and Co-Founder

    • Sep 2023 - Present
    • Washington DC-Baltimore Area

    Greenlight America is a new independent non-profit focused on leveraging grassroots energy to help more clean energy and transmission projects win local permitting and approval more quickly. The U.S. needs to build 6,000 clean power projects and more than 10,000 miles of transmission lines in the next decade to hit emissions reduction goals. Perhaps the biggest obstacle is widespread local opposition - which often reflects genuine sentiment within the communities where clean energy must be built, but is amplified by fossil fuel funding and exacerbated by misinformation. There is no comparable independent grassroots effort advocating *for* building these projects. Our founding team has led some of the largest grassroots organizing networks in the country. We are building a scalable, nationwide model for engaging and mobilizing local residents in support of clean energy.

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  Swing Left

  • Political Organizations
  • 1 - 100 Employee

  • Board Chair and Co-Founder

    • Jan 2017 - Present

    When Trump was elected President on Nov 8, 2016, like so many left-leaning Americans, I knew I had to do something. The very next morning, I had the idea to build a tool to show folks their closest House Swing District to help them get started winning back the House for Democrats in 2018. It was an idea that caught fire and turned into Swing Left, an organization that focused the energy of the "Resistance" on strategic electoral targets and helped win back the House in 2018 and the Senate and White House in 2020.

  • President

    • Jun 2020 - Jul 2022

    In 2020, with redistricting upcoming and the Senate and Presidency on the line, our message had to be more nuanced than 2018's simple and straightforward "Take Back the House." Our solution was the "Super State Strategy," which took the well-worn political idea of nested targets and packaged it for popular consumption. I'm proud of how the strategy helped fight "paralysis by analysis" for so many folks who wanted to be all-in on the fight against Trump but didn't know where to focus.We also launched Blueprint in 2020. Spearheaded by the amazingly talented Catherine Vaughan, who had brought her states-focused organization Flippable into the Swing Left family in 2019, Blueprint was intended as a "grassroots donor advisory" that would democratize access to the best political giving advice. The result was a tool that raised $5M in 2020 despite launching halfway through the year, but more importantly provided a superior experience for donors looking to make a positive impact on our democracy. The team's efforts were justly recognized when Blueprint won a Fast Company "Innovation By Design" award that year.

  • Executive Director

    • Jan 2017 - Jun 2020

    Swing Left met the moment in 2018. Two of the programs I was most proud of that cycle were our District Funds and The Last Weekend. The District Funds took a little-known provision of election law and popularized the idea of raising money into funds that are held in escrow for eventual Democratic nominees. We were able to deliver over $3M in funds in just days to Democrats who had just won their primaries, frequently via a "big blue check" well into the six figures, to help them jumpstart their campaign against better-funded Republican incumbents. The Last Weekend campaign was our attempt to rebrand GOTV. To get the volunteer energy we needed to win in 2018, we put together a coalition of over 70 grassroots organizations under The Last Weekend banner ("Don't just vote; volunteer"), then organized influencers like Kerry Washington, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Kevin Bacon, Jane Fonda, Hillary Clinton, Samuel L. Jackson, etc to create content that would spur folks to action. The result: TLW wound up being the largest driver of shifts to the races that took back the House for Democrats in 2018.

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  Vote Forward

  • Board Chair

    • Jun 2019 - Present

    In the 2018 cycle, we realized that there was a lot more energy out there for doing voter contact work year round than there was useful and effective voter contact work to do. So when I met Scott Forman in 2019 and heard about the handwritten letters he had pioneered at Vote Forward--and, most importantly the randomized controlled trials he had done proving their effectiveness, I was intrigued.We relaunched Vote Forward that year as a c4 affiliate to Swing Left with the mission to increase voter participation in traditionally underrepresented communities. Driven by our Big Send campaign in 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic's effective shutdown of in-person voter contact activities, we saw over 200k grassroots volunteers write 20M letters to voters. And in true Vote Forward fashion, we performed a randomized trial on our 2020 campaign that showed the letters led to a new 126k votes in the most hotly contested states.

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  Veritas Prep

  • GMAT Teacher

    • Oct 2009 - Jan 2016

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  The New York Times

  • Freelance Writer

    • 2004 - Nov 2013

    I contributed regularly to the New York Times for 10 years, starting with the (now defunct) City and Circuits sections, then making my way to the (now defunct) Escapes section and finally the Travel section, where I published most of my work. I wrote primarily about quirky subcultures and outdoor adventures that most readers would only experience through my stories. I also contributed the occasional photos and videos.

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  Bill Smith Group

  • Consultant

    • 2008 - 2008

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  SmartyCard

  • Editorial Consultant

    • 2008 - 2008

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  Primedia Software-on-Demand

  • Consultant

    • 2004 - 2005

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  Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions

  • Marketing Coordinator

    • 2003 - 2004