Climate · land · local economies
I work across policy, markets, technology, and practice to help climate, land, and public-benefit organizations make complex work coherent enough to act on — then build the strategy, program, tool, or operating rhythm that makes it real.
The organizations I work with are rarely short on purpose. They are short on coherence — the strategy lives in one document, the operations in another, and the story is in nobody's hands. The mission is intact; the pattern carrying it has frayed.
My job is to find the life-serving pattern inside the complexity, then build the next practical thing that makes it real — a program design, an operating cadence, a pilot, a story your people can repeat without me in the room.
A good solution improves the larger pattern it enters.
Different sectors, same question: does this solution leave the larger pattern healthier than it found it?
Soil, carbon, and ecosystem markets that pay the grower before they pay the intermediary — program design, measurement honest about its own uncertainty, and the farmer-facing translation that decides whether any of it gets adopted.
Electrification where it actually happens: one house, one contractor, one block. Anchored on Chicago's North Shore with Next Step. The transferable part was never the equipment — it is the translation layer and the operating system around it.
Design to pilot to scale for a pluralist commonwealth: community ownership, procurement that keeps wealth in the watershed, and governance built to hold it there. The longest arc, and the reason for the other two.
These are starting shapes, not packages. We choose the smallest useful piece of work after we understand what is actually stuck.
A bounded inquiry when the problem is consequential but the diagnosis is unclear.
Turn the diagnosis into a program, tool, story, workflow, pilot, or decision system people can use.
Ongoing strategic capacity for a team moving through a complex change.
Since 2007, I have worked where environmental ambition meets the institutions, markets, tools, and relationships that determine whether it becomes useful in practice.
2007–2019 · Build the field
Delta Institute and Loyola University Chicago
Developed and delivered farmer and landowner programs across the Midwest, secured more than $2 million in collaborative grants, and co-founded the Artisan Grain Collaborative and ReGenerate Illinois. Advanced conservation finance, soil carbon, fertilizer-emissions work, regional food system partnerships, and strategy. Designed and taught Loyola's first undergraduate course in ecological economics.
2019–2020 · Make a new market operable
Nori
Co-led the Croplands Methodology, helped translate COMET-Farm science into software and market rules, and supported the first independently verified and transacted project.
2020–2026 · Work across the seams
Solving for Pattern and partner firms
Research, program and market design, grants, product and technology strategy, partnerships, sales, and implementation for climate, agriculture, carbon, and public-benefit organizations.
Selected work includes: American Farmland Trust, Argonne National Laboratory, Colorado Collaborative for Healthy Soils, Cquesta, Environmental Defense Fund, GeniHub, Green America, Hummingbird Technologies (now Agreena), Soil in Formation, The Carbon Underground, and the U.S. Climate Alliance. Some engagements were delivered through Sierra View Solutions.
2026–present · Bring the transition home
Next Step Heating & Cooling
Developed business strategy, redesigned the website, and recommended operational improvements to accelerate residential electrification in the Chicago region.
Finance taught me to follow value. Ecological economics taught me to ask what the ledger leaves out. Nineteen years in the work taught me that durable change depends on translation between people who rarely share the same map.
The method is simple so the thinking can be rigorous.
Strategy starts where the work actually happens — the field edge, the shop floor, the kitchen table, the service call.
Trace how money, energy, trust, and information really move. The stuck point is rarely where it hurts.
One or two changes that solve more than one problem without creating new ones. Not a forty-item roadmap.
A real thing — a program, a system, a pilot, an operating cadence — proven in use, not in a deck.
The work isn't done until your people can run it, extend it, and explain it without me.
Berry's “Solving for Pattern” offers fourteen tests for a good solution. These eight are my working synthesis, not quotations. I use them to challenge a recommendation before asking anyone else to live with it.
A model makes some relationships visible by leaving others out. Before I ask anyone to act on one, I make its boundary, assumptions, evidence, and uncertainty visible — and bring in the people who will live with what it omits.
How the standards become methodOpen by default, because the transition needs more capacity than any one studio.
Berry's criteria in working form: how to tell a fix from an improvement, and why the difference decides whether your solution survives contact with the system it enters.
Embedded with a family-owned HVAC company in Skokie. The constraint was never demand for decarbonization — it was translation, and translation is infrastructure.
AI can help us see patterns. Placed intelligence asks where an answer lands, who lives with it, and what the tool cannot know from nowhere.
Ecological economist, electrification advisor, founder of Solving for Pattern. From regenerative agriculture and ecosystem markets to a 1923 Evanston bungalow that runs fully electric, the throughline holds: turn environmental policy and complexity into direct, practical returns for the people doing the work.
A few sentences about what feels stuck is enough to start. I read every inquiry myself.
Replies personally and promptly