Blog

The news trucks leave in a week. The work takes years.

Flood maps are not bureaucracy for its own sake.

The strongest case in emergency management is also the hardest to sell.

I once took over a 50-project portfolio where the tracking had quietly fallen apart. Status lived in scattered spreadsheets and people's memories. Nobody could give leadership a straight answer.

A field guide for nonprofits new to federal money.

Uniform Guidance reads like a wall of regulation. Underneath, it is asking three simple questions. Did you spend the money on what you said? Can you prove it? Did you treat the funds as a steward, not an owner?

At the SBA I helped stand up a $100M program and bring more than 50 organizations onto it from a standing start. Most had never touched federal money.

Everyone obsesses over winning the award. The hard part comes after.

I have reviewed more than 700 grant applications. Volume is the enemy of fairness, so you build systems that protect it.

If a grantee asked me for one habit, it would be this: track your burn rate every week.

On writing for the highest-stakes reader you will ever have.

Federal recovery money does not teleport to Main Street. It moves through layers — program design, awards, sub-recipients, local organizations that people actually trust.

During COVID I helped coordinate logistics for more than 10,000 federal medical responders. There is no clean playbook for a surge like that. You build the plane while flying it.

Hurricanes Laura and Zeta arrived during the pandemic. We stood up 150-plus medical responders within 24-hour activation windows.

On managing emergencies that stack.

More than once I have had to design a data-collection framework from scratch, mid-crisis, with no runway.

In Malawi I supervised 15 international and 150 local volunteers, most of whom I met on arrival. You cannot lead that on authority you have not earned.

Notes on coalition-building.

I represented a national coalition at FEMA's National Response Coordination Center during activations. Sitting at that table teaches you something about how disasters really get coordinated.

M&E sounds like a compliance chore. Done right, it is just honesty with numbers.

After Hurricane Maria, I ran an Evacuee Marketplace that moved around $3M in donated goods to more than 1,000 displaced families.

In a disaster, the question is rarely whether to help. It is who does what, when, without tripping over each other.

I have built programs from a blank page more than once — intake, tracking, the whole apparatus.

An unlikely throughline.

Years around emergencies rewires your relationship with stress. Not because you stop feeling it — because you learn what it is for.

If I had to name the single most underrated skill in program work, it would be follow-through.

For most of my career I have been the person stakeholders call first. That trust is built in small, repeatable ways.

I am not an engineer. I have still rebuilt most of my working life around AI tools, and it has changed what one person can do.

I have pointed AI at a lot of my own work over the past year. Some of it was hype. Some of it stuck.

Everyone wants the response role. Few line up for recovery, mitigation, and the grant work behind them.

Across every program I have run, one habit has paid off more than any other: a single source of truth.

Federal, state, and local partners all want the same outcome and describe it in completely different languages.