Summary
Community-rooted human-services professional, program and policy designer, and self-taught civic technologist. Pairs frontline experience in mental health, addiction recovery, and youth homelessness with a record of designing programs and advocacy campaigns — and building the digital tools that carry them. Helped secure $71M+ in state funding for gun-violence prevention, authored a shelf of municipal policy proposals, and independently builds, deploys, and maintains public-interest websites. Currently a Medication Aide in residential recovery and the founder and project lead of Exhale, a statewide emergency-resource directory serving all 87 Minnesota counties.
Selected Projects & Program Work
Exhale — Founder & Project Lead2026–Present
- Founded and lead Exhale, a free, mobile-first resource directory that connects Minnesotans to emergency and everyday help — ordered by urgency, in four languages, storing nothing and asking nothing about who the person is.
- Built and deployed the live tool (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) across eight help pathways — crisis, mental health, medical, substance use, housing, legal, and know-your-rights — covering all 87 counties; ingested and staged statewide mobile-crisis data from state records.
- Assembled a complete fiscal-sponsor package — proposal narrative, itemized budget ($150K–$233K), pitch deck, and five appendices — and drafted sponsor applications; designed a privacy-first, consent-first model in which tribal nations appear only on their own terms.
Deconstruction + Salvage School — Program Design & Prototype (Rethos)2026
- Designed a full launch plan for Rethos's MPCA-funded contractor training program: a 16-module curriculum map, a learning-platform recommendation, a lean grant-administration and reporting architecture, and a recruitment pipeline.
- Built and deployed a working course-module prototype in the school's own branding — six-part lesson flow, embedded video, downloadable resources, and a pass-to-advance quiz.
Policy & Advocacy Proposals
- Authored a phased fiscal roadmap for the Minneapolis City Council (FY2026–2028) that scales the city's Snow Patrol pilot — two seasons across 8 neighborhoods, 17 miles of sidewalk and 534 site clearings at $30/hour — into seven resident-staffed programs: pothole patching, a neighborhood cleanup corps, school-corridor Safe Passage, an auto-repair co-op, home-repair micro-grants, paint and sign restoration, and a power-washer business incubator.
- Costed the package at ~$1.535M in new spending over four phases (roughly 0.016% of the general fund), with every worker a W-2 employee at $25–35/hour carrying workers' comp, unemployment, and earned sick time and no unpaid internships; built per-program ROI (a $50 cold-mix patch averts ~$2,000 in structural repair; an $800 furnace repair averts a ~$15,000 shelter placement), Year-1 performance thresholds that gate each phase on a published third-party evaluation, anti-patronage safeguards, and 12 specific council actions — benchmarked against Chicago Safe Passage, Baltimore Clean Corps, and Ypsilanti's Pull Over Prevention.
- Researched and wrote a data-driven proposal to staff 34 paid Safe Passage workers across 13 walking corridors serving 15 Minneapolis public schools — W-2 positions at $25/hour on 2.5-hour arrival and dismissal shifts, each paired with a volunteer, deployed in four tiers from the North Side core outward.
- Qualified every corridor under a “Three-Source Rule”: a corner counts only where at least two of Vision Zero's High Injury Network, MPD crime data, and a four-block radius of an MPS campus overlap, with transportation-equity priority areas as the tiebreaker — 17 sources cited, against a backdrop where 9% of city streets carry 70% of fatal crashes. Phased the budget from a $485K Phase 1 request to $1.03M at full scale, with each later phase contingent on a 90-day gate review of before-and-after MPD incident data.
- Authored a four-part eviction-prevention ordinance proposal for the Minneapolis City Council (FY2026–2028), addressing the 3,000+ eviction filings brought against Minneapolis renters each year, roughly 90% of them for non-payment: a Dec. 1–Mar. 31 moratorium on cold-weather lockouts, a fund that pays up to 60 days of arrears directly to landlords for households at or below 60% AMI (repaid interest-free over 12 months), mandatory pre-filing mediation, and a universal lease registry.
- Costed the full program suite at $1.53M over two years — under 0.016% of the city's general fund — against $11.8M–$26.25M in avoided public costs from a projected 785–1,050 prevented evictions, with break-even at 65; built the phased rollout, sunset provision, and public accountability dashboard, and grounded the legal theory in Minnesota's Cold Weather Rule (Minn. Stat. § 216B.097) with a direct answer to Chapter 504B preemption.
- Wrote a petition to the Minneapolis City Council, Mayor's Office, and MPD with two asks: a council resolution urging a Minnesota apology statute that separates an officer's expression of sympathy from an admission of legal fault, and MPD policy plus scenario-based de-escalation training that affirmatively permit officers to apologize — framing the harm as structural, since officers are coached into silence before any incident occurs.
- Grounded it in precedent from 30+ states with apology or benevolent-gesture statutes (broad versions in California, Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, Tennessee, and Washington) and Canadian provincial acts from British Columbia (2006) onward; drafted a six-subdivision model statute, resolution language, and a one-page MPD policy outline, aligned the plan with the MDHR settlement agreement and a 12-step council roadmap, and stated the limits plainly — no reach into criminal proceedings, no bar to civil suits, limited effect on federal § 1983 claims.
- Built a rapid-response community action page after the federal Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman — the only body mandated to investigate abuse and unsafe conditions inside ICE detention — was eliminated, leaving no agency required to enter Minneapolis's Whipple Building, inspect it, or publish findings.
- Identified the available lever: Minn. Stat. § 241.021 already authorizes the Commissioner of Corrections to inspect any detention facility in the state. Turned it into role-specific, ready-to-send letters for constituents, county commissioners, faith leaders, and press — each with named recipients and one concrete ask, from mandating routine unannounced inspections to escalating Hennepin County's 2025 access request into a formal public demand and a cross-denominational pastoral letter to the Governor.
- Researched, fact-checked, wrote, and built a long-form report on grid capacity across the U.S. and 12 top trade partners, arguing that transmission, transformers, storage, and interconnection queues — not generation — are now the binding constraint, and proposing “usable clean power” in place of installed capacity as the metric that matters.
- Documented it with 177 numbered citations to Ember, the IEA, IRENA, GWEC, national energy ministries, and country-level polling; hand-coded the site's data tables, SVG artwork, and an interactive chart that re-ranks all 13 nations across installed capacity, usable output, and build efficiency — the reordering (China fifth on usable output, the Netherlands up eight places, India down seven) carries the argument.
Professional Experience
Medication Aide — EOSIS Recovery (Tapestry), Saint Paul, MN2026–Present
- Administer medications, including medication-assisted treatment (MAT), and support residents in a CARF-accredited residential program for substance use and co-occurring mental health disorders — serving people of all genders and communities, including the integrated LGBTQIA+ Latitudes program.
- Follow established protocols, maintain accurate documentation, and help sustain a safe, supportive recovery environment.
Front Desk Coordinator — YouthLink MN, Minneapolis, MN2025–2026
- Served as a first point of contact in a 40-resident young-adult supportive housing program; monitored resident safety, planned programming, and maintained strict confidentiality under data-privacy rules.
Mental Health Assistant — Touchstone Mental Health, Minneapolis, MN2022–2024
- Supported adults living with serious and persistent mental illness (SPMI); performed behavioral interventions and delegated nursing services including medication administration; documented in the Credible EHR; completed 140+ hours of training.
Field Canvasser — Working America (AFL-CIO), Twin Cities, MNSummer 2026
- Door-to-door canvassing and member engagement for the AFL-CIO's community affiliate on working-family issues; in good standing and available for future campaigns.
Key Political Consultant (Volunteer) — Mothers Against Community Gun Violence, Twin Cities, MN2020–2024
- Helped secure over $71M in state funding (2023) for communities affected by gun violence through 2+ years of grassroots organizing with residents, community leaders, and elected officials.
Youth Program Coordinator — Minneapolis Parks & Recreation Board, Minneapolis, MNSummer 2022
- Planned and led sports, arts, and games programming for neighborhood youth.
Health Services Aide — U of M Masonic Children's Hospital (Fairview), Minneapolis, MNSummer 2022
- Prepared and delivered ~200 meals daily for long-term pediatric patients in a fast-paced clinical setting.
Payroll Specialist — Accra Care, Inc., Minneapolis, MN2021–2022
- Processed and verified 10,000+ personal care assistant timecards bi-weekly with a high standard of accuracy.
Working Artist — Self-Employed, Minneapolis, MN2007–Present
- Portrait painter and graphic designer creating visual content for community campaigns. Instagram: @QPa1nts.
Earlier Experience
After-School Tutor — Hennepin County Library (2017–2021) · Reading Tutor — AmeriCorps / MN Reading Corps (2016–2017) · Election Ballot Judge — City of Minneapolis (2020) · Produce Grocer — Seward Community Cooperative (2019–2020)
Technical & Web
Self-taught web developer — HTML, CSS (responsive design, CSS Grid), JavaScript (ES modules), Node.js, Git/GitHub, VS Code, hand-coded SVG data visualization, and static-site deployment (Netlify). Designs, builds, and maintains public-interest websites end to end.
Education & Training
- High School Diploma — Perpich Center for Arts Education
- Mental Health Practitioner Training (140+ hours, incl. crisis de-escalation) — Relias / Touchstone Mental Health, 2022–2024
- Medical Office Support Certificate — Avivo Institute of Career & Technical Education, 2017–2018
- Public Relations Specialist Certificate — Takoda Institute, 2014
References