Return On Investment Technical Communication ~ Community Work

Press

Northeast did the hard work to help its children, 4/6/10

Busy school drop-off to get makeover, 3/30/10

Neighbors seek ideas to slow cars at ‘a zoo' of an intersection, 4/29/06

Sprucing up the block, 5/4/04


Walk & Roll to School event supported by a Healthy Steps/Active Communities grant,
May 2007


Preschoolers planting bulbs in garden built with funds from a City of Olympia Sustainability grant,
October 2007


Harvesting school gardens for the
Thurston County Food Bank,
June 2009 & 2010

My interest in making Olympia's neighborhoods safer and more attractive for walking and biking defines most of my current work in the community. Additional community service is listed at the bottom of this page.

Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee,
City of Olympia
Volunteer to inventory, rank, and prioritize locations where sidewalks will be built in Olympia, as documented in the City of Olympia Sidewalk Program.

Northeast Neighborhood Association (NENA)
As Vice President of NENA from 2001 through 2006 and webmaster of the NENA website since December 2005, I've focused on:

Writing grant applications and performing work under Thurston County's Healthy Steps/Active Communities program, including:

Working with staff from Roosevelt, the Olympia School District, WA Department of Transportation and the City to redesign traffic flow at the Roosevelt school entrance. These improvements will be implemented in summer 2010.

Writing the Closing the Gaps: Building Places for People on Olympia's Neighborhood Streets proposal for the City of Olympia.

Writing the Walking Routes through Northeast Olympia guide.

Spearheading Safe Routes to School efforts and Walk & Roll to School events at Roosevelt Elementary.

Conducting a neighborhood Walkable Places assessment. The NENA president and I presented our strategy and findings at the WISEWOMAN Conference sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Newport Beach, CA, Nov. 2005.

Developing a school traffic survey for Roosevelt Elementary.

Developing Olympia's first school walking route survey since 1989.

Winning neighborhood grants from the City of Olympia so our community could:

Plan public outreach activities with neighbors to envision how to make our neighborhood a safe and attractive place to get active and get connected.

Build gardens and a kiosk at our neighborhood hub/San Francisco Street Bakery.

Build a preschool garden, centennial garden, and native plant garden at Roosevelt.

Voluntary Service International
Voluntary Service International (VSI) is the Irish division of Service Civil International, which was started after World War I on the premise that if we know, respect, and care for people from other cultures, we’re less likely to go to war against them.

Through VSI, I volunteered to:

Help Turkish Radio and Television shoot a documentary about secular life in this Islamic nation as the Turks took their first steps toward their goal of becoming part of the European Union. The documentary was translated into the primary European languages and shown throughout Europe in the mid-1990s.

Help build an ecologically friendly house in Bern, Switzerland that incorporated technologies to minimize its footprint on the delicate Alpine foothill ecosystem. These included a rooftop garden and a pyramidal greenhouse/rainwater collection system.

Dispute resolution and human rights

Davis Community Mediation Service: Volunteered as a mediator to help community members resolve personal and community disputes. Developed and produced TV public service announcements.

Institute for Participatory Management & Planning: Completed training in the Systematic Development of Informed Consent, which ensures that stakeholders have the opportunity to express their concerns and work toward a mutually agreeable solution.

American Red Cross: Trained and volunteered as a disaster responder.

United Nations World Conference on Human Rights: Served as a citizen observer at the conference in Vienna, Austria.