Community Work - Return On Investment Technical Communication

News articles:
NENA did the hard work to help children, 4/10
Busy school drop-off to get makeover, 3/10
Neighbors seek ideas to slow cars, 4/06
Officials pressed for safer walking, 10/05
Sprucing up the block, 5/04

Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Committee, City of Olympia

Volunteered to help inventory and prioritize locations where sidewalks are needed as documented in the City of Olympia Sidewalk Program.

Olympia YMCA Masters Synchronized Swimming Team
Created a website for our team.

Northeast Neighborhood Association

As NENA's Vice President and website manager for five years, I focused on:

Writing grants and performing work to enhance our neighborhood through the Thurston County Healthy Steps/Active Communities program, including:

Spearheading Safe Routes to School efforts and Walk & Roll to School events at Roosevelt Elementary.
Developing Olympia's first school walking route survey since 1989.
Working with staff from Roosevelt, Olympia School District, City of Olympia, and WA Dept. of Transportation to redesign traffic flow at the Roosevelt school entrance. These changes were 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.

Winning neighborhood grants 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 a preschool garden, centennial garden, and native plant garden at Roosevelt.
Build gardens and a kiosk at our neighborhood hub/San Francisco Street Bakery.

Voluntary Service International

Service Civil International and its Irish division, Voluntary Service International, started after World War I on the premise that if we know and respect people from other cultures, we’re less likely to go to war against them. In spring 1993, I volunteered with VSI to:

Helped Turkish Radio and Television shoot a documentary about secular life in this Muslim nation as Turkey applied for membership in the European Union. The documentary was translated into the primary European languages and shown throughout Europe in the mid-1990s.
Helped build an ecologically friendly house in Bern, Switzerland that was designed to minimize its impact on the delicate Alpine ecosystem. Features included a rooftop garden and a pyramidal greenhouse/rainwater collection system.

Dispute resolution and human rights

Institute for Participatory Management & Planning, dispute resolution training.
American Red Cross: Trained as a disaster responder.
United Nations World Conference on Human Rights: Citizen observer at the conference in Vienna, Austria. June 1993.
Davis Community Mediation Service: Volunteer mediator to help community members resolve personal and community disputes.