Major Highlights

• Over 200% budget growth in multiple nonprofits

• 45% personnel growth and 20% budget growth in COVID

• Expanded operations into 6 different jurisdictions

• Founded a 501(c)4 organization

• Raised over $70 million collectively between all nonprofits

• Led small and medium-sized nonprofits and groups from a staff of 5 to a staff of over 60

• Successfully led nonprofits with budgets as small as $120k up to $17 million+

My experience started young helping to lead a newly found high school program in 2004 at the Bus Project called the Youth Caucus. Here I learned the basics of community organizing, coalition building, neighborhood canvassing, fundraising and donor stewardship.

From there, I continued serving in leadership capacities leading teams in the faith community that performed various places and mentored youth. I eventually was a part of a church plant in Vancouver, Washington as the worship leader for a couple of years…and continued down this path until 2014.

I began serving in political leadership capacities in 2011 at the NAACP Portland Chapter 1120, coalition work with Portland African American Leadership Forum and various Black-centered groups.

From there, I went to serve in my first official nonprofit leadership capacity as Deputy Director of a renter’s rights advocacy group where I stayed for six years; eventually leading as Executive Director for the final four. Here I pooled all the skills and volunteer work to help grow from a team of 5 to 20, landing our first million-dollar state-funded contracts through legislative action.

From there, I moved on to lead a homelessness agency for three years helping to lead multiple coalitions, grow infrastructure, and grow a nonprofit in the midst of COVID. Yes, you heard that right - grow it. It grew when many agencies scaled back.

Now, I serve at the Urban League of Portland as their Strategic Engagement Officer supporting workforce programs, health and senior services, economic justice, youth programming, and temporarily leading their housing department to build housing, house our homeless neighbors, prevent evictions, and lead multiple jurisdictional efforts to change the homelessness services landscape.

I helped grow a renter’s rights movement in the state of oregon that reached into 23 counties in Oregon serving thousands of Oregonians renting in Oregon. We tapped into our first tenant voting block in partnership with labor and showed the legislature that Renters are a force to be reckoned with.

I helped found a Multi-sectoral housing and renter’s rights advocacy group, Stable Homes for Oregon Families, that has become the go-to group in the Oregon State legislature of housing related policy. Industry partnerships between labor, environmental justice, healthcare, education, retail, and more banded together to demonstrate the vast impact housing policy has on all of our industries and helped land nationally renowned policy that is studied by international audiences in France, Germany, South America and more.

I helped co-lead a bipartisan multi-sector coalition founded to create the nation’s largest per-capita investment in homeless services that banded together business, nonprofit services, housing developers and more to pass a Metro-wide ballot measure in 2020.

I co-founded Reimagine Oregon with Nkenge Harmon-Johnson in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd and eruption of Black voices demanding systems change. Here we mobilized federal, state, Metro, county and multiple city governments and their resources to shift their engagement with Black Oregonians resulting in monumental systems change (see more below in “Systems Change.”

Coalition Participation

• NE Alberta & MLK/PAALF

• Portland NAACP Chapter 1120

• Stable Homes for Oregon Families

• Welcome Home Coalition

• Here Together Advisory Committee

• Reimagine Oregon

• Anti-Displacement PDX

• Housing Oregon

• And many more…

I’ve had the honor and privilege to participate in a number of monumental, nationally-renowned systems change efforts that have shifted Oregon’s landscape in many ways.

Major Highlights

• United States’ first statewide rent-regulation law/2019 and subsequent updates

• United States’ first statewide just-case eviction law/2019 and subsequent updates

• City of Portland’s FAIR Ordinance

• City of Portland’s Preference Policy

• Metro Supportive Housing Services Ballot Measure & implementation (Mult Co and Clackamas Co Implementation Plan Committee member)

• Modifying Goal 10 in Oregon’s land use laws

• SW Portland’s Transportation Anti-Displacement Coalition

• Changing 40-year funding structure of housing funding in State of Oregon (HB2100)

• Helped establish State of Oregon’s Rental Market Resources Fund

• Oregon CARES Fund for Black Oregonians

• COVID ERsAP distributions in Oregon

• City of Portland Inclusionary Housing laws

• State of Oregon Racial Impact Statement development

Major Highlights

• Mentoring youth - since 2009

• Youth Caucus

• PolitiCorps participant

• Church leadership and ministry (operations management, music ministry director, youth services engagement

• And much more…

Current

• Oregon Donor Alliance, Board Member

• Oregon Consumer Justice, Board Member

• Health Share of Oregon, Board Member

• Here Together, Advisory Committee Co-Chair, Board Member

• Reimagine Oregon, Co-Founder, Steering Committee Member

• HB2100 Task Force, Member

• Stable Homes for Oregon Families, Co-Founder, Member/Lobbyist

Former

• CAT Action, Founding Board Member

• City of Portland’s Rental Services Commission, Founding Member

• Oregon Governor’s Wildfire Council, Member

• Clackamas County Affordable Housing and Homelessness Task Force, Member

• Youth Caucus (Bus Project, now NextUp), President & Intern

• City of Portland’s Preference Policy, Contributing Member

• City of Portland’s N/NE Development Strategy, Contributing Member