Homelessness Prevention — South Africa
Through the United States State Department, I partnered with South African organizations on homelessness prevention strategies — sharing evidence-based frameworks on Housing First, community-centered urban planning, and intervention models developed over years of work in Kansas City. The work also included designing a point-in-time survey to collect baseline data on the scope and nature of homelessness in Durban, training local data collectors, synthesizing the results, and using that data to inform policy recommendations.
A central focus was articulating why public policy must be rooted in objective measures of what people need rather than subjective opinions about what people deserve. Deservedness framing inevitably leads to a hyper-focus on eligibility criteria, which adds unnecessary cost and complexity — and routinely results in systems designed to screen people out rather than screen them in. Beyond that, there's a strong economic argument for prevention that exists entirely separate from anyone's opinion about social services: preventive interventions are always cheaper than responding after the fact. The cost of doing nothing isn't zero — it's an inevitable increase in emergency response services, which are the most expensive kind of service a community can provide. The resources required to address homelessness don't disappear when we choose not to act; they just shift to the costliest possible point of intervention.
What It Taught Me
The power of proximity. Many of the city officials we worked with had never actually visited their own city's homeless camps and shelters. Their understanding of the people living there changed when we visited those sites together. There are regional and cultural differences to be sure, but there's also a striking universality to the lived experience of poverty that transcends borders.
Ultimately, we're capable of solving any problem as soon as we agree in principle that it's a problem worth solving. The belief that homelessness is simply the result of "bad choices" is a gateway to a do-nothing philosophy — and that philosophy has a price tag that communities are already paying, whether they realize it or not. This experience reinforced something I carry into every engagement: the best frameworks are the ones flexible enough to be reshaped by the people using them. If your model can't survive contact with a different culture, it was never as evidence-based as you thought.
Immigrant & Refugee Work — McAllen, TX
In the summer of 2018, the DOJ's "zero tolerance" policy began criminally prosecuting all unauthorized border crossings — offenses previously treated as civil infractions — resulting in the family separations that dominated the national conversation. Days later, an executive order reversed course, but the damage was done and the confusion was total. I arrived in McAllen, Texas as a volunteer just after that reversal, when nobody — including the federal agencies on the ground — seemed to know who was going where or why.
There was no structure, no SOP, and no guidance. Asylum seekers were processed at a border facility ten minutes away and bused to a church gymnasium where volunteers like me — strangers to one another — coordinated their travel to sponsors across the country. We learned what to do largely from the refugees themselves. Sponsor information came from them directly, not from any formal system. There were no funds for bus tickets, so we arranged Western Union transfers with family members. No food was provided, so we bought pizza. No security. Each night, the gymnasium housed 50 to 70 people, roughly two-thirds of them children.
The contrast was what made it so difficult. These were people who'd traveled hundreds to thousands of miles fleeing war, corruption, and danger — and the reception from U.S. agencies was aggressive and disorienting. Many refugees had no idea what was happening or where they were going. But the moment it became clear we were there to help, they were looking out for us — saving us plates of food, watching our things, keeping an eye on anyone unfamiliar who entered the space. Given how many children were in such a small room, it was remarkably calm. The love between parents and their children was palpable.
What It Taught Me
The power of being present and decent. There is a vast distance between a national conversation about something and the face of that something when you're standing right next to it. Proximity changes everything — and the leaders and organizations I work with today often face their own version of this same gap: the distance between where decisions are made and where they're felt. The first question is always: "Have you been to the front line lately?"
Workforce Development & Congressional Testimony
As COO of Nautical Manufacturing and Fulfillment — and co-founder and managing partner of Staffing By Starboard — I led a partnership with Down Syndrome Innovations (DSI) to create an apprenticeship program that hired DSI clients directly into the workforce. The partnership was a genuine success: Nautical hired more than 30 DSI clients during my time with the company. That work gained national attention and led to joint presentations with DSI across the country on what inclusive employment actually looks like in practice.
The DSI partnership wasn't an isolated experiment — it reflected a broader philosophy. Programs like Pawsperity (then The Grooming Project) demonstrated the same principle: workforce development works best when it's built around people's strengths rather than their deficits, and when the outcomes benefit both the individual and the community they live in. Finding creative ways to support the employment goals of populations conventionally perceived as having barriers to employment is a topic near and dear to me — and the results consistently challenge the assumptions that keep those barriers in place.
That body of work eventually led to testifying before the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee on affordable housing, workforce innovation, and economic opportunity. Standing in that room, speaking to members of Congress about what actually works on the ground, crystallized something: the gap between good intentions and good outcomes is almost always an operational one.
What It Taught Me
There's a hidden market of exceptional workers, and all it takes is a bit of intentionality and outside-the-box thinking to unlock it. Many of the people who look like a risk on paper — because of what they've had to experience — are more humble, more loyal, and more eager to learn and grow than the candidates everyone else is competing for. The people closest to the problem are usually closest to the solution, but they're rarely in the room where decisions get made. The most impactful thing a leader can do is build a bridge between those two worlds. That's what operationalizing your why really looks like at scale.