Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.
I’m a facilitator, community builder and the person behind Birch + Bloom.
I've spent more than twenty-five years working with people, organizations and communities, often in moments of complexity and change, when something needs to be imagined, or when people are simply looking for a different way to come together.
My work has taken me across the non-profit, charitable, education, tourism and community sectors. I've led both small and large teams through complex periods of change, facilitated conversations among people who hold very different perspectives, designed community engagement and relational approaches to organizational change, and worked alongside leaders, volunteers, boards and communities trying to figure out what comes next.
Through all of it, I've become increasingly interested in how we gather.
I've seen what can happen when people are given enough time to really listen to one another, when a good question changes the direction of a conversation, or when we move away from the boardroom table and find another way into something we've been struggling to understand.
That's a big part of why I created Birch + Bloom.
My approach to facilitation is thoughtful, but it isn't particularly conventional. I draw from dialogue and engagement while also making room for creativity, reflection, storytelling, nature, movement and making. Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we write or draw. Sometimes we spend time outside.
I'm interested in what becomes possible when people have permission to show up as people, rather than only as the roles they carry.
I'm less interested in arriving with answers than I am in creating the conditions for people to remember what they know, learn something new and imagine what might be possible.
Birch + Bloom is also informed by my own life. I've known devastating grief, change, uncertainty and the experience of having to find myself again. Those experiences changed what I pay attention to and deepened my belief that there is room for all of who we are — in our work, our relationships, our communities and the lives we're creating.
Sometimes I host a public gathering or retreat. Sometimes I work alongside someone one-to-one. And sometimes an organization, team or community brings me in to help create a different kind of conversation or experience.
The subject may change, but what sits underneath it doesn't:
Our humanity is worth making room for.
Experience
In 2024, a recommendation from an incredible coach led me to Pamela Slim’s Body of Work. It changed the way I saw my career — and myself.
I began to see experience not as a collection of jobs or credentials, but as everything we’ve learned, created, contributed to and lived through along the way. Birch + Bloom is a reflection of mine — the many threads that have shaped how I gather, facilitate, lead and work with people today.