I spent seven years inside philanthropy: a community foundation in South Carolina, a global reproductive health funder, and a major climate funder, where I managed a grassroots environmental justice portfolio. The settings were different, but each scope of work generated the same questions: whose knowledge shapes a strategy, how institutions make decisions, and what gets lost when complicated human systems are compressed into the formats organizations are used to using.
I went to Stanford to deepen the methods I had already begun reaching for inside foundations. The MS Design program strengthened my ethnographic research, systems thinking, rapid prototyping, visual communication, and physical making—tools I now use alongside the strategy and operating experience I brought with me.
Since then, that practice has taken a lot of forms: an 80-page publication on field-wide shifts in design, AI governance tools built from community-engaged research, 25 hand-turned objects carrying AI characters through queer historic sites, a 150-person design studio in Karachi, and an 8 × 8 foot moving memorial to people lost to AIDS.
The question connecting them is increasingly simple: how can we understand a system deeply enough to find its most impactful leverage points, and design a solution that can deliver lasting change?
