Systems & Transformation

I build systems because the work needs them

I did not start my career as a technologist. I started close to the work, and the systems piece grew out of practical problems: too much information in too many places, unclear handoffs, repeated work, and people trying to coordinate under pressure.

Operations transformation

Keeping a multi-site humanitarian operation coordinated

The problem: rapidly changing arrivals, multiple shelter sites, hundreds of staff and volunteers, transportation needs, service coordination, and public reporting.

What I built: practical workflows and low-cost data systems using the Google ecosystem to track arrivals, departures, demographics, travel needs, capacity, volunteer coordination, and service delivery.

Scale: a $12 million operation serving up to 1,800 people nightly with 62 staff, more than 600 volunteers, and up to 2,500 operational data points per day.

Independent operational context →

Related coverage: AZPM on the 2024 funding cliff · KJZZ on migrant-care funding pressure · KGUN on opening the Benedictine Monastery shelter

Multi-agency implementation

Helping organizations share referrals and data more reliably

The problem: border shelters and destination organizations needed better continuity of information as families moved across the country.

What I worked on: shared referral workflows, common data fields, reporting practices, documentation, and cross-agency communication across Catholic and humanitarian partners.

Scale: coordination across multiple agencies with high-volume migration-service data, including work involving up to 10,000 new records per week.

Decision support

Turning changing field conditions into information leaders could use

The problem: decision-makers needed usable information about shelter capacity, community readiness, transportation, social services, and operational risk.

What I built: dashboards and executive-ready reporting for government officials and humanitarian stakeholders, combining field information with service-capacity analysis.

Why it mattered: the goal was not a better-looking dashboard. It was to make resource planning, referrals, and operational decisions clearer.

AI & automation lab

Experimenting with local-first AI for operational knowledge

The problem: complex workspaces lose time when knowledge is fragmented across files, dashboards, tools, and services.

What I am building: a governed local-first AI environment combining retrieval, local language models, automation, dashboards, tool access, and human approval gates.

Why I care: I am interested in AI when it reduces repetitive work, improves access to information, or helps people make better decisions. I am much less interested in using it simply because it is fashionable.

How I approach systems workI start with the people doing the job, the information they actually need, and the constraints they are working under. Then I build the simplest structure that can reliably support the work and improve over time. See Leadership, Implementation & Systems capabilities for the broader skill set, Research & Evidence for the evidence-to-practice perspective, and the Implementation Resume for a role-focused version of this experience.