Every one of us was once a child who looked up into a canopy and felt small in the best possible way. The wonder only deepened from there: beneath every forest, roots trade water and warning so that nothing stands alone, and the best among us spend their lives planting for a canopy they'll never stand under, to shelter creatures they'll never meet. That's the faith I've worked from.
I served as the first National Ambassador for American Forests, the oldest country-wide conservation organization in the United States. Building that role meant showing up everywhere it mattered: the TV studios and the media, yes, but just as much the finance calls, the partnership tables, and the policy rooms. This past year, that added up to more than 50 engagements, one a week, reaching an estimated 250,000 people. Some were world leaders and Fortune 500 CEOs, reached from stages like the United Nations General Assembly, TIME100, SXSW, and COACHELLA. Further downstream were the frontline kids the work is really for.
But the stage was only ever leverage. I used it to move partnerships, funding, and policy toward forests: the canopy over our cities, the watersheds and wildlife downstream. Alongside a lot of people who'd been at it far longer, I helped scale #TreeEquity past 200 cities, making the tree-cover gap between rich and poor neighbourhoods a national funding priority; brought new partners into long-term commitments to put trees in the ground; and put young people in front of Members of Congress across the aisle, carrying a generation's wonder at the living world into the rooms that decide its fate.
None of it happened alone. Then-CEO Jad Daley helped build this role with me from the ground up, and alongside new leadership, it took a team and partners who backed it every step of the way.
I'm stepping back now, not because the work is finished, but because what we built together doesn't depend on any one person anymore. If I did my job well, the doors opened, in government, in funding, on the stages that matter, stay open for the next generation.
With gratitude, and roots that don't pull up easily.
