Hey. I’m Root.

I'm a white, queer, nonbinary, and chronically ill Integral Coach living on the stolen ancestral lands of the Cedar band of the Piscataway Nation (known today as Baltimore, MD).

I believe that personal transformation and systemic change are the same movement. It’s something I've lived across and experienced for more than twenty years of working inside, alongside, and in service of organizations cultivating positive change and social justice.

It started for me at nineteen, when I started working at a worker-owned restaurant and had everything I thought I knew about how work gets done turned completely upside down. We made decisions together about the business as the people who put in the hard work everyday. That experience cracked something open in me that never fully closed — questions I've been living into ever since: what does it actually look like when organizations are built around the dignity of everyone in them? And what are the qualities of the people who lead them?

These questions have taken me through over two decades of facilitation, organizing, consulting, and coaching. I've guided groups through complex processes — the kind where everyone's voice needs to be in the room, where the stakes are high and conflict is present, where shared leadership isn't just a value but something that is being built day by day. I've worked with organizations and communities across the country – from grassroots to federal agencies – to design systems that support people to lead from their whole selves, not just perform their job descriptions.

I come to this work through over a decade of frontline community organizing — leading my community to stop a new jail, protecting my undocumented neighbors, and building a multi-racial political home where queer and trans people could build power for racial justice. And I’ve learned what it costs to pour yourself into systems change without tending to the system of yourself. Chronic illness eventually made that lesson impossible to ignore.

And I come to this work through my love for the land. I grew up in rural Virginia running through streams and forests. My graduate training in ecological landscape design taught me that our ability to thrive — as a forest, as a watershed, as an organization, and as a person — is about the relationships between things, how each element contributes to the whole. I saw the connections between ecological, social, and human systems. Of many things that are similar about these systems, there is one thing that stands out the most to me. You have to tend to the roots.

The same is true for leadership.

Being queer and nonbinary has shaped how I approach coaching. Queerness taught me to distrust the binaries that systems of power depend on — the ones that say you must choose between your authenticity and your advancement, between caring for yourself and caring for the collective, between being political and being whole. I've learned to refuse those choices. And I help my clients refuse them too.

I gave myself the nickname "Root" in 2011 during a time when I felt everything but rooted in my life and in myself. It became a north star — something I was reaching toward more than inhabiting. I hadn't fully felt what I thought Root would feel like until I left my first marriage in 2021. And I've felt it in me ever since. Now I can't imagine feeling any other way. It's remarkable, after a lifetime of feeling literally the opposite.

Getting here wasn't clean or linear. I've been through career changes, divorce, depression, crippling anxiety, friend breakups, moving to a new city, and building a business from scratch that sustains me and stays true to my values. I've been broken open many times personally and professionally — and what I found on the other side every time was something in me that couldn't be destroyed. That's what grounds my coaching.

Through the years I've been coached, gone to therapy, read the books, listened to the podcasts, journaled endlessly, and leaned hard on the people who love me.

I never did the work alone and you shouldn’t have to either.

And because you should also know who you're dealing with:

I'm a gardening, biking, and hiking queer. I love my wife, my cat, my people, my family, and my bikes (road and mountain). I read fantasy novels and play video games in my spare time. Feed me amazing tacos and I will do whatever you want. Foraging is my newest way to connect with the land — and the land is one of my closest friends. I grew up in the middle of the woods along a small stream in rural Virginia and feel most at home in the mountains of the Shenandoah Valley. My wife and I spend 3 months each year working remotely from Costa Rica. I've watched every season of Survivor. I dream about living in a queer commune. I love my life and the people who are in it with me.

Credentials and Additional Training

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