I  provide landscape design, garden management, and arboriculture services in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. I serve as the president of the Salem Planning Commission, which he joined in 2021. I also serve on the City of Salem’s Climate Action Committee. I am a student in the master’s program in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Oregon’s College of Design (2023-2025). In 2018, I co-founded the Mission Street Parks Conservancy to help care for historical Bush’s Pasture Park. I served as its full-time president through early 2021.

 

Between 1995 and 2017, I worked as a non-profit executive and social justice advocate. I served as president and executive of Project Vote, a national voting rights organization, from 2008 through 2017. I previously served as Project Vote’s deputy director (2007-2008) and as a program manager (2004-2006). My colleagues and I ran an aggressive litigation program to enforce the federal National Voter Registration Act, especially provisions requiring states to offer voter registration at public assistance agencies and motor vehicle departments (“motor voter”), as well as provisions to prevent unreasonable voter purges. I helped expose the George W. Bush administration’s effort to illegally purge voters, which developed into a scandal that led to the resignation of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

 

Prior to my work with Project Vote, I was a community, labor, and religious organizer in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Ohio, and Nevada. I began his career as an intern to US Senator Paul Wellstone. 

 

Il live in Salem (OR) with my wife, Lori, son, Ben, three miniature schnauzers, and six chickens. I grew up in suburban Minneapolis and studied history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.