I was three years into swimming in it, building dams with sticks, wading through waist-high water, and racing leaf boats against the current before we found out the creek splitting my neighborhood was a sewer. Not metaphorically. Literally. A runoff channel. I was a kid in Mobile, Alabama, and this was my neighborhood playground.

We didn’t think about policy or infrastructure or redlining. We just thought about how far the crawfish had made it past our last rock wall, and whether the snakes had returned to the log that connected my backyard to my best friend Josh Harris’. We didn’t talk about baby water moccasins in terms of ecological disruption. We just noticed they were using the same crossing we were.

In retrospect, that creek was doing more than carrying runoff. It was a mirror of choices made far upstream: in land management meetings, in zoning maps, and in the invisible hand of urban planning. It was carrying clues. Clues about how systems are built. About who swims in what water. And who doesn’t. 

I was born in Phoenix but Pittsburgh is where my family rooted itself. We bounced around living in places like Denver, Colorado and Mobile, Alabama (where interracial marriage was still illegal in 1998, my mother is white and father is black), but Pittsburgh was always gravitational. Eventually, it pulled me back in. Not before some adventure.

By 18, I was back in Phoenix, stumbling into a small tech school for Audio Engineering. At 19, I landed in New York City to work for Chung King Studios as my first gig. Boom…Hip-Hop. Studios. Tours. Smoke machines. Lasers. And yes, mirror disco balls. All the glamour that capitalism hangs like tinsel over its favorite toys. I moved in rooms with names. Worked in buildings with plaques. I saw the mythos up close.

And then, in the middle of all that… John Rupp took me fishing.

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. A stream. Me in Bape sneakers and city attitude. Him with patience. We worked a mile of water that day, breaking from the constant chaos of the grind at Quad Studios in Times Square. I didn’t know then that something was planting itself inside me. John would go on to found Pocono Fly Fishing while working on large world tours. I wouldn’t cast again until the pandemic, two years after I’d left the road to run a restaurant, pouring my personal recipes along with some of my mother’s into a business meant to cradle my newborn daughter, Mina. 

COVID didn’t just shut down economies. It interrupted stories. For me, it was a moment of stillness where some old truth surfaced. I was flipping auction items for side cash and stumbled across a Redington Classic Trout fly rod. John said, “Buy it.” I did.

In the five years since, I’ve wandered farther into nature than I ever thought I would or could. I’ve met people doing work that doesn’t just feel good, but cuts to the bone of what society needs. I’ve seen that healing, when it’s real, doesn’t come through slogans or donations or “impact reports”. It comes through listening. Grounding. Slowing down. Building ecosystems of care, not just markets of scale. 

Through teaching content creation with teens, I discovered a lineage of America’s “forgotten places”. Those bulldozed out of economic futures, buried beneath extractive histories and spoken of as distant past to be forgotten. I believe we are onto something sacred, but like Anand Giridharadas says of our systems: they’re often built to preserve inequality while branding it as opportunity. Conservation isn’t exempt. Education isn’t immune. Even technology, with its gleam and promise, too often amplifies privilege rather than dissolving it.

That’s where systems thinking comes in. Along with a summation of my story.

The tools that got us here as a region… extractive industry, colonial curricula, philanthropic gatekeeping… cannot be the tools we use to chart the future. But what if we reimagined everything from the water up? What if conservation wasn’t just about preserving landscapes but recovering relationships? What if we used AI not to predict purchasing behavior, but to identify which nonprofits are truly serving overlooked communities? What if education wasn’t a factory but a forge of storytellers, systems thinkers, ecologists, and artists?

That’s the question I now get to live with every day in partnership with Wildlife Leadership Academy. I met Executive Director, Sara Mueller, at a fly fishing show, and it felt less like a coincidence and more like a confluence of two unlikely streams finding each other in a watershed. 2 years later I found myself transitioning out of a tech-based nonprofit I had helped formalize. After learning the nuances of workforce development, philanthropy, and the ecosystem fueling our region, the opportunity to contract as Community Partnerships Coordinator, bridging networks together and collaboratively envisioning the future, was offered from the WLA team.

This brings us to now. Through my company, String Theory Solutions, I consult for the Forbes Funds and Skillbuilder.io based out of Pittsburgh PA on AI systems integration and transformative leadership initiatives. With WLA, I get to bring that infrastructure to bear on something more urgent and enduring: the future of young people who already feel the pulse of change, who already understand the language of systems because they’ve lived it, even if no one has ever named it for them.

We are a region rich in contradiction: ecological abundance and industrial scars, cultural wealth and institutional erasure. We also have artists. We have technologists. We have fly rods and family recipes. We have memory. And perhaps, if we’re willing to look again at what we were told was just a sewer creek, we might find the current that leads us home.