Made with communities, not just for them.

Voices of Hope

Network for Hope

Voices of Hope carries donation education into the places where crowds gather, delivered by familiar faces in the community.

The campaign launched with a 2026 pediatric calendar and companion films that put families and children behind the mission on camera. Every participant painted what hope means to them, and their artwork became the calendar.

The 2026 calendar cover, built from participants' own artwork

Maria is one of the twelve. Born with severe complications, she lost a kidney at nine, finished her degree, and is now searching for a living donor. Her spread runs in March, alongside Kidney Awareness Month.

Maria, still waiting. Bryan, a liver recipient whose canvas reads Esperanza.

The calendar was also produced as a full Spanish-language edition, which is why Bryan's canvas reads Esperanza. Families told their stories in the language they live in, rather than having them translated after the fact.

Jaylynn's story: she nearly lost her eye at age 2. A donor changed everything.

Barbershop and Salon Talks

Network for Hope

Kidney failure hits Black communities and rural Appalachian communities harder than almost anyone else, and both have valid reasons to distrust the healthcare system. Different histories, same result: trust moves through people, not institutions.

So the program goes where the relationships already are and where people already have to go: barbershops, salons, churches, diners, community centers. Barbers and stylists are trained as community ambassadors rather than treated as venues. On-site blood pressure and glucose screening runs alongside the conversation, so the visit meets a need whether or not anyone registers as a donor.

It was built to be measured and to be handed off. Pre- and post-surveys track changes in knowledge and sentiment rather than attendance. Targets cover session counts, screening volumes, ambassador training, and partner retention across five to ten locations. The facilitation model is documented as a toolkit so the program can run without a staff member present.

Series flyer: real talk, free health screenings, and lunch

Hope is on the Line

Network for Hope

In the middle of Cincinnati's Fountain Square, we set up a phone. Anyone passing by could pick it up, and on the other end were people whose lives had been changed by organ donation and transplantation: recipients, donor family members, and mission staff, offering hope to whoever answered.

The activation turned an abstract cause into a one-on-one human conversation in the region's busiest public square, and the film that captured it brings that intimacy to everyone who couldn't be there.

The installation: pick up, and hear a voice on the other end

Chloe: the story that didn't end when the campaign did

Donate Life Kentucky, then Network for Hope

The first time I met Chloe, she was two years old and waiting for a heart transplant. She went on rides around the hospital, connected to tubes, instead of taking walks outside. That video ran under Donate Life Kentucky, and like most campaign videos, it was built to change minds: to make a stranger understand that the waiting list is not a number, it's a kid with her whole life ahead of her.

Two years later, at a different organization, I filmed her again. This time the story was about what came after: parents with a child who got her life back. Campaigns rarely get a second chapter.

Before transplant, and after

Greatness Begins with Hope

Network for Hope

Game day. Community impact. Lifesaving hope.

Greatness Begins with Hope brought organ, tissue, and eye donation into the one place a whole community already shows up together every week: the football field.

I set the strategy and made the final calls; my engagement team carried it out across three high schools (Sycamore in Cincinnati, Frederick Douglass in Lexington, and Corbin in Kentucky) and three universities (Cincinnati, Louisville, and Marshall), spanning Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia.

Every activation ran the same three-part play. Honor a local community member whose life had been touched by donation, with their story read aloud to the crowd. Educate fans at tables staffed by trained local volunteers with a personal connection to the mission. Then put the message in people's hands with giveaways made for the crowd in front of us: helmet decals and bag tags for high school players, 2,000 headbands at Louisville, 3,000 thundersticks at Marshall, and 2,500 drink koozies at Cincinnati.

The honorees carried it. Adria Johnson, CEO of Metro United Way, whose son was an organ donor. Mario Jarrett, who played high school football locally and received a heart transplant after collapsing at practice. Recipients, living donors, and donor families were recognized on the field in front of the people who already knew them.

Honorees recognized at midfield, University of Louisville

Savor the Story

Network for Hope · Eastern Kentucky

Elliott County had the lowest donor registration in Eastern Kentucky and some of the highest social vulnerability in the state. On the maps, those two things sat almost on top of each other. The obvious move was digital advertising. The data stopped it: broadband gaps meant the ads would land nowhere near the households they were written for.

The region carries a heavy chronic disease burden, with residents roughly 10% more likely to have diabetes than the rest of the state. On top of that, during the 2025 Appalachian floods, as many as 20,000 people a day were waiting on food assistance. So the entry point became food, but healthy food only helps if you know what to do with it. Families were opening boxes and finding eggplant with no clue how to cook it. That gap is the whole reason Savor the Story exists. We paired health-indicated food boxes with recipe cards that honor each participant by name and story. Each card carries a QR code linking to donation resources, and we keep a steady team presence at food banks and farmers' markets.

This Thing Called Life: Corie Blount's story

Network for Hope

For an episode of the This Thing Called Life podcast, I helped coordinate a conversation with former University of Cincinnati standout and 11-year NBA veteran Corie Blount, who shared something far bigger than basketball. His 25-year-old son, CJ, is on dialysis now, waiting for a kidney while the family looks for a match.

Long-form audio gives a story like that room to breathe. We timed a media activation alongside the episode so it landed with sports listeners and with media in one push. The family then carried it into the community in person, including a first pitch at a Cincinnati Reds activation at Great American Ball Park.

Sickle Cell Data Collection (SCDC) Program communications

CDC Foundation · Health Communications Specialist

The 16 states in the Sickle Cell Data Collection Program

I led national communications strategy for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Sickle Cell Data Collection Program across 16 state programs. The work included turning complex health data and scientific guidance into plain language for policymakers, government partners, and public health leaders.

I helped build and run a monthly Community Outreach Workgroup with more than 100 participants, overhauled "The Bloodline" quarterly newsletter, and supported the SCDC website revamp.

Health literacy runs through it all. The program's surveillance research on sickle cell birth prevalence and social vulnerability was published in CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the agency's flagship scientific publication. For that release, I helped create the public-facing graphic and the plain-language explainer. Those pieces made the findings legible to someone without a science background.

The grantee work was hands-on: capacity building and technical assistance across all 16 state programs, including helping states build their public-facing websites, such as California's SCDC site at Tracking California.

The most durable output was a storytelling system. I created the photoblog template and walked through it with every state, from finding the story to publishing it. The programs then published on their own sites without me, some housed at state health departments and some at the universities and nonprofits running the work. Six of those, plus a success story series from the program's six original states, are still live today: Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and California.

Free Outdoor Movie Night

Donate Life Kentucky

The premise was that nobody has to talk about organ donation if they don't want to. A free movie in a public park, free popcorn and cotton candy and snow cones, school supplies for the year ahead, and Encanto after sundown. We piloted it in Louisville in 2021, then took it statewide in 2022 as a three-city series starting at a park in Madisonville.

The barrier was never information; it was the conversation. Organ donation gets treated as a subject for the worst day of your life, so people avoid it until they have no choice. Putting it in front of a family movie on a summer night changes what kind of subject it is. Location selection followed the same logic: the series went to communities that rarely get events this size, not to the cities where turnout is easy.

The film was also chosen on purpose. Encanto opens with a father's death and spends the rest of its time on a family remaking itself around loss.

In Madisonville, the event ran with Circuit Court Clerk Tanya Bowman, whose office promoted it locally and whose staff worked it as volunteers. At the time, clerks' offices issued driver's licenses, which is where most Kentuckians say yes to donation. Partnering with the clerk put the people who process registrations in the park alongside the families who might make one.

Recap from the most recent screening, Louisville, 2025

Save My Human

Donate Life Kentucky

Save My Human campaign creative

Save My Human made the case for organ donation through the eyes of the pets whose humans needed a transplant. The integrated campaign used user-generated content, 12 micro-to-macro local influencers, an animated commercial, real patient stories, geography-based media pitches, merchandise, billboards, bus shelter posters, and a standalone campaign website. I planned and bought the paid placements.

The influencer program over-performed and helped the campaign go viral, reaching an estimated audience of more than 420,000 for less than $2,000. Several influencers have stayed on as advocates for the mission.

The animated commercial

Save My Human on Great Day Live

Be the One & the Faces of Donation art exhibit

Donate Life Kentucky

Black Americans make up roughly 13% of the US population and 35% of the national organ waiting list. Be the One worked on that gap where the conversation was already happening: in churches. Pastors led it, starting with a faith leaders panel for National Donor Sabbath, alongside recipients and donor families from congregations across the region.

The campaign culminated in Faces of Donation, a traveling art exhibit I produced with a local Louisville artist. Seven portraits showed the full ripple effect of donation: recipients, donor families, extended family, staff, a nurse, and a transplant surgeon. I directed the shoots, ran print production and vendor coordination, built story cards, and QR-tracked the full stories that accompanied each portrait.

The Faces of Donation traveling exhibit

I pitched the exhibit to newsrooms across the region, and the coverage did what the exhibit did: it put the disparity in front of people who had never seen it stated plainly.