Relationality Lab

My Roots Are In Community

For over 25 years I have helped lead communities that have changed the world.

In 2001 I founded the world’s largest community of people who identify as asexual and demisexual, building a thriving grassroots organization that has shifted public understanding and touched the lives of millions.

As a senior leader in the tech reform movement I have helped parent advocates, youth leaders and tech workers build relationships with the power to move the world’s largest and most powerful social media and AI companies.

I regularly support leading NGOs, mission-driven companies, and philanthropic funders making strategic investments in communities that drive change. As the author of the award-winning book, Relationality, I regularly give talks and lead workshops on the power of investing in community.

What I Do

Guide Strategic Investment in Human Connection

Anyone who wants to invest in real change needs to invest in the relationships that make that change possible. I help organizations identify what relationships will move their work forward and come up with concrete strategies for nurturing them. Often this looks like bringing key stakeholders together for a set of recurring events focused on building trust, mutual support, and creative collaboration. I specialize in building the connective tissue that turns fans of an organization’s work into movements that can mobilize resources, create things together, and push for systemic change.

Through strategic engagements, workshops, and advisory services, I focus on two core questions: What relationships move our work forward, and what places need to exist for those relationships to grow and thrive? These questions are explored in depth in my award-winning book, Relationality.

Get The Book

Measure the Impact of Relational Work

Our bodies often know when powerful connection is happening. We feel electricity when we're in a room where transformation and connection are occurring, but it can be difficult to convey this electricity with anything other than anecdotes. Powerful communities often struggle to demonstrate that power to outsiders.

I arm communities with this proof so that they can more easily attract funds, tell the story of their impact to their members, and negotiate with decision makers. I do this by identifying and adapting scientifically proven measures which communities can integrate into their day-to-day operations. For example, the power of a community to create change is often tied to how frequently and meaningfully community members support one another. Its resilience, meanwhile, is often tied to how effectively community members engage in generative conflict.

Read About Measuring Collective Care

Develop Tooling for Relational Measurement

People building communities need more than frameworks; they need practical ways to collect data and make it useful. That's why I build practical, open source tools that make it easy to collect data and integrate it with an organization’s existing CRM. This tooling is designed to protect the privacy of communities and their members, and to integrate into the day-to-day work of convening people rather than feeling like a burden on community members.

My flagship tool, Rhizal, helps communities collect relational data, track member engagement over time, and translate that data into compelling evidence of impact. In addition to supporting impact measurement, it is designed to increase event participation and increase signups to paid community membership.

Learn More About Rhizal

Get in Touch to explore how we might work together.

Core Beliefs

Relationships exist when we change one another.

The more we change one another, the more powerful a relationship is. To be in relationship, we have to learn how to change and be changed in new ways. It's always vulnerable and often awkward.

A good community space will make learning easier. It will help people discover how to change one another's lives in ways that lead to connection, collective care, and collective power.

The more effective we are at building relationships, the less they can be predicted or controlled.

The more we change one another, the less we can know about where that change will lead us. This is often beautiful, but it often creates a tension between powerful communities and the people who fund them.

Investing in community requires understanding that relationships will lead to resilience, creativity, and systemic change that are aligned with a set of core values, but that the specific form that change will take is unknowable.

Our world will transform for the better if we recognize and resource the work of building relationship.

Stronger relationships are proven to drive everything from public health to economic mobility to climate resilience to overall happiness. The key to building those relationships is creating places where people can learn to change one another.

Every day, hundreds of millions of people work to create these sites of connection, but often their work goes underrecognized and underresourced. If we could learn to more effectively invest in relational work, research indicates that our world could rapidly and dramatically improve.

We would be happier, healthier, and longer-lived. Our small businesses, our schools, and our democracies would thrive. Our society would become less polarized and less lonely. We would enjoy better art and more scientific breakthroughs. All we have to do is get basic economic security for people who are burning out building community.