Case Studies
A closer look at some of the work. Each case study documents a real project, the deeper problem it was trying to solve, and what shifted as a result. More coming as the archive fills in.
When a Region Needed to Hear its Own Story
Imperial Irrigation District. Educational Multimedia and Community Outreach. 2016 to 2017.
The setting
By 2016, California's Salton Sea had endured fifteen years of state inaction. The Quantification Settlement Agreement (QSA) had assigned California responsibility in 2003, but no major restoration or management projects had been implemented. Local frustration was high while people were suffering from decreasing air quality and millions of animals were losing their.. habitats. Imperial Irrigation District had already petitioned the State Water Resources Control Board to force the state to act. The region needed Sacramento to move. But the region itself had not yet been fully equipped to tell its own story at the scale the moment required.
The problem I saw
The obvious problem was Sacramento's silence. The deeper problem was that efforts aimed at legislators were treating the symptom, not the cause. What was missing was funding; and a regional constituency that understood the science, the stakes, and the solutions well enough to speak for itself. Until the region could speak from a place of shared understanding, restoration would keep being something being done to the Salton Sea communities rather than by them. Institutions respond to public will. Public will begins with organization, and a concerted voice.
What we did
Imperial Irrigation District appointed The EcoMedia Compass as their educational multimedia and community outreach partner. The scope was regional education first: multimedia management, production, community events, and outreach in service of a multidisciplinary, science-based approach to restoration.
Over the course of the engagement, we developed STEM-aligned curriculum on the Salton Sea for classrooms, shared with schools across the region, hosted community events and forums, produced multimedia on current and proposed restoration projects, and worked with community members, artists, scientists, and shoreline residents to help them tell their own stories in their own voices. We spent a month in Sacramento convening a well-attended forum near the State Capital in the Secretary of State's office, called "California's Salton Sea." We visited every state senator and assembly member's office.
We also brought our existing network of press relationships from local, national and international publications, into contact with the deeper story of the Sea. Throughout the engagement, I remained an independent voice, connecting reporters with authentic sources across the region including community members, scientists, and advocates whose perspectives didn't always align with any single institution's messaging. That independence was the point. Trust with the press came from telling the truth, not from carrying anyone's brief.
The theory of change was regional first: educate the constituency, and the political conditions for state action follow.
What shifted
In November 2017, during the final months of the engagement, the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) voted unanimously to approve a stipulated order requiring California to implement a ten-year Salton Sea Management Plan (SSMP). It was the state's first written commitment after fifteen years of inaction. I testified at the November 7 meeting as EMC's executive director, on the record for the residents whose homes ring the Sea. My testimony was a critique as much as a witness: the order named the most emissive playa in the state's plan but did not extend concrete projects to Salton City, Desert Shores, or Bombay Beach where communities actually live. I urged the board to add an accountability provision requiring that if the state fell short of its annual milestones, water transfers from the region be paused until the state caught up. Though not all of my recommendations were adopted the board did approve modifications to address a number of concerns raised during the meeting.
Weeks later, the California Legislature passed SB 615, formally naming the state's comprehensive Salton Sea Restoration Plan and codifying the Water Board's role in restoration. By 2018, the Salton Sea Management Plan was released, the Legislature held formal hearings on the Sea, and the state moved from planning mode into implementation.
In the years since, over $583 million in state funding has been committed to Salton Sea projects, and a $250 million federal commitment from the Inflation Reduction Act began flowing in December 2023, with additional landmark agreements between the federal government, the California Natural Resources Agency, IID, and the Coachella Valley Water District announced in 2025 to accelerate implementation of the state's plan.
The EcoMedia Compass has been recognized as one of the region's key nonprofit voices, listed on the official California State Water Resources Control Board's Salton Sea resources page alongside universities, research institutes, and long-standing advocacy organizations.
Our engagement was one thread in a much larger effort. But it was the thread that helped the region become audible to itself, and to Sacramento. When the state finally moved, it moved because the region had become impossible to ignore. And when the vote was cast, at least one voice at the microphone insisted that the residents themselves not be left out of the plan that was supposedly for them.
When the Credit Market Needed a Front Door
World Systems Solutions. ClimateScale prototype. Conceived 2020. Prototype development 2023 to 2024.
The Setting
By 2020, global greenhouse gas and social impact credit markets had grown into a sprawling ecosystem of registries, standards, verifiers, and project developers. Corporate buyers, foundations, and governments increasingly wanted to fund verified restoration and climate work, but the market had become nearly impossible to navigate for most users. Purchasing a credit and knowing it was genuinely additional, verified, and beneficial required expertise most buyers didn't have, and I believe, shouldn't need to have.
The Opportunity I Saw
The obvious problem was complexity. The deeper problem was that the market was optimized for the players inside it, not for the capital trying to enter it. Buyers wanted to fund the highest-quality regenerative work. They were getting spreadsheets, jargon, and a hundred separate websites. What was missing was a front door. A simple, navigable, trustworthy interface that could sit on top of the existing infrastructure and route capital to the projects most worth funding, with clarity on additionality, biodiversity co-benefits, and multi-benefit impact. Not another registry. A curated marketplace built on top of the ones that already existed.
What We Did
I conceived ClimateScale in 2020 after studying impact markets, restoration budgets, and the friction between capital and credible climate projects. The concept was to build a customer-facing marketplace layer that could sit on top of existing credit registries and project developers, providing simplicity and clarity for buyers while directing capital to the best-verified regenerative work. Think of it as a navigable front door to a market that had never had one.
I drafted the initial prototype and served as project manager through the roughly eighteen months of development that followed, from 2023 into 2024. The work was led by a distributed international team spanning Argentina, the Philippines, Germany, India, and the United States. It included Nicolás Ducoté (former Mayor of Pilar, Buenos Aires, and Executive Director of CIPPEC), leaders in change management and organizational transformation, urban systems and energy modeling, strategic partnerships, communications, and technology, alongside John Jones, WSS founder and CEO. The prototype launched and demonstrated the core thesis: that simplicity and clarity could make a complex market legible and fundable. ClimateScale is now being integrated into the broader PHOENIX platform at World Systems Solutions, which is fundraising for the next phase of staffing and buildout.
What Shifted
The ClimateScale prototype proved that credit markets could be made navigable without oversimplifying them. It surfaced additionality, biodiversity, and multi-benefit impact as first-order visible criteria rather than fine-print qualifications. Decision-support AI was drafted to help evaluate values and project components. The prototype became a foundation for WSS's continued fundraising and platform development, with ClimateScale positioned as a durable component of the PHOENIX.
Personally, the work deepened my thinking on climate finance and greenhouse gas markets, particularly on the tension between funding project development and using regulation as the carrot or the stick. It also reshaped how I think about international collaboration: the distributed team taught me that cultural range and time zone spread are not obstacles to work around but sources of insight and rhythm to design with. WSS is still organizing for the fuller buildout of the PHOENIX platform.
What I take from it
Markets don't fail because the projects are bad. They fail because the door is hard to find. Sometimes the highest-leverage intervention is not another registry, another standard, or another campaign, but a front door built with enough clarity that the right capital can walk through.
When the Format Was the Intervention
World Systems Solutions. Climate Emergency Response Forum (CERF) I and II. Producer, convener, and multimedia lead. 2023 and 2024.
The Setting
By 2023, the climate response landscape had grown crowded with summits, statements, and pledges. Yet the solutions that scaled were rare, and the gap between the scale of the crisis and the scale of the response kept widening. World Systems Solutions, the nonprofit developing the PHOENIX World Transformation Platform, was asking a different question: what would it look like to design a workshop format specifically for the work of collaborative solution generation across disciplines that rarely share a room?
The Opportunity I Saw
The obvious problem was that traditional climate convenings produce declarations, not solutions. The deeper opportunity was structural. Most convenings are formatted for panels, keynotes, or plenaries. Very few are formatted for scientists, spiritual leaders, technologists, policymakers, indigenous elders, financiers, and youth advocates to actually build something together across the differences that usually keep them apart. What was missing was not more content. It was a format that could hold the difference and put it to work.
What We Did
World Systems Solutions produced two Climate Emergency Response Forums (CERF I in Greenville, South Carolina, and CERF II in Santa Barbara, California). Both were preceded by a Spring Gala at the Music Academy of the West that introduced the PHOENIX platform to California leaders and residents, featuring Dr. Katharine Wilkinson (author of All We Can Save and a Project Drawdown veteran) and Rev. Dr. Michael Beckwith (founder of the Agape International Spiritual Center). The Gala's role was to open the door: to bring PHOENIX into public conversation with the leaders whose engagement would shape whether the CERFs could go on to do their deeper work.
My role across the CERFs was producer, convener, and multimedia lead. I designed and produced the day-one scenario broadcast and video that grounded participants in a shared hypothetical future, so the collaborative work of day two could build from common ground rather than competing framings. I facilitated conversation within the larger group. I handled photo and video and hired the audiovisual team. I met with and interviewed prospective global participants to inform who should be invited and how the invitation should be framed. I produced the multimedia publication material that carried the forums' outputs beyond the room.
The participants who came reflected the ambition of the design: a Zen master and former NASA deputy manager, a Buckminster Fuller Institute board member, a former California State Senator, the CEO of a youth climate nonprofit and UN ambassador, a senior advisor from the US Department of Energy, Native American elders, an urban systems modeler working across Germany, Singapore, and India, a Blue Capital founder, a founder of Descendants of the Earth, ministers from three faith traditions, and technology and finance leaders whose usual audiences do not overlap. Collaborating organizations included the Institute for Zen Leadership, Except Integrated Sustainability, Agess Inc., ReShift, Orchid City, Liberated Grounds, EarthPilot, Regenerative Life Design, Global Peace Yes, Healing Roots Design, and The EcoMedia Compass.
The forums used AI augmentation not as a spectacle but as a working tool, synthesizing the outputs of day-one workshops in real time to feed the values-alignment work of day two. That sequence, practical solutions first, then the values needed to fund, distribute, and scale them, was the design premise the format was testing.
What Shifted
CERF I in Greenville proved the format was possible. CERF II in Santa Barbara refined it. Between them, WSS developed a working model for hyper-collaborative workshops designed specifically to accelerate solution generation across the disciplines that most need to work together and least often do. The forums' outputs, along with the multimedia materials produced from them, continue to inform the ongoing development of the PHOENIX platform and its integrated tools, including ClimateScale.
What I Take From It
Traditional climate and other collaborative convenings assume that if you gather smart people, solutions will emerge. They usually don't, because the format isn't shaped for the work. Design the format for the work you actually want done, and the people you already have become capable of things they couldn't do apart.