Institutions are experienced at the front desk.

The front desk turned out to be a vantage point.

At Georgetown’s Prisons and Justice Initiative I am often the first person someone meets — students, staff, community members, partner organizations, and people calling to find out whether we can help at all. I support PJI’s six programs across prison education, reentry services, and wrongful-conviction work — PIVOT, the Paralegal Program, the Scholars Program, the Bachelor of Liberal Arts program, Making an Exoneree, and the Family First Initiative. In practice that means keeping participant records and program documentation in order, running outreach, fulfilling research requests for students, and sitting with people as they work through housing, identity documents, phone service, storage, and online portals that were plainly not designed with them in mind.

I support and observe intake interviews and reentry assessments. I do not conduct them independently. Separately, I research and build profiles of reentry service providers across D.C. and Maryland — housing, employment, and other resources — so that the organization’s referrals rest on something current rather than something remembered.

The part that changed how I think is smaller than any of that. Reentry is rarely settled in a hearing. It is settled in whether the person who picks up the phone knows which form you need, and whether they treat the asking as a nuisance or as the job. Georgetown wrote about that shift in a profile of my work at PJI.

So I spent seven months studying the organization I work for.

My M.A. capstone asks whether the frontline reentry practices of a nongovernmental organization interrupt, soften, or reproduce punitive governance — and what the answer reveals about reentry as a governance problem. In the District, custody and supervision belong to federal agencies and identity documents to District agencies, while the connective work of interpreting rules and moving people between institutions falls to intermediaries the formal system neither commands nor replaces.

It is a single-case qualitative study conducted from inside the organization between January and July 2026: nine recorded interviews with staff, faculty, and program participants; fifteen weekly field journals; participant observation; and a documentary record assembled to check the organization’s account of itself against sources it does not control.

The finding is that all three verbs hold at once, and that their distribution tracks control. The paper develops a framework of three regimes of discretion for analyzing nongovernmental intermediaries as governing actors, argues that their most consequential outcomes are structurally unobservable, and sets out implementation recommendations. Its conclusion locates the constraint in the design of the reentry field rather than in any single organization’s performance.

Work you can open and read.

Three pieces are posted here in full. Each one is my own writing, and each says plainly what it can and cannot support.

The unglamorous half, which is most of it.

Carmichael for Ward 5 Council

Deputy campaign manager · February – June 2026

I ran field and operations for Bernita Carmichael’s campaign for the Ward 5 seat on the D.C. Council. The campaign lost. I coordinated a field team of ten volunteers across canvassing, phone banking, and community events; supported ballot-access verification by helping with technical review and compliance documentation against Board of Elections thresholds; organized two campaign events and represented the candidate at roughly ten more, including a D.C. teacher summit; and handled the logistics, including late-night runs to get materials where they needed to be by morning. I drafted volunteer briefings and outreach materials.

Teaching

Graduate teaching assistant, Department of Government, Georgetown · August 2025 – May 2026

I led weekly discussion sections for about forty undergraduates across two semesters — one course in the fall, then two sections of a different course in the spring — in The U.S. Political System and Introduction to International Relations. Teaching is where I learned to explain institutions to people meeting them for the first time.

Pappasito’s Cantina

Waiter, headwaiter, bartender, to-go · 2021 – 2025

I worked at Pappasito’s for four years while I was in college, at high-volume locations in Houston and Austin, and I was still doing it the year I started applying to graduate school.

Get in touch.

I am actively looking for full-time work beginning after my degree is conferred in August 2026, in campaigns, advocacy organizations, think tanks, or nonprofits.