I didn't set out to become a futurist. I set out to understand the earth. 

I started my career as a geologist and hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, NOAA, and Fugro, interpreting marine geophysical data, producing coastal hazard maps, and building GIS-based mapping solutions for wetland restoration projects across the Gulf of Mexico. It was rigorous, technical work. I learned to read the earth's past in order to understand its risks, and I learned to translate complex data into findings people could actually act on. 

From there I moved into economic development and nonprofit leadership. For eleven years I served as Executive Director of LAGCOE in Lafayette, Louisiana, an organization that functions much like a chamber of commerce for the global energy industry. I took it from a biennial trade show to a year-round global membership association, grew its Education Fund, launched a Young Professionals network, and worked closely with the Lafayette Economic Development Authority, Louisiana Economic Development, and the U.S. Department of Commerce on international trade and workforce development. That work earned our organization the U.S. Department of Commerce President's E-Award for Export Excellence. I also helped design and build out a custom Salesforce CRM implementation during that time, so I understand organizational infrastructure from the inside, not just from a dashboard. 

Somewhere in the middle of running that organization, I started noticing a pattern: the strategic plans we built, the ones with clear goals and clean timelines, kept getting overtaken by a world that wouldn't hold still. That noticing eventually led me to strategic foresight. I earned my Certified Foresight Practitioner designation, and in 2020 I founded Joy Forward Strategy to bring that practice to other mission-driven leaders navigating the same complexity I'd been navigating for years. 

I hold a Master of Science in Engineering Geology from the University of Mississippi and a Bachelor of Science in Political Science and Environmental Geology from Millsaps College, and I'm an Inner MBA graduate through Sounds True, LinkedIn, and Wisdom 2.0. I lean on Gallup CliftonStrengths in how I understand myself and coach others, and I'm a Reiki master, an Oracle card reader, and a nature photographer in training. None of that sits off to the side of the strategist and the scientist. It's the same person, and I've stopped trying to introduce only half of her. 

I spent over two decades in Louisiana, one of the most coastally vulnerable states in the country, where flooding, land loss, and adaptation aren't policy abstractions, they're lived, daily realities. In 2024 I relocated to Chesapeake, Virginia, where I now live with my husband Chris and our very large German Shepherd, Yona. The questions I used to map in soil and water, about what's coming, what's vulnerable, and what it takes to adapt, are the same ones I help leaders and organizations navigate today. The terrain just changed. 

The systems and structures that have held our organizations, communities, and institutions together for generations are showing their cracks. Most people feel it. Few know what to do with it. And almost no one has language for what comes next.

I do.

I have spent my career at the intersection of two things that do not usually belong together: rigorous, evidence-based thinking about the future, and the deeply human work of helping people find their footing in uncertainty. The work I am called to do sits at the crossroads of strategic foresight, human transformation, and what I call Mindful Foresight: the integration of analytical intelligence with intuitive wisdom, somatic awareness, and genuine presence. Lasting change in any organization begins not with a new strategy, but with a shift in how the people inside it see themselves and what is possible.

In practice, this looks like sitting with a leadership team exhausted from reacting to crisis after crisis, and helping them lift their eyes to the horizon. It looks like facilitating the conversation that's too risky, too uncomfortable, or too big to name in a regular meeting. It looks like coaching a leader through the disorienting experience of outgrowing the framework they've been leading from.

I do not predict the future. I help people get ready for it, not by eliminating uncertainty, but by developing the capacity to move with it rather than against it. I ask good questions. I listen deeply. I hold space for the complexity most processes are designed to simplify too quickly.

The world does not need more trend reports. It needs more people who can stand in the middle of genuine not-knowing and help others find their courage, their clarity, and their capacity to imagine something better than what already exists.

That is the work I am here to do.

You cannot think clearly about the future from a dysregulated nervous system. You cannot hold genuine uncertainty without the capacity for presence. Strategic foresight is more than a set of tools. It is an operating system, for organizations, for leaders, and for the human beings doing the most important work of our time.