01 / 06
What I carry from home
I’ve come to enjoy starting from scratch in an unfamiliar place. Through travel and international work, I get to know myself again as I question assumptions I might never have noticed at home. Those experiences continue to shape how I understand the places I come from.
My mother was working in Florida when I was born, and my family brought me home to The Bahamas two weeks later. I spent my first eighteen years on Grand Bahama. I returned to the United States in 2019, shortly before Hurricane Dorian destroyed my family’s home.
02 / 06
A place to return to
After seven years here in the US, going back can leave me feeling a little estranged. I still feel at home in the way I speak there. Being near the ocean brings back a sense of being grounded that I miss in the United States.
The ocean feels like someone who helped raise me, someone I can return to without having to explain who I’ve become. I’m always learning from how it responds to what we do. To me, there is accountability in that response. Our actions have consequences we have to pay attention to. People have built whole ways of life around the water, with different ways of expressing what it means to them. I want to understand those relationships alongside the science, and help others understand the ocean with room for what it means in their own lives.
03 / 06
Beyond our household
My family tree is so big on both sides that I’ll probably never meet all my cousins. Even so, my parents made sure I knew who my family was. I grew up understanding that I belonged to a much wider circle than our household, and that those connections mattered.
That early understanding of community influences what interests me about climate finance. In an asue, people pool contributions and take turns receiving the fund. The arrangement depends on commitments people make to one another. I want to understand how funding can work with those existing relationships, with the people involved retaining influence over what it supports.
04 / 06
A place to belong
In Gainesville, Florida I began finding community beyond the connections I had grown up with. I was exploring my own culture while getting to know people whose experiences were different from mine. Porters Quarters, one of the city’s historic Black neighborhoods, became an important part of that experience. Spending time in its community garden gave me a way to participate in a place I was still learning.
The garden also helped me understand why land can matter so personally. It can hold years of someone’s work and become a place where another person begins to feel they belong. In my work on forests and land use, I care about whether those relationships carry weight when a place’s future is being decided.
05 / 06
Learning from each other
I’d like to help people working through related questions find one another across borders. My ties to The Bahamas and the United States give me relationships to build on, while the other places I’ve come to know continue to influence what I might contribute. I’m interested in exchanges where people can develop ideas together and have a say in how their knowledge is used.
06 / 06
Carrying it forward
Thank you for spending some time here. If our interests overlap, I’d be glad to hear from you.