New to NoVA
newtonova.org · 2026
I started New to NoVA because I wanted it to exist: one place to find the groups around here that welcome new people. It's a free directory of more than 30 of them so far, from choirs to mutual aid, and it's growing.
Work
A few things I've built, and the problems they solved.
Intake and workload tracking for a technical consultations program
Patrick J. McGovern Foundation · 2024–2026
Through its technical consultations program, the foundation gives nonprofit partners access to its developers, for advice and for building technology projects together. Requests came in through scattered channels, with no central view of what was in progress or team capacity. Rather than bring in a new tool, I designed an intake, prioritization and workload-tracking system around the ones the team already used: Slack, Notion and Google Drive. It's been the program's single source of truth since 2024, and the team keeps building on it. With it, the team can take on the right number of consultations, track hours worked on each engagement, know who needs a follow-up, and look back across past consultations for themes worth writing about.
The ES Hub
Brookings Economic Studies · 2020–2022
The department tracked its publications, events, media coverage and impact in separate places that didn't talk to each other, so every report, whether for a funder or for the department's own planning, meant slow, manual work pulling it all together. I taught myself Quickbase, a low-code platform for building custom business apps, and built one connected database, imported more than 10,000 media mentions and the full back catalog, and automated media tracking so each new mention took under a minute to log. It became part of how about 20 people across the department did their jobs: they logged their work in it, kept it current, and relied on it for reporting and analytics.
Salesforce for Brookings Metro
Brookings Institution · 2022–2024
Brookings Metro, a 50+ person research department, used Salesforce to track its research, speaking engagements and impact, much like the ES Hub. External contractors had built it, and staff found it overengineered and too complex to use, so my job was to streamline and simplify it. I started with the people using it, talking with each team to learn what they needed from the tool and what wasn't working. Then I rebuilt impact tracking, publication handoff and fundraising workflows, set up role-based permissions, and wrote the documentation and training to go with them. Two examples: the department had been paying for a calendar add-on, and I rebuilt the calendar with Salesforce's built-in features so they no longer needed it. And I redesigned each role's home page to show what that person actually used, with the right buttons and charts up front instead of everything at once.
Grant Guardian signup review
Patrick J. McGovern Foundation · 2026
Grant Guardian is a free AI tool for grantmakers, open only to US-based philanthropic organizations, so every new signup has to be checked for eligibility. I inherited that review as a manual, undocumented process that took about ten minutes per organization. I built a Claude skill, a reusable set of instructions for the AI assistant Claude, that researches each organization on the web against the eligibility criteria, recommends whether to approve it, and drafts the next message: an approval, or a request for more information. A person still makes the final decision, but each review now takes only about a minute.
Interactive data visualizations
Brookings Institution · 2017–2022
Economic research only matters if the people making policy can read it. I built interactive visualizations in R and D3.js that turned research findings into something a policy audience could explore. Two examples: Where Work Pays, comparing what occupations earn across the country, and Chronic absence across the United States, on missed school in the 2015–16 school year.
This site
2026
Designed and built from scratch in plain HTML and CSS, with a light and dark mode.