This is the first of what I plan to send out most Thursdays or Fridays during my DC sabbatical (Sep 1 -> Nov 30, 2026). It’s a bit different than the ones I intend to send in the future, since I’ve only been here two days, but I wanted to share with you all about where my head is and what I’m chasing.
I knew going into this sabbatical that the first week would be ambiguous. I did not expect just how overwhelming it would feel to stand in front of the sheer range of what is possible here. This week has been full of meetings and calls with the people who make up my life in Ohio and in DC: Lisa, Beth, Fred, and Liz at All Aboard Ohio, my mentor Kim, Margaret at Amtrak, Maddock (a recent Brown grad and transportation policy whiz), and Sam at United Way, all in the span of two days. Later today I am meeting with Jim from the Rail Passengers Association, along with two more of my mentors, Lindsey and Becky. Most of these conversations have followed a similar shape: brainstorming, talking through my goals, and listening to what people who have been at this far longer than I have think I should focus on next.
On the personal side, I am getting to know my roommates and starting to feel more comfortable in a new space. I got dinner with old friends India, Alex, and Taylor, who all had their own wisdom to share as I start this. I have been exploring the city, and am starting to get used to this new car-free life (pictured above is me on the bus with my trader joes haul). It has been a good reminder that this sabbatical is not only a professional undertaking, but also a chance to figure out what I want out of living in a new city.
My vice chair Lisa recommended I read What the Heck is EOS, and it got me thinking about All Aboard Ohio in a different way. I have spent a lot of the last four years thinking about the organization in terms of mission: how do we get more trains and better transit into Ohio. The book pushed me to think more about the organizational side. Good infrastructure and good output are not competing priorities; one produces the other. I got a DC public library card to grab a copy, which felt like its own small milestone. Out of that reading, I am hoping to build out a clearer picture of my team’s individual strengths, put real accountability structures in place for myself and my teammates, and tighten up how I communicate our vision, both short and long term, to the volunteers and staff doing the work every day.
I have also started subscribing to a stack of newsletters, including ones from The Urban Institute, CityLab, and a few housing publications, hoping they sharpen my thinking over the coming months.
The piece that has stuck with me most, though, was a talk by Scott Belsky, author of The Messy Middle. I liked it enough that I emailed him, and he wrote back. I told him All Aboard Ohio has grown from 200 to 8,000 members in the last few years, that we are getting real attention from legislators and the press, and that we are squarely in our own messy middle, with a lot of organizational catch-up left to do. His talk pushed me to look back at old photos with my team, to sit with the uncertainty instead of rushing past it, and to shift more of my attention toward organizational structure rather than pure output. Somewhere in there, I also realized that a nonprofit at this stage of growth is, in a lot of ways, a startup.
All of this is in service of three things I am chasing this sabbatical.
The first is personal. I want to enjoy living in a new city, figure out what resonates with me here, reconnect with old friends, and build new relationships with the kind of passionate people this city seems to have a lot of.
The second is All Aboard Ohio. I want to spend real, focused time on both the mission, getting trains and transit built in Ohio, and the organization behind it. That means the architecture of a group that has grown faster than its systems, a robust fundraising apparatus, and a sharper focus on personnel and recruitment. I am lucky to have a team of staff and volunteers who are already pushing me in the right direction on all of this.
The third is bigger than Ohio. I want to help build a national network of state and local transit advocacy organizations. There are promising groups doing this work all over the country, and I think Ohio’s experience has real lessons to share, lessons that could help other organizations move faster toward their own version of what we have built. A connected network of grassroots groups gives national organizations like RPA and APTA more legitimacy in front of legislators, and it builds the kind of social and political infrastructure that gets projects built where they are needed. To get there, I am networking hard with national partners, advocates from around the country, and foundations who fund this kind of work.
There is a fourth thing underneath all three, which is funding, for AAO’s work and for my own time here. I anticipated the expenses of this trip, but I am coming to terms with just how true it is that advocacy is not free, and that it is often thankless work. I am actively fundraising for myself for this endeavor, and if anyone reading this has ideas or connections, I would love to hear them.
Two days in, I do not have this figured out, and I am not trying to pretend otherwise. What I have is a good set of conversations, a stack of reading, and three throughlines I plan to keep pulling on. I am so thankful to be able to go on this journey and am happy to have my support system around the world cheering me on! Follow along, share your thoughts, and stay tuned to see if I actually ever do figure this out :)