This is the second in a weekly series on my DC sabbatical (Sep 1 → Nov 30, 2026). Catch up on the first post if you missed it.
It has been about a week since my last post. The nebulous sabbatical in front of me has solidified into a more concrete plan with weekly goals.
A major focus this week was All Aboard Ohio’s organizational architecture. To start me in the right direction, I had a wonderful brainstorming session with Alex, a professional mentor of mine who is a big proponent of “sparring,” going back and forth on ideas I am having. In this session, we reviewed what is working and what is not within AAO, and a big takeaway was a lack of clarity in expectations across various committees. Alex pushed me back to the fundamentals, the P&G idea of jobs to be done, and only then to what structure is required to actually get those jobs done.
That framing has stuck with me all week. I even have had it reinforced through my reading: communication, clear expectations, and tying every task back to the mission are critical for an organization to operate successfully. I have been working closely with board members Lisa and Jameson to put this mindset into practice, and I think the updated structure we are building is going to hold up as we keep growing.
Jayna, who leads AAO’s engagement committee, said something on a call this week that framed the need perfectly. Her committee needs the “what” and the “why,” (what needs to get done and why it matters), but not the “how” (how to do it). Our volunteers are extraordinarily capable and giving them room to figure out the “how” builds ownership instead of taking it away.
It all came together Wednesday night at our board meeting, which was an extremely productive session. Great attendance, strong engagement from the full board, and I do think having a full week of reflection behind me made me a more effective leader in that room. One thing we are still working through is organizational values. AAO has defined values already, but they mostly describe how we show up externally. I think we also need to define how we operate internally as we keep growing.
I closed out the week with Beth, our comms director, planning out what her team has coming, and I left that call energized, and very pleased with how she is leading her team. We are so lucky to have her.
The rest of the week kept building the case for a national coalition of state and local advocacy organizations, something I’ve been informally calling “All Aboard America” in my head. Dinner with Jim Mathews, RPA’s CEO, gave me a much clearer picture of what is working in federal advocacy right now, and how much of it comes down to the same thing Ohio depends on: coalitions. We ran into Mariah, one of Amtrak’s Government Affairs leaders, while we were there, which was a nice bonus.
Later that night, dinner with mentors Lindsey and Becky, along with their husbands John and Dan, gave me my first chance to see Becky in person. Hearing about both of their careers is always inspiring.
Kaleb Neal showed me an application he is building to connect intercity travel directly to local transit, so buying a Delta ticket into DC could come with the option to add a Metro day pass right there at checkout. No more fumbling at the airport station’s ticket machine. That conversation left me with a handful of new ideas for AAO Labs.
A call with James Flattum out of Colorado, who is putting his whole heart into the new Colorado Connector route on the Front Range, energized me in a similar way, and I’m looking forward to continuing to bounce ideas off him. I had coffee with Jerome Horne, a transit advocate and professional who has made a tremendous impact on projects across the country. I look forward to a follow up chat when I visit him in Baltimore in a few weeks! Also, an enlightening conversation with Jaibin Matthew from the Senate Transportation Committee, who gave me an introduction to “how stuff works” on Capitol Hill.
But the conversation that stuck with me most was with Thomas Davidenko, an Amtrak employee who chairs Young Professionals in Transportation internationally. We went deep on what it would mean for RPA, APTA, and Amtrak to have boots on the ground doing grassroots advocacy all over the country.
On the personal side, I took it easy Friday and Saturday, hanging out with my new roommate Felix, who is here from Germany for a six-month legal fellowship. We hit the neighborhood dive bar Friday, and Saturday brought Jazz Fest at the Wharf. Coffee with my old college friend Emma gave me a longer-term resident’s perspective on the city, and Sunday night I was back at the dive bar for neighborhood legend Granny and the Boys, who is 94 and has been performing there for 30 years. Sitting on the shore of the Potomac during Jazz Fest turned out to be one of the more relaxing hours of my whole week.
I also kept up my reading! I finished The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. I don’t agree with everything about his politics today, but the book delivered exactly what I was hoping for, real lessons on leading an organization that looks a lot like a startup in a lot of ways, and I’d recommend it widely.
I’m halfway through If You Want to Win, You’ve Got to Fight, a field guide to transportation advocacy, and I’m looking forward to talking with the author, Carter, when I meet him next week. We are also floating the idea of an AAO book club to read it together. And I’m halfway through Boards That Lead, which digs into board dynamics on the business side. A lot of it translates to nonprofit governance and a lot of it doesn’t, but I’m finding real value in pulling out what applies to AAO.
A few things are already on the calendar for the weeks ahead. I’ll be at Rail Nation Toledo with RPA October 2 and 3, joining my friend Hayden in New York for TransportationCamp on October 24, and speaking at the High Speed Rail Alliance conference in Chicago on November 13.
Against the three goals I laid out in my first post, this was a big week. Personally, I am loving DC, the speed of it, the density of passionate people, and the way this city keeps handing me small windows to think and reflect. I am starting to feel at home here.
For All Aboard Ohio, this was a heavy week of organizational architecture, fundraising conversations, and time with many leaders in the organization. I am energized because so much of that work will carry directly into building the national coalition, as we reapply to other states.
And on the national coalition itself, I feel more certain than ever that this is the right fight. We need to activate the millions of people across the country whose lives are shaped by transportation access every day, and I believe building All Aboard America is exactly the work I am supposed to be doing right now. Looking forward to seeing what the next week brings.