Sideyard Studio partners with organizations, teams, and small businesses on learning design, clear strategy, and facilitation that gets people unstuck — with a civic designer's love for places and the people who live in them.
A studio for learning design, strategy, facilitation, and healthier teams — rooted in Oakland and built for people doing meaningful work in the everyday world.
What I offer
Every engagement starts with your actual situation — not a template. These are the four kinds of help I'm asked for most.
Trainings, workshops, curricula, events
From ambiguity to a plan you can act on
Sprints, retreats, and working sessions
Coaching for managers and leaders
Not sure which of these you need? That's usually a good sign we should just talk. Tell me what's going on and I'll point you in the right direction — even if it's not me.
How I work
Empathy interviews, stakeholder conversations, and honest questions — so the actual problem shows up before we start solving the guessed one.
Big, ambiguous questions get distilled into frameworks, criteria, and a shared picture of what "good" actually looks like.
A training, a roadmap, a pilot, a prototype — a concrete artifact your team can react to, use, and be proud of.
Facilitated decisions, clear owners, and sequenced next steps — so momentum survives long after the engagement ends.
Why “Sideyard”?
The backyard is private. The front yard is public-facing. The side yard is the in-between — semi-public, semi-private, easy to overlook. It's where neighbors talk over the fence, where stuff gets built, where bikes get stored, plants grow, and kids cut through. A little improvised, and full of possibility.
That's how I see organizations, teams, and communities, too. The most interesting work usually lives in the in-between spaces: between strategy and execution, between a business and its neighborhood, between what a program is and what it could become. My job is to see the possibility in places and systems other people overlook — then help you make something of it.
Sideyard Studio is rooted in Oakland, California — and open to work anywhere people are building something worth building.
About
I'm the whole studio — researcher, designer, facilitator, and thought partner in one. I came up through learning design and education, which means I can't help asking: how does someone experience this, and what do they walk away knowing or being able to do?
Along the way I've been a classroom teacher, a learning designer, and a leader of teams — and I founded and ran an education technology company, so I've sat on every side of the table: building the program, managing the people, and living with the results.
That habit of designing for the learner turns out to work everywhere: training programs, strategy offsites, manager coaching, pilot programs, and neighborhood-scale problem solving.
Organizations and teams bring me in when the stakes are high and the path isn't obvious yet. I bring structure, warmth, and a bias toward decisions over deliberation.
Get in touch
Whether you have a defined project or just a nagging sense that something isn't working — send a note. I'll reply personally, usually within a couple of days.
