The Environmental Defense Initiative (NPO)

The Environmental Defense Initiative (TEDI) is a nonprofit organization working to advance environmental policy and public awareness. As Chief Technology Officer, I am responsible for the organization's entire technology infrastructure — from the public-facing website to internal tooling used by our team and contributors. The role requires balancing the typical constraints of nonprofit work (limited budget, volunteer contributors) with the need for reliable, maintainable software.

The centerpiece of my work at TEDI is the organization's website, which I helped build from scratch using Next.js, React, and TailwindCSS. The platform includes a custom blog editor that allows non-technical staff to publish content, member-exclusive pages behind authentication, a petition tracking system, and significant SEO improvements over the previous site. Designing for a non-technical editorial team pushed me to think carefully about user experience and content management in ways that purely engineering-focused projects don't require.

One of my proudest contributions has been open-sourcing the technical infrastructure we built. Other similar environmental and advocacy organizations can now fork the codebase and adapt it for their own needs without starting from zero. Contributing to the open-source ecosystem while solving a real organizational problem felt like a meaningful intersection of my technical skills and the mission I was working toward.