Featured Projects
My work develops models that expand belonging through infrastructure, youth leadership, and sustainable design. Each initiative strengthens the long-term growth of The RILEY Project while deepening collaboration across schools, nonprofits, and community partners.
Gather San Mateo
Belonging, Built
Gather San Mateo is a proposed community café, bookstore, and civic hub designed to serve as a physical home for neurodiversity, mental health, and inclusive programming
Structured as a nonprofit-owned LLC, Gather blends social enterprise with mission sustainability — generating earned revenue while protecting the nonprofit’s long-term financial base.
Revenue streams include café/book partnerships, events, memberships, and RFP-aligned programming.
Why it matters:
Gather reduces fragmentation by creating a centralized, accessible hub for collaboration and neurodivergent leadership. It is a test case for place-based systems change.
Growing Into Ourselves
A Public Storytelling & Convening Model
Growing Into Ourselves was a live event hosted at Manny’s in San Francisco, bringing together educators, families, and community members for an evening of storytelling and dialogue around neurodivergence, identity, and belonging.
The event served as:
A platform for lived experience
A convening space across sectors
A public-facing expression of The RILEY Project’s mission
More importantly, it tested a replicable model:
How do we create rooms where neurodivergent voices are not invited as an afterthought — but centered?
The vision is to expand this model — hosting more gatherings like Growing Into Ourselves across the Bay Area and beyond. Each event deepens stewardship, strengthens partnerships, and builds cross-sector alignment around inclusive education and systems change.
What began as a single evening is becoming a framework for sustained public dialogue.
This is the convening layer of the ecosystem.
Voices of Strength
Self-Advocacy in Practice
Voices of Strength is a pilot program focused on identity, skill-building, and self-advocacy for neurodivergent students .
Students develop:
Confidence discussing their diagnosis
Real-world advocacy scripts and tools
Personalized advocacy toolkits
The program integrates UDL-informed facilitation and creates a foundation for broader youth advisory and leadership work
It is where belonging becomes skill.
