Space for new ideas.
I’m Finn, and I work at the intersection of systems, strategy, and story.
My best ideas are always in my newsletter.
Work With Me
Three Things I Believe
01. Strategy is not a luxury
Strategic work is the practice of clearly defining a challenge, discerning our unique strengths, and matching our strengths to that challenge in the best way possible. This is vital for any person or team with a bold vision for their work in the world. So why does the word “strategy” make people think of strategic plans that no one reads and eating stale conference pastries while putting post-its on a wall? I’m out to change this. We all need and deserve access to spaces and frameworks for strategic thought that work in our unique contexts.
02. How we structure our creative lives is our most potent source of creative power
Maybe you don’t have writer’s block. Maybe you have a manuscript that’s spread between Google Drive, Word, and Scrivener, a bunch of notes you can never find when you need them, and a word count spreadsheet template someone gave you that secretly stresses you out. I believe that the most important thing we can do to support our creative work is to discern what systems will actually work for our own creative lives, and to put those in place and iterate on them as needed. This is the system I teach to other writers.
03. The right metaphor can unlock everything
As a trans person, the old cliche is that I’m “trapped in the wrong body.” I’ve never felt this way, but increasingly, I’ve felt trapped in the wrong metaphor. And never more so than when I was pregnant — our cultural metaphors and narrative shapes around pregnancy are just plain weird. It’s a “journey,” but also sort of a destination? One is supposed to get bigger and bigger, with weird fruit comparisons for one’s fetus, until one (metaphorically) pops? What happens if we change our narrative frame and try on some new metaphors and narrative shapes for a pregnancy experience? I explore this in my book, There Are No Rules for a Pregnant Trans Body.
About Finn
Whether it’s complex healthcare program design or writing a novel, the right system can make everything easier. Too often, we get stuck trying the same things over and over, or trying to make our work fit “best practices” from a completely different context.
I’ve always been fascinated by how we know things—and how we can learn to ask better questions to arrive at better solutions. I’ve trained — at different times — as an epidemiologist, a Zen practitioner, and a storyteller, and I bring all of these approaches to shine new light on challenges that might seem impossible.
My recent professional work has included relaunching North Jersey’s first comprehensive LGBTQ+ primary care program, including bringing in $500k in grants and growing the team from two to six in under two years. I’ve also pioneered innovative approaches to building strong collaborative relationships between large healthcare institutions and grassroots community groups, including the use of a successful think tank model and in-depth trust-building strategic process.
Ultimately, I believe the answers we arrive at are only as good as the questions we ask. My clients come to me faced with complex and specific challenges around healthcare program design, grants program development, and community engagement strategy. At times, they feel they’ve already “tried everything.” That’s when it’s time to look at the challenge through a different lens, and find a new set of tools to solve it.
It’s not every day you meet an experienced community health program director who’s trained both as an epidemiologist and as a poet — but we need a variety of methods to solve today’s most complex problems.
If you have a challenging problem in healthcare program design, strategic clarity, grants strategy, or community engagement, I’d love to hear from you.