I was born and raised in Utah – the product of a long line of hard-working laborers and tradesmen. My father grew up in Moab in a single-wide trailer with five siblings and one bathroom, provided for by my grandfather who was an underground hard rock Uranium miner. My mother was raised, along with her three sisters, by my other grandfather who worked as an electrician. My parents divorced when I was five years old, so I grew up between two homes. My mother was an excellent, natural homesteader who could grow and craft anything. My father also worked as an underground miner, and as a jack-of-all-trades carpenter – he could build and fix anything. So naturally, I grew up with a love of both building and gardening, a fierce sense of independence and a solid work ethic.
In high school I played sports, did community theater, competed in speech and debate, and was on the academic team. I also was tapped by my guidance counselor to train in conflict resolution as a Peer Mediator, and over the course of my Junior and Senior years I facilitated more mediation sessions than anyone on the team and was given a ‘Peer Mediator of the Year’ award, along with our school’s ‘Spartan Pride’ award for excellence, and a handful of scholarships I earned by winning regional speech competitions through the Lyons and Rotary clubs.
My dad worked his tail off to help grant me the opportunity to pursue a higher education and in 2005 I became a first-generation college graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture. I spent eight years slowly working my way through that degree at Portland State University in Oregon while juggling various part-time jobs and my involvement in a dozen or so student groups. I co-facilitated our University’s ‘Student Leaders for Service’ club which combined leadership development with the implementation of volunteer opportunities for the student body. I took on multiple teaching positions as a Peer Mentor, ESL instructor, and volunteer teacher at an alternative high school that taught building construction skills to disadvantaged youth. I was heavily involved with student garden and placemaking projects through the Student Sustainability Leadership Council, and led two consecutive Alternative Spring Break trips to do service-learning work in the agriculture industry. I was also a Resident Program Assistant for a program called the Middle Eastern Partnership Initiative in which I lived and worked with dozens of visiting student leaders from countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa. And finally I volunteered for a non-profit called City Repair that did urban placemaking and community building projects, compiling and editing their magazine for three years and helping to organize educational programming across the city.
After finishing my degree I decided to pursue building construction with the goal of ultimately being a well-rounded designer-builder. I studied at a sustainable design-build school in the New Mexico high desert called Earthship Academy, learning about sustainable off-grid development. And I completed a Permaculture Design Course in Washington to bolster my landscape design and gardening skills. For a few years after that I freelanced as a designer-builder, handyman, and landscaper before deciding to apply to graduate school. I took the GRE and scored in the 98th percentile nationally in both the Verbal Reasoning and Analytical Writing sections. This, along with my design portfolio got me accepted into two concurrent Masters programs at UC Berkeley for Landscape Architecture and City Planning. I received straight A’s my first semester but had second thoughts about taking on the massive additional student loan debt burden and decided it didn’t make financial sense for me to continue with the program.
It pained me to leave Berkeley but I didn’t see myself following those traditional career paths and felt like whatever education I needed to follow my passion I could get through self-teaching and life experience. I spent a year helping a co-living business get off the ground in San Francisco, working as their in-house designer-builder and community manager, before taking a job with Habitat for Humanity as a Field Supervisor in their Neighborhood Revitalization program. I spent another year doing home repairs and leading volunteer groups with Habitat before deciding – in the true spirit of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area mentality I’d been immersed in – I was ready to start-up my own business or initiative of some kind.
I knew that I wanted to work with land and building construction as some kind of real estate developer. To get started without having any special connections or wealthy family members, I needed an affordable property to take on as a first project, and so spent many months scouring the entire country for unique, non-residential fixer-upper properties for sale. I stumbled across a historic general store building that had been sitting on the market for years in my home state of Utah, near a little town called Helper. The photos in the listing really spoke to me so I flew to Utah to check it out. Driving down from Salt Lake and through the Castle Gate, I immediately sensed there was something special happening in Helper – this quirky little town I’d never heard of or stopped in before. When I got to ‘the Old Company Store’ just up the hill, it was love at first sight and I knew I was home. I asked a dozen of my closest friends if they’d be willing to invest some money into helping me buy this building and make my vision a reality, and with their help I scraped together the $45,000 asking price and paid cash for the property.
That was in 2018. I moved into the building April 1st 2019 and have been here ever since, repairing, restoring, reinventing and revitalizing the building and growing a community around it. My vision for what we now call simply ‘The Store’ was to offer live-work space for artists and a community center where our small town can gather for events, potluck dinners and town hall meetings. After five years of work, that vision has been largely realized. The goal here is to provide affordable housing, create a few jobs, and to use the arts as a catalyst to help breathe new life into this former coal mining town that was entirely abandoned long ago by the company that built it. The five years that I’ve spent living and working here and investing myself in this community has been the greatest adventure and most fulfilling endeavor of my life, and I plan to stay in Carbon County for the long haul. I have a deep love and appreciation for rural southeast Utah – its majestic landscapes, hard-working people, industrious history and creative culture. I feel I owe a great debt to my ancestors to give back to this place that raised me and do everything I can to make it better.