Work That Moves
Systems at Scale
Across three practice areas, with governments, civil society, and mission-driven organizations doing work that matters.
The projects on this page span human rights systems, community revitalization, legislative influence, collaborative technology, and intelligence platforms. What connects them is not a sector or a methodology but a set of convictions about how change actually happens.
- Most efforts to drive transformation fail not because they lack good ideas or resources, but because they misread the system they are trying to change — assuming information persuades, rational argument moves institutions, and innovation flows from the center outward. The evidence demonstrates otherwise.
- Real transformation requires a cognitive and motivational shift in the people who must carry it; credible models and a transparent roadmap that make the destination visible; sustained practice that embeds new behaviors before the pressure is on; and support networks that hold the change when the environment pushes back.
- The analytical tools that shaped this work — how information crosses the relevance, credibility, and legitimacy thresholds that precede action; how high-impact innovation tends to emerge from network peripheries and intersections rather than the center; and a discipline of mindful, situationally-aware engagement — were developed in the field and revised accordingly.
The projects below are the record of that work.
Challenge: Design a scalable, regionally-based system enabling religious freedom defenders and at-risk communities to move from reactive crisis response to proactive threat preparedness — capable of operating across 130+ countries with diverse faith-network partners.
Result: Conceptualized and directed development of the Global Freedom Network: a two-phase architecture providing (1) situational awareness and actionable intelligence through distributed country-level data collection and regional analytics teams, and (2) threat preparedness, expert volunteer deployment, crisis response protocols, and resource matching. Africa pilot launched in Nigeria in partnership with the Baptist World Alliance (13,000 churches, 7 million members in Nigeria alone).
What we learned: The most effective human rights interventions are not reactive — they are architectural and require local guidance and ownership throughout the system and at every stage of development and implementation. Build the system before the crisis, not after. This program was discontinued following the organizational acquisition of 21Wilberforce.
Challenge: Enable civil society organizations worldwide to more effectively engage the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review process to advance Freedom of Religion and Belief recommendations — and build a shared platform for coordinating that engagement across countries and faith traditions.
Result: As a United Nations NGO representative of a 51-million member, 130-country global alliance in New York and Geneva, engaged the Human Rights Council and Freedom of Religion or Belief Committee. Built the collaborative civil society platform un.globalfreedom.center. Co-directed a research partnership with the University of Stirling Human Rights Program on civil society UPR strategies; published actionable research findings and models for organizations worldwide.
What we learned: Civil society organizations working on UPR implementation lack coordinated intelligence — a collaborative platform changes the calculus entirely.
View UPR Research Findings (PDF) →Challenge: Design an applied analytics and strategic communications program capable of providing decision support for both Nigerian and international policy makers and at-risk communities facing significant human rights violations and organized violence.
Result: Initiated, designed, and negotiated signed contracts with Oxford Analytica (strategic analytics) and CIJA/Groundscout (international justice accountability and investigations) to build an integrated Nigerian Strategic Analytics group — combining investigation, analytics, and training teams in a unified decision-support architecture. Secured program funding and reached advanced negotiations with a leading West African private security firm. The program was fully structured and ready for launch when COVID-19 made implementation impossible; it was subsequently terminated.
What we learned: World-class partners — Oxford Analytica, CIJA/Groundscout — will commit to a program when the architecture is right and the need is real. The demand that drove this program has not diminished.
Challenge: Bridge critical technology gaps in remote and economically disadvantaged Romanian communities — both in connectivity infrastructure and in crisis data collection during natural disasters.
Result: Two distinct initiatives delivered in partnership with CRIDL:
- Public WAN Wireless Network (Titești): Designed and deployed Romania’s first free public wide-area wireless network in a remote mountain village. Working with the Romanian National Park Service and local mayor, personally helped design, install, and test the system — providing internet access to economically disadvantaged mountain communities for the first time.
- Ushahidi Crowdsourced Flood Application: Responding to extensive flooding in Romania, adapted the open-source Ushahidi crowdsourcing platform to collect, analyze, and visualize real-time flood and community impact data — an early application of crowdsourced crisis intelligence tools in Eastern Europe.
What we learned: The most durable technology interventions are those designed with the community rather than for it — and cost almost nothing to maintain once the community owns them.
Challenge: Romania’s cultural heritage — spanning multiple historical regions, languages, and traditions — had no unified digital infrastructure enabling specialists and the general public to collaboratively preserve, contribute to, and share it.
Result: Negotiated and designed a formal partnership with the Romanian government-founded Romanian Cultural Institute (icr.ro) to build Patrimoniu (Heritage) 2.0 — a national web and mobile platform combining a collaborative multimedia visualization architecture with a structured program for specialist and public involvement in cultural knowledge preservation. The platform integrated text, audio, imagery, video, interactive maps, GIS, and personalized itinerary tools across all of Romania’s historical regions. Initiated the concept, formed the official institutional partnership, recruited software designers and volunteers, designed the software architecture, and supervised the development team. The project was on the verge of board approval when a national political crisis led to the dissolution of the RCI board; it was abandoned before launch.
What we learned: At the time, we were not aware of any comparable project anywhere in the world integrating this range of factors — collaborative contribution, multimedia depth, GIS visualization, and regional cultural specificity — into a single national heritage platform. The architecture is more relevant today than it was in 2011, and more achievable.
Challenge: Design collaborative intelligence sharing modules for a common multi-agency decision support system enabling real-time coordination between federal, state, and local law enforcement and public safety organizations.
Result: Under contract, conducted research and development for StarLight’s innovative Situational Awareness Management System (SAMS). Drafted business development strategy, built a working prototype of a collaborative online Public Safety Knowledge Center, and prototyped a collaborative user-generated content module for the SAMS platform — extending the system beyond its original reliance on law enforcement incident reports and camera feeds to enable field operatives and commanders to contribute and share their own knowledge and situational insights with other users in real time. StarLight was first deployed by the DC Metropolitan Police during the 2008 U.S. Presidential Inauguration, coordinating multi-jurisdictional joint command operations across 15+ federal, state, and local law enforcement and public safety organizations.
What we learned: In high-stakes multi-agency environments, the hardest design problem is not the technology — it is creating a shared information architecture that every agency will actually trust and use.
“Coalition architecture precedes coalition impact. The platform is only as powerful as the trust built before anyone logs on.“iCatalyst CKS · Collaborative Systems Practice
Challenge: In the late 1990s — a decade after the overthrow of the Ceaușescu communist regime — the Jiu Valley, one of Eastern Europe’s most economically devastated regions, was suffering the collapse of the coal mining industry: hyperinflation, mass unemployment, environmental degradation, organized crime, and frequent mass civil unrest. Individual monthly wages averaged $90. A generation of young people faced a future without viable livelihoods, institutions, or models of civil society.
Result: Co-founded and served as Chairman/President of DEEP, a Romanian NGO prototyping community revitalization and social innovation programs. Developed the original concept and largely self-funded the foundation for its first 18 months before raising international funding from the World Bank, USAID, U.S. Embassy Bucharest, and the Balkan Stability Pact. Lived with local coal mining families for approximately 1.5 years across multiple extended visits. Personally recruited and supervised 300+ national and international volunteers. Key programs included:
- Youth leadership and enterprise development — practical training for young people in social enterprise creation, community-based initiatives, and local government participation; helped young miners start alternative businesses.
- Environmental remediation — conducted field programs addressing widespread hazmat contamination, acid mine drainage, and water pollution; worked with teams carrying out scientific testing, community interviews, and on-site inspections in active underground mines.
- WVU Partnership — in partnership with West Virginia University, trained a regional team of experts working with informal community leadership in multiple localities to develop and implement physical environmental and community revitalization strategies.
- Multi-city coalition — established collaborative projects with six regional cities, national and international universities, and national and international media (including film crews from France, National Geographic, and BBC Special Programs).
- Roma community outreach — supported outreach, recruitment, and political engagement facilitation for the marginalized Roma community.
What we learned: Sustained presence changes what is possible. You cannot design a community revitalization program from the outside — and you cannot lead one without earning the trust of the miners’ union, the mayors, the mothers, and the children, one relationship at a time.
Challenge: Map the neuroscience of leadership — translating peer-reviewed research on how the brain learns, trusts, creates, and transforms into practical tools for coaches and practitioners.
Result: AI-powered tool with 100+ research-sourced and evidence-graded neuroscience studies providing actionable tools for coaches. Currently in beta development.
What we learned: The neuroscience is there. What was missing was a tool that made it accessible without losing the rigor.
Challenge: Design the neurological formation of leadership character — a platform that draws on the science of how the brain actually changes through sustained practice.
Result: Platform architecture complete. Theoretical framework — the Hexis Protocol™ — fully developed. Beta launch 2026.
What we learned: The most important question in leadership development is not how to change what leaders do, but how to create the conditions under which they become someone different.
“The most important question in leadership development is not how to change what leaders do, but how to create the conditions under which they become someone different.“The Hexis Protocol™ · Human Flourishing Practice
Challenge: What information sources, framing, and content criteria actually drive legislative action and risk-taking? Why do most advocacy efforts and technically sound information typically fail to influence decision-making?
Result: Grounded theory research of key legislative staff mapped how information realistically flows within the legislative process, identifying key drivers of legislative action — including the relevance, credibility, and legitimacy criteria that must be met before information influences decisions.
What we learned: A relatively small number of key legislative staff drive nearly all successful legislative action. Whether information influences them depends on individual heuristics and whether it is perceived as meeting personal and prioritized stakeholders’ relevance, credibility, and legitimacy requirements. Published peer-reviewed findings in Policy Sciences; available on request.
Challenge: Why do many disruptive innovations emerge from the periphery and intersections of emergent networks, rather than the popularly assumed — but outdated — center-out diffusion model?
Result: A modified model of disruptive innovation diffusion that reverses Actor-Network Theory’s traditional bias toward the center. The theoretical foundation of iCatalyst’s applied AI governance research series.
Read the AI Governance series on LinkedIn →Ready to build something that actually works?
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