Recipes for Reform
Frameworks, essays, and tools for people trying to build institutions that actually match their promises — especially for military families and the communities that hold them.
Notes From the Field
Dispatches from the messy middle — rural Virginia, post-military life, parenting through crisis, starting over, and all the quiet moments that never make it into reports but shape everything.
Too often, institutions celebrate inclusion and impact on paper while families on the ground still feel unseen, exhausted, or shut out. That gap between what gets reported and what gets lived erodes trust — and people notice.
Recipes for Reform is where I name that gap out loud and build ways to measure it — through the Military Family Inclusion Model, essays, and field notes that treat lived experience as real data, not decoration.
This site is the home for that work. Some of it becomes frameworks. Some of it becomes talks or policy conversations. A lot of it stays right here — as a public notebook for anyone trying to lead from where they are.
Latest from Recipes for Reform
Advocating for change — on and off the page
About Recipes for Reform
Recipes for Reform, LLC is the home for my systems-change work — the frameworks, research, writing, and experiments that have grown out of two decades of life at the intersection of family, service, and systems.
Some people will know me from JavaCupcake. Others from caregiver advocacy, Rock Island Farm, or national leadership programs. Recipes for Reform is where all of that comes together with a clear purpose: truth alignment.
Here you’ll find work-in-progress ideas, tested frameworks like the Military Family Inclusion Model, and stories that don’t need anyone’s permission to be told. It’s not a “services page.” It’s a body of work you’re invited to read, share, and build from.