About
Most of what I do professionally traces back to things I started doing long before it was a profession. This is that story.
Some people find their way into community work through marketing or customer success. I found mine at 12, running a fan forum dedicated to an up and coming animated series and its creator, and moderating fan communities on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) where showing up consistently and keeping things running smoothly actually mattered to people. (Ask me about it.)
I didn't have a job title for any of it. I just liked building spaces where people with the same obsessions could find each other.
That instinct kept showing up. At 14 I was writing scripts and making short films. At 16 I started learning guitar, piano, and vocals with one goal in mind: writing my own songs. By 18 I was putting on shows for my band, The Redmond Barrys, handling the booking, the promotion, the night-of logistics, and figuring out how to get people in the room and keep them there. What I learned during that time stays with me. Every effort I made was elevated by the people around me and the community I built around the music. The shows got better because the community got stronger.
I moved to Calgary in 2017 and joined Shopify, where I supported merchants ranging from early-stage entrepreneurs to enterprise Shopify Plus brands. But the community building instinct didn't wait for a job title. On my own time I started connecting with local merchants and business owners, building relationships around the city before anyone asked me to. By the time Shopify was ready to formally establish a community presence in Calgary, I had already done the groundwork. The opportunity came up and I had made myself the obvious choice. That local program eventually scaled to a national level.
When Shopify shifted to a fully remote workforce of over 10,000 employees, the need changed. Community still mattered, but now it was about building the safeguards, moderation frameworks, and rules of engagement that would hold a distributed organization together at scale. Shopify wasn't just responding to a moment, they were establishing a new way of working and moving fast to make it permanent. I built the internal digital community infrastructure to match that ambition.
From there I was recruited by Vention, which brought me back to my hometown of Montreal for a year before I returned to Calgary just in time for my wedding. At Vention I built a zero to one community program, taking the company from no formal community presence to a functioning global platform with clear participation pathways, moderation practices, and direct feedback loops between customers and product teams.
At Run Calgary I led engagement across charity partners, corporate teams, and new community segments including newcomers to Canada and local businesses who had never seen themselves as part of the marathon before. The goal was never just to fill a start line. It was to make the Calgary Marathon feel like a city-wide moment that belonged to everyone.
The through line across all of it, from those early forums to building national programs at Shopify, is the same belief that sits at the core of my work: a community doesn't exist for optics or engagement metrics. It exists so people feel connected to something and feel like their voice matters. I have spent my career building the systems, the spaces, and the trust that make that possible. That is what I am here to keep doing, at greater scale and with greater impact.
If you want to talk about what that looks like for your organization, I'm just an email away.