FOUNDER & OWNER

From local to national training, program design to evaluation, Dan has spent the last 18 years working in the helping field, with experiences varying from pioneering, designing, and evaluating programs with the unhoused and underserved around the world, to the first-of-its-kind substance-use specialty team at a Child Welfare Agency in NC.

Dan hails from Italy and England, moving to the US in 2005 to serve as the Assistant Director of Outdoor Education at Georgetown University. There he supervised and trained over fifty undergraduates in organizing and implementing outdoor educational programs both locally and abroad. He then returned to England, where he pioneered a holistic outreach to the homeless community and ran a youth café in York. He also worked in conjunction with a local group in Hong Kong to help the local homeless and substance-using populations.

In the DC area, Dan’s work with the unhoused continued. He became an integral member of the Housing Opportunity Support Team, carrying responsibility for coordinating and delivering services to shelter residents and actively seeking out, identifying, and building rapport with unsheltered populations throughout the region.

After moving to Asheville, Dan began his career in Child Welfare, focusing on families’ strengths. As the Lead Social Worker, he was tasked with mentoring and training employees. Dan took the initiative to create training curriculums that helped to foster cooperation, communication, and consensus among groups. Using his experience in sustained substance use recovery and his role as part of the training team, he helped create a more substance use and recovery-aware culture in child welfare social work.

Next, Dan was selected to pioneer a trauma-responsive, evidence-informed program for families that paired Peer Supports with Social Workers. In leading this team, he saw the true potential unlocked when a system's decision-making power is redistributed to center those most affected by that system's decisions, and a diverse coalition of community support is at the table. Dan started and facilitated a stakeholder group representing over twenty organizations and program alumni to participate in program design, development, implementation, and maintenance. This stakeholder coalition, coupled with integrating peer supports, resulted in a vastly increased number of families safely remaining together. Within two years, the program received over $1 million from the Governor's office to double capacity, and plans are currently in motion to replicate in other NC counties.

During his Child Welfare tenure, Dan was the Family Drug Treatment Court program liaison for over six years, helped organize three regional and state Perinatal Substance Exposure Summits, and participated on the Expert Team for the Perinatal Quality Collaborative of North Carolina. Dan has a natural ability to coach and connect through recognizing peoples’ struggles and innate gifts and by giving them the confidence to grow within their personal framework or tenets of their own organizations. He has coached individuals and teams; trained small and large groups through various mediums and channels.

With that spirit of deliberative community participation and elevating the voice of those often left out, Dan began leading the ANCHOR Collaborative in 2021. He was one of the catalysts that gave rise to the formation of an Unhoused Resident Council at a non-congregate shelter and the mobilization of a new Emergency Winter Shelter at Trinity UMC. These and other recent initiatives attracted diverse and growing community attention, leading to a new community-led Winter Shelter Steering Committee. Dan was a founding Board Member of Operation Gateway, a nonprofit that seeks to reduce recidivism of the re-entering citizen from prison by addressing social determinants of health. These rich experiences gave rise to the recent formation of Counterflow.

Dan has a Master's in Public Administration with a concentration in nonprofit management. He is currently serving on the MAHEC Institutional Review Board and is an Independent Affiliate of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. He loves ultrarunning in the mountains and being in wild spaces. He is proud to be a parent in long-term recovery.