
Climate Ready Boston
Boston, MA
Jill is an associate principal and planner in Sasaki’s Urban Studio with over a decade of experience collaborating with public sector and non-profit clients. Her expertise in climate adaptation and resilience, public engagement, and park/landscape planning enables municipalities, states, and conservancies to implement strategies that respond to the changing climate, increase equitable access to parks, and grow greener, more resilient cities. Her projects have been recognized with three National Planning Achievement Awards from the American Planning Association for public engagement (2018), resilience (2019), and implementation (2020).
Jill’s approach is centered on listening and collaboration. She believes that combining community input with data-driven findings and insights from multi-disciplinary design teams leads to implementable strategies that advance multiple objectives. Her work is known for revealing insights through data that enable community leaders to advocate for positive change.
She brings a national perspective in helping communities adapt to a changing climate. Jill has worked with communities in Florida, Colorado, Louisiana, Rhode Island, and Alabama to add resilience strategies to their parks and restore local ecosystems. Her work on citywide Climate Ready Boston shed light on the disproportionate impacts of climate hazards on socially vulnerable populations. She collaborated with an interdisciplinary team at Sasaki, The Nature Conservancy, and other partners to develop an interactive online tool—NRCsolutions.org— designed to give community leaders information to make thoughtful choices about flood solutions and identify relevant nature-based solutions for their specific contexts.
Common to her work is a focus on bringing together diverse constituents to identify shared visions for places/open spaces and outlining paths towards achieving these visions. For example, she was project manager and lead planner for the High Line Canal Community Vision Plan, a 71-mile greenway in Denver, which was the Gold Winner of the 2018 APA National Planning Achievement Award for Public Outreach. The final plan was endorsed by all 11 jurisdictions along the canal—the first time in the canal’s 150-year history that all jurisdictions have come together to support a common vision.
Jill is currently co-leading the Parks + Equity Atlas with Laura Marett. A 2019 Sasaki research grant winner, the research initiative is taking a national look at the equity of access to parks and recreation opportunities.
Jill holds a master in urban planning from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and dual undergraduate degrees in architecture and economics from Clemson University.
Boston, MA
Coastal Alabama
Denver Region, CO
Boston, MA
Davenport, IA
Nationwide, United States
Denver, CO
Lower Mississippi River Delta
Raleigh, NC
Baton Rouge, LA
Chengdu, China
Hartford, CT
Newport, RI
Boston, MA
Northeast Ohio
Sarasota, FL
Des Moines, IA
Clemson, SC
View more of Jill's Projects Collapse Projects
Economic resilience and ecological restoration fell hand-in-hand—the success of one goal relied on the success of the other at Gulf State Park
Recasting the "vision plan" as a storytelling exercise to get community members of all ages and backgrounds invested in the future of Denver's High Line Canal
“Environmental leader” has not been a phrase many would use to describe Alabama. Now, thanks to Sasaki's work on Gulf State Park, it will.
Now entering its fourth year, Sasaki’s annual internal research initiative encourages the firm’s most passionate and enterprising professionals to delve into research that informs project work, the firm's capacity to serve clients, and the future of the industry at large.
Sasaki is delighted to announce the American Planning Association (APA) awarded the Climate Ready Boston Citywide Report a 2019 National Planning Achievement Award for Resilience – Gold Winner, the highest honor within the category
Transformative coastal park honored for Planning and Implementation
The Community Vision Plan for the High Line Canal is a forward-looking vision to preserve and enhance a beloved regional greenway in Colorado’s Front Range