Cary Simmons

Cary is the Director of Community Strategies at Trust for Public Land, where he serves as the organization’s leading expert on public spaces that bring people together across lines of difference and division. Previously, Cary worked as a forester and a landscape architect, collaborating with communities in the United States and abroad to plant thousands of street trees and build dozens of neighborhood parks. At TPL, Cary leads the organization’s advocacy and policy agenda for community engagement and public space programming. He recently completed a three-year fellowship with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on community-based participatory research and serves as a national leader in measuring and evaluating the social impact of public spaces. Cary’s work has been published in top publications like the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Daily Yonder, the Journal of Ecopsychology, and Parks and Recreation Magazine. He is passionate about the role of organizing and movement-building in strengthening communities and civic life in the United States. For more than 20 years, he has worked with a wide range of communities to connect everyone to the outdoors, from a farmworker community in central Washington to the site of the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan. Originally from a rural farming community in Arkansas, Cary lives with his partner in rural central Washington State. He earned his Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas and his Master of Environmental Management from the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies at Yale University.