Dan is the Co-Founder of Grassroots Solutions where he currently focuses on one-to-one leadership coaching. He has spent over twenty five years as a strategy consultant and evaluator to large advocacy organizations, foundations, and political campaigns.

Over the years, Dan has worked for clients such as The National Audubon Society, Energy Foundation, Center for the American Experiment, Atlantic Philanthropies, United Steelworkers of America, The McKnight Foundation, Center for Community Change, America Coming Together, The University of Minnesota, Medtronic, Best Buy, Thrivent Financial, Minnesotans United for All Families, The National Education Association, and United States Senators Tina Smith, Al Franken, and Paul Wellstone.

Dan believes that winning and building sustained power for social change depends on having strategic, equitable, healthy, and imaginative leaders and that’s why he is currently focusing his attention on leadership coaching. His unique coaching philosophy is shaped by the years he spent working at the intersection of elections, advocacy, evaluation, policymaking, and entrepreneurship. In particular, his strategic engagement work for the Kresge Foundation in the city of Detroit demonstrated the importance of strong, creative, and credible local leaders as the primary agents for long-term social change. Similarly, the 10 years Dan spent working to help legalize same sex marriage taught him that traditional and outdated approaches to leadership and movement-building must be discarded in favor of more dynamic, curious, and relational models. These experiences and many others mean that Dan is not simply an armchair theorist about leadership. Instead, he approaches his coaching work from a practitioner’s perspective.

Prior to starting Grassroots Solutions in 1999, Dan worked as an attorney for the Gray, Plant Mooty Law Firm. He served as Executive Assistant to the Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives. Managed Congressman David Minge’s first successful campaign and held a variety of leadership positions for U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone.

Currently, Dan lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with his wife Cassie and Doc the Basset Hound. Dan is a competitive backgammon player, an avid cook and reader, and loves to goof around with his 7 nieces and nephews. He and Cassie are also cancer bloggers chronicling how they are navigating life after her Metastatic Breast Cancer diagnosis. You can check out their personal reflections: www.meaningandstuff.com

His cancer and caregiving experiences have very much influenced how Dan thinks about questions of balance, privilege, presence, empathy, priorities, and other aspects of personal and professional development.