Cary Simmons

Cary Simmons is the Director of Community Strategies at Trust for Public Land. He is the organization’s leading expert on innovative community engagement and partnership models that deliver powerful social outcomes and recently completed a three-year fellowship with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation focused on community-based participatory research methods.

At TPL, Cary’s team leads our national partnerships and collaborations around creative placemaking, welcoming and belonging, and civic engagement. Cary has worked at the organization for eight years, previously in a field leadership role in the Northwest, where he developed more than a dozen neighborhood parks and schoolyards across Washington, Montana, and Wyoming.

Prior to joining us, Cary led several nationally significant memorial and city park design projects at AECOM, based in Washington, DC. He has also worked previously at the Smithsonian Institution, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the Urban Resources Initiative. 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.