Jared’s path to Northeast Ohio begins in California’s Bay Area. Born to working class parents, he was raised just south of Oakland and attended Cal-State East Bay, where he earned a B.A in English, and U.C. Berkeley where he earned a Master’s Degree in Journalism. He was part of a reporting team that received an award from the nonprofit Investigative Reporters & Editors for his contribution to a series on gun smuggling. He’s published stories from India, Hong Kong, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Jared worked in Sacramento covering California’s Environmental Protection Agency and environmental policy and legislation, where he discovered a newfound love for politics.
In 2004, Jared accepted a job at Earthjustice, a national nonprofit law firm, that sent him to Washington, D.C. where he spent the next 15 years as a communications and public relations expert on national environmental policy. He ran a successful campaign to pressure the U.S. EPA to adopt the first-ever national regulation for the safe storage and disposal of toxic coal ash. He defended the Endangered Species Act from legislation designed to weaken the law and cripple protections for threatened and endangered species. He’s pitched and placed stories in every major print, radio, television and online news outlets and has been quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, Politico, and many other national newspapers.
In 2019, Jared and his wife and three children moved to northern Ohio to be closer to family and apply his communications and public relations skills to advance the mission of Western Reserve Land Conservancy and protect the special places of northern Ohio.