Cary Simmons

Cary Simmons 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 featured in top publications like the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Daily Yonder, the Journal of Ecopsychology, and Parks and Recreation Magazine.