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 to build community. 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 parks.

At TPL, Cary leads the organization’s advocacy and policy agenda for community engagement and community-based partnerships, and he serves as a national leader in research and evaluation methods for the social benefits of parks and public space activation. 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’s 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.