Cary Simmons

Cary Simmons is the director of community strategies at The Trust for Public Land. He is the leading expert on innovative community engagement and partnership models that deliver powerful social outcomes, and his team leads the national partnerships and collaborations around creative placemaking, welcoming and belonging, and civic engagement.

Cary has worked at the organization for seven 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 The Trust for Public Land, Cary led several nationally significant memorial design and city park development 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.