Cabrillo National Monument.
Two terms as an Associate in the park's Interpretation program, designing, running, measuring and documenting public engagement programs end-to-end so they survived past my tenure.
The Program
Public engagement at a federal park, against a fixed audience and a fixed calendar.
Cabrillo National Monument sits at the tip of Point Loma in San Diego, coastal scrub on the bluffs, an intertidal zone below and the Old Point Loma Lighthouse on top. Visitors arrive across all ages, languages, and prior knowledge levels, often for an hour at most.
I worked as an Associate in the park's Interpretation program, the team responsible for the educational and cultural programming visitors actually engage with. My remit covered scoping, designing, facilitating, measuring and writing the SOPs that let the next person run each program without me.
"How do you run public-engagement programs that scale across staff turnover, multiple seasons and a 7-to-70 audience, when your only signal is whether someone walks up?"
The Playbook
A repeatable model I wrote down so the next intern wouldn't start from scratch.
Most of the work was running events. The most useful artifact I produced was the process behind them: a written guide called "A Mini Guide on Pop-Up Programs" that codified the 7-step model below. Future associates inherit a system, not just a folder of files.
The Interpretation program runs on rotating interns and seasonal staff. Without documented process, every new associate reinvents the wheel and the program loses institutional memory. Writing the playbook was a deliberate PM move, one document that compounds across every future event.
Initiative 01: Guided Whale Watching
A multi-week program run two seasons in a row, with a documented handoff for the third.
Gray whales migrate past Point Loma every December–February. Cabrillo was historically a pioneer in land-based whale watching, but the program had lapsed. I designed and ran a multi-week pop-up to revive it, first in 2024, then expanded for 2025.
Program scoping, partnership with subject experts, activity workbook, on-site facilitation, social promotion across two seasons, weekly tuning based on attendance and the SOP that let the program run again in 2025 without me re-spec'ing it.
Program shape
Flip through the Gray Whale Watching booklet
Cover → instructions → anatomy match → migration map → observation centerfold → final report → thank-you stamp page. Click the right edge to turn each page.
I partnered with Park Ranger Amanda, who had run earlier versions, to absorb institutional knowledge before launch. Then I wrote a public Canva for the activity book and a Grey Whale Watching SOP, both editable so future facilitators can extend the program rather than rebuild it.
Initiative 02: Eco-Web
A two-deck educational card game on California food webs, designed against explicit user-research requirements.
A reusable activity for outreach events and classrooms that explains how disruptions cascade through an ecosystem, without a science background and without losing a 10-year-old halfway through.
Facilitator-led: a ranger or teacher draws a scenario card and players reason out cascading effects. The right answer is the conversation, not a card flip.
User-centered requirements (from the SOP)
The card system
| Set | Contents | Function |
|---|---|---|
| Animal Cards | California natives across two ecosystems, coastal scrub (Bumble Bee, Prickly Pear, Black Phoebe, Cooper's Hawk, Grey Fox, Gopher Snake, Red-tailed Hawk, Crawford's Grey Shrew, Desert Cottontail) and intertidal/marine (Brown Algae, Bat Star, Blueband Hermit Crab, Garibaldi, Osprey, Common Dolphin) | Build the food web before scenarios begin |
| Scenario Cards | Disruption events, disease, new predator, drought, chemical spill, invasive species, ocean acidification, intertidal invader | Trigger reasoning about cascading effects |
| Resource Icons | Sunlight, Water (H₂O), Nutrient (N/C) atomic-style icons used as a shared visual vocabulary across both decks | Same language across ecosystems → cards mix and combine |
The full deck
15 species across two decks, coastal scrub on top, intertidal/marine on the bottom row. Each card carries a photograph, common + scientific name and the prey-icon row that drives the food-web reasoning.
The SOP I wrote includes a "Future Refinements" section, a 4-step process (research → wireframe the new relationships → design new cards → user-test before merging) so future staff can extend the deck without breaking the visual or pedagogical system.
Initiative 03: Junior Botanist (Spring Flower Hunt)
A native-plant scavenger hunt, and the only program where I got to A/B test the launch.
Visitors got a foldable scavenger hunt at the Visitor Center, walked the park's grassland and coastal trails to find five native plants, photographed their favorite and returned to redeem a prize. An accompanying info table, with live plants from the park greenhouse, caught visitors who didn't want to walk.
Coordinated with Patricia, the park's Vegetation Specialist, to request a crate of in-bloom plants from the greenhouse for the table. Live plants ended up being the centerpiece, a reminder that the right ask to the right partner beats anything I could've designed alone.
The first run was a quiet test. The second run, same activity, same location, same staff, went out with full social-media advertisement.
It pulled 10× the participants.
That gap is the whole reason I take program-level promotion seriously. The activity wasn't the lever, the activity was already good. The lever was making sure people knew it existed before they showed up at the park. Every program I ran after that got a real promotion plan baked into the timeline, not bolted on at the end.
Program Breadth
Smaller initiatives that filled out the program calendar, each treated as a real launch.
Eight panels, page by page
One folded sheet, eight panels, cover, how-to-play, word hunt, "ask a ranger" prompt, draw, BINGO, lighthouse stamps and event checklist. Click the right edge to flip.
Measurement & Iteration
What I tracked, why, and how the numbers changed how I ran the next program.
Clicker counts of meaningful interactions, required for end-of-year reporting at the park level. The same number tells you whether your pop-up is working and gives leadership a quantifiable program impact at the end of the season.
For programs that used activity books, I tracked how many were handed out vs. completed. That ratio tells you whether the activity is the draw or whether people are just collecting collateral.
The 10× participation gap between the test and advertised runs of Junior Botanist. After that data point, every program got a real promotion plan baked into the timeline, not bolted on at the end.
Whale Watching ran four Saturdays. If attendance dropped or visitors weren't engaging with the workbook, I had three more weekends to adjust the pitch, the materials or the location. Each weekend was an iteration.
Coordination & Handoff
The people I worked through, and the documents I left behind.
- Park Rangers, subject experts for whale watching, lighthouse history, marine ecology
- Vegetation Specialist (Patricia), live native plants from the park greenhouse
- Supervisors, content and timing approval before printing or promoting
- Park social media, partner accounts on Instagram for promotion reach
- Volunteer interpretive staff, facilitators on event days when programs ran multi-station
- "A Mini Guide on Pop-Up Programs", the 7-step playbook
- Grey Whale Watching SOP, multi-week program runbook
- Eco-Web Mini SOP, facilitator script + future-refinement guide
- Public Canva files, for the activity books and flyers, editable by future staff
- Promotion templates, IG post layouts dated and reusable season-to-season
Reflection
What program management at a federal park taught me, in PM terms.
- Scoping under hard constraints (fixed events, fixed audience, no rollback)
- Cross-functional coordination with subject experts
- Shipping to a real launch date with measurable outcomes
- Iterating based on quantitative + qualitative signal
- Writing documentation that survives staff turnover
Programs aren't projects. A project ends; a program has to be runnable next season by someone who wasn't there. That mindset, designing for handoff, measuring for the next iteration, writing things down before you forget them, is what I carry into every product role.
The best work I did at Cabrillo wasn't an event. It was the document that let the next person run the event without me, and the data point that told them whether to bother promoting it.