Cincinnati, Ohio
Who notices when someone stops coming?
The answer is usually built into things nobody thinks of as belonging: who gets the invitation, who can physically get there, who owns the next handoff. That is the work I do.
Bio
Yair Walton builds things that do not exist yet. He works on the human side and the systems side at once, and spends most of his time getting people, technology, and institutions to hold up something none of them could hold up alone.
He has worked with communities in Ukraine, Costa Rica, Argentina, Lithuania, and Israel. He now works in Cincinnati, where he directs a program working against isolation among older adults that has reached more than 1,300 people since 2020.
He was ordained at Hebrew Union College in 2021. The training shows up less in ritual than in method: how he listens, what he asks, and a stubbornness about not letting individual people disappear inside a large system.
He lives there with his wife and their young daughter. Outside work he camps, explores new places with them, tinkers with emerging technology, and has spent an unreasonable amount of time on the surprisingly difficult problem of making restaurant quality noodles at home.
Reach me
Email is best.
I'm writing at more length about how organizations design belonging, and about the measurement problem sitting underneath it. I'll link the pieces here once they're published, and I can send you an email when that happens.