Alumni
We hope that our employees will go on to do wonderful things with their careers, including creating their own firms. We believe all boats rise in the tide. We don’t have time to waste in addressing the world’s challenges with creativity and earnest effort. So we look forward to collaborating with former employees and having them keep us on our toes. Here are the folks who have made Graphite Studio a stepping stone in their journey and what they're up to now.
Amber Rachele
Amber joined Graphite Studio for the 2022-2023 academic year while pursuing her undergraduate degree in landscape architecture. As our Accountability Intern, Amber was responsible for accountability projects related to the all three aspects of our triple-bottom-line. As an organization we have developed five year goals and Amber helped us holding ourselves accountable to them by engaging with outside programs.
Amber helped get our AIA 2030 Challenge reporting updated and she became our in-house BEAM expert, performing carbon calculations for all of our projects to identify opportunities to make our projects more environmentally friendly. She also researched organizations and drafted our Solidarity Commitment and Justice Commitment
We are grateful for Amber's contributions and look forward to continuing the work she started here. In her last update Amber shared that she was interning with TruexCullins. She intends to pursue an M. Arch after graduation.
Lina Menard
Houses are Lina's very favorite thing and she began dreaming of designing and building her own home when she was a little kid. She loves helping other people design theirs.
Her path to Graphite Studio was meandering and included: legos, blocks, volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, inadvertently becoming a tiny house expert and ADU geek, helping create the world's largest collection of ADU Case Studies, living in a yurt, a travel trailer, four tiny houses on wheels, and a couple of ADUs, receiving her Masters in Urban and Regional Planning at Portland State University, collecting several certifications, and teaching small space design courses.
At Graphite Studio she did Design & Operations, facilitating projects from preliminary design through construction administration, while perpetually looking for opportunities to improve our workflows. She helped Graphite transition from a one-man-show to a full-fledged company. In her last update Lina shared that she is traveling on the around-the-world trip she started imagining when she was a teenager.