A native of Manhattan, Adam graduated in 1996 from Vassar College with a focus on folklore and storytelling in American Culture. As a child, he spent time on the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, learning about the beauty of the river and how humans have both destroyed and restored natural resources.  As a teen, he worked as a volunteer on the Clearwater and shared his perspective with others.  Following college, Adam earned his New York City Board of Education substitute-teaching certificate and worked at three junior high schools in the same East Harlem neighborhood. That year he was offered an opportunity to build on his initial boatbuilding education experience and ran the first Rocking the Boat after-school program for high school students based out of Hostos Community College in the South Bronx.  After eight months of work, he and his students celebrated the completion of the first of the 15 wooden boats Rocking the Boat students have since built.

In August 1998 he returned to the Bronx after taking the year off to develop his boatbuilding skills, and brought Rocking the Boat to New Settlement Apartments community center, where the boatbuilding and environmental education after-school program incubated for three years before growing its own independent nonprofit.  Currently, Rocking the Boat has 13 full-time staff, and an equal number of part-timers, many of whom are former students, and through four levels of programs, serves more than 1500 young people annually.

Through his work developing Rocking the Boat, Adam has received an Echoing Green Fellowship, a Union Square Award for grassroots organizing, and has been featured as a New York 1 New Yorker of the Week. His community outreach and environmental activist efforts include serving for six years as a Board Member of the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater and for four years as a Board Member of the Bronx River Alliance.