Who Are We
Delaware Highlands Conservancy Staff
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Executive Director
A journey of discovery led Sue to the Conservancy in 2003. Sue earned a Bachelor’s degree in economics and a Master’s in business administration from McMasters University and then spent two decades gaining business savvy in marketing and management in the telecommunications industry. After ten years in the high tech world, Sue took time off to travel – she has spent time on six continents – and decide her next step in life. She found tremendous satisfaction volunteering with conservation groups. After becoming familiar with the work of land trusts, Sue decided the land trust community was where she could best contribute her talents in the service of people and lands from which they live.
When Sue came to the Upper Delaware River region, the dense woodlands, cold streams, and rural communities reminded her of the Ottawa River Valley, where she grew up collecting wildflowers in the summer and not at all minding the long, cold winters. She was thrilled when the Conservancy Board offered her the position of Executive Director. Sue remembers, “the board at the time had money to hire me for one year, thanks to a generous donation of $20,000 by a very kind individual who wanted the Conservancy to make the leap to the next step.”
Sue is grateful to that original donor for the insight, wisdom, and belief in the Conservancy’s decision to make the huge investment of hiring its first fulltime employee. Less than nine years later, Sue directs a staff of five fulltime employees, a core of dedicated volunteers, and manages a well-respected land trust that has protected over 13,000 acres to date.
“The Delaware Highlands is home,” Sue states, “Yes the land is beautiful – but it is the people that make our region and our organization so very special. The Conservancy has grown and with a dedicated capable team I’m confident about the future and the achievement of our goals to protect the quality of life here now and for generations to come. Everyday, I am so thankful for all the inspiring members of this Upper Delaware regional community—including that wonderful first donor—who make it all possible.”
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Stewardship and Education Coordinator
Amanda is a Pike County, Pennsylvania native daughter with a lifelong love for the lands and waters of the Upper Delaware River region. Legend has it she learned to identify pink lady slipper orchids at age three. Amanda’s love of forestlands led her to a desire to learn to care for them. She achieved an Associate's degree in Forestry/Resource Management from Keystone College and a BS in Forest Science from Penn State. Amanda has used her forestry skills to participate in an internship in Urban Forestry with Morris Arboretum in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, and has worked with local communities improving their streetscapes and town parks through the PA Urban and Community Forestry Program. Amanda joined the Delaware Highlands Conservancy in 2008. “I came to the Conservancy because I love where I grew up,” Amanda asserts. “The farms and forests of this region are beautiful places to see and play in. But, more than that, they provide good, clean, sustainable livelihoods for so many people who live here.”
As Stewardship Coordinator, Amanda leads the Conservancy’s easement documentation and monitoring activities. She collects and compiles field data for property baseline documentations and provides support for the annual monitoring conducted by the Conservancy on all properties with conservation easements.
In her role as Education Coordinator, Amanda coordinates regional partnerships and produces and helps to lead educational programs. She was instrumental in the launch of Conservancy initiative Shop Local, Save Land, a program that connects consumers to local farm and forest products and is the designer and coordinator of the “Women and Their Woods” program focused on giving women forest landowners the tools they need to steward and sustain their forestlands.
Amanda is the proud mother of a new son, Zebbin, and knows her work at the Conservancy is for future generations who will grow up here. Amanda states, “I want my son to experience what I have been able to experience here in the Upper Delaware River region and to have a relationship with the land here. There’s no better feeling than knowing your own work will matter to your children.”
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New York Land Protection Coordinator
Melinda is another Delaware Highlands native daughter, from across the river in Sullivan County, NY, where she spent her youth exploring the feet of the Catskill Mountains. She currently lives in the hamlet of Rock Hill, New York with her husband Josh and her cat, Fred. Melinda grew up outdoors and still loves exploring those unique, unspoiled natural landscapes in Sullivan County, whether it is a new swimming hole, camping spot, waterfall, or a never-ending view.
She earned a Bachelor's degree in anthropology and sociology from SUNY Purchase and a Master’s degree in environmental law and policy from Vermont Law School. Before joining the Conservancy, Melinda interned with the Sullivan County Planning Office, where she developed a taste for land use policy. She works on both outreach and procedural ends of conservation easements and land use projects.
Melinda understands from her own engagement in her community of Rock Hill that caring for our environment, our towns, our parks, forestlands and farms, is a civic responsibility. She is intimately involved with Rock Hill community enhancement and the development of a community farmers’ market there. “I work with my town,” Melinda affirms, “because I believe that raising awareness, especially for my younger generation, regarding the importance of natural resources and local food and forest economies to the overall economic picture of the region is vital to sustaining what we care about here. I work at the Conservancy because it’s an organization that reflects my own values. We need to care, we need to engage, and we need to actively sustain what we love and the quality of life that we enjoy.”
In the three years since Melinda came on board at the Conservancy, she has been directly involved with the protection of over 1,000 acres of farm and forest lands. Though each of these landowners has a different story for exactly why they chose to permanently conserve their private lands, what they have in common is a desire to know that their forests, farms, and waters will always be healthy. “These landowners have all been passionate about protecting their lands for future generations,” explains Melinda, “not just for their own families, but because they care about their communities. They understand that the protection of their lands benefits everyone.”
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Pennsylvania Land Protection Coordinator
Jake arrived at the Conservancy via a journey from the Midwest in early fall 2011. Originally from eastern Kansas, Jake grew up exploring the Missouri River bluffs. “As a child I grew attached to the woods running my grandfather’s small oak woodland in the northeast Kansas town of Leavenworth,” Jake remembers, “so my decision to study and practice forestry was due in no small part to the wood smoke-filled winter memories of working in my grandfather’s log workshop—constructed from logs harvested from his land—and the summer memories of fresh raspberries with Edy’s vanilla ice cream.”
Equal parts athlete and scholar, Jake gave up football for forestry at the University of Illinois, where he earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. During graduate school, Jake was a practicing forester for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and later a consulting forester. Jake found, as many foresters do, that good forestry meant more than just a well-managed forest. Jake realized that to sustain forests and the services that forests yield—water, sustainably produced wood products, habitat, scenery, and places for outdoor recreation—land, working forests and farms, had to be protected from subdivision and development. “My attraction to working with a land trust is the moral imperative that forestry and land management must be integrated with land protection.”
Jake works with Pennsylvania landowners who want to protect their farms and forests. He is also involved in landowner outreach and educational programming, and as a natural born computer-whiz, Jake keeps the Conservancy Facebook and website up to date.
Jake is happy to have settled in the unique Upper Delaware River region. Jake traveled the U.S. prolifically as a child and had been to all 48 contiguous states by the time he was 12, “but,” Jake explains, “I knew this was a special area of the country. When I visited to interview, the most impressive part of the region was not the natural landscape, which is quite impressive, but the strong communities of the region and how integral the natural and working landscape is to the identity of each of these communities.” Jake looks forward to making the Upper Delaware region, home.
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Outreach and Development Manager
Virginia, her husband, and three children have made their home in the Upper Delaware region since 1993. Before joining the Conservancy full time in fall 2011, Virginia spent the majority of her professional life as a teacher. She taught high school English in the 1980’s and after receiving a MA in literature in 2000, she taught literature and composition as an adjunct professor at Marywood University and the University of Scranton. In 2006, Virginia embarked on a obtaining a PhD in English and American Indian Studies at Cornell University and will be completing her doctoral dissertation on environmental ethics in American and American Indian literature this spring.
While completing her teaching fellowship at Cornell, Virginia spent time when she could at the Conservancy writing grants and producing other outreach materials. Upon finishing her degree at Cornell, Virginia had planned to continue teaching. But, the opportunity to work fulltime at the Conservancy changed her mind. “I had given time to the Conservancy over the years because I knew it was an organization committed to protecting these lands I have grown to really love, the place where we have raised our kids” Virginia states. “I was attracted to the chance to work here fulltime because the Conservancy is an organization that actively seeks to connect people to these lands where they live, work, and play. The Conservancy through its land protection work and its outreach is all about connecting communities to the really vital idea that we are a part of the land that sustains us—to be healthy ourselves in mind, spirit, and body, we need to keep our lands and waters healthy.”
Virginia will manage all facets of outreach and development for the Conservancy from producing newsletters and planning community programs to organizing fundraising events. She will be an integral part of developing the Conservancy’s membership base in Pennsylvania and New York and to making the Conservancy’s new office location on the Lemons Brook Farm in Bethel, New York a place for programs and events focused on encouraging people to have a relationship with the land. Virginia asserts, “I am really excited to be part of an organization that has done so much good for our special region and has so much possibility to do so much more.”
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