Leadership

For Golden Gate Campus Director PaHoua Lee (she/they), there’s no place like the Marin Headlands. “Every time I’ve had an important life event,” PaHoua notes, “I have come here to the Headlands to celebrate.” From engagement photos to pregnancy announcements to family hikes, PaHoua has been drawn back to this special place over and over again. “This place always felt like home to me. I left [after working here as an educator for two years], but NatureBridge has always stayed with me in a lot of ways.” Ten years later, in July 2022, PaHoua returned to NatureBridge as Golden Gate's first woman of color Campus Director.

As a child growing up in Northern California, Corinne Dedini would travel frequently with her family to their forest service cabin in Stanislaus National Forest. Along the way, young Corinne would see signs directing travelers to Yosemite National Park, and she remembers asking “Mom, what’s Yosemite?” And her mother would reply that it was “just like our little cabin” in Stanislaus.

Congratulations to Kim Hanson who recently accepted the permanent position of Mid-Atlantic Regional Director after serving as Interim Director for the Mid-Atlantic Region. Now in her third decade of working for NatureBridge (she began in 2002!), Kim brings a wealth of experience, wisdom and vision to the role.

Jerry Edelbrock is a builder: a builder of partnerships, a builder of people and a builder of visions. In 1983, long before the notion of a Yosemite Institute (YI) in Olympic National Park at the Rosemary Inn had come to fruition, Jerry was building the foundation for what was to come. Throughout his time building connections, infrastructure, and programming in Olympic, Jerry always went back to one question: “Is it in the best interest of the park?”

Jenn Peach led the 2017 Armstrong Scholars program alongside Daniella Beinstock. When the 13-day excursion began, the high school-age women saw Jenn as mature, but little else beyond that — she was there to lead and instruct. After Jenn and Daniella held the open conversation period around the campfire, the dynamics of the entire group changed. One of the memorable questions they fielded around that campfire in the dark: “How do you have the courage to go do things by yourself?”

“At some point I said that I was the person who gave me permission to do things, and it sparked this fascinating conversation about the ‘permission’ to be certain things as a young woman. It opened everyone’s eyes to each other.”

Thanks to Jon, Destry and other impactful leaders and passionate teachers, NatureBridge has served 8,964 kids since 2012 in Prince William Forest Park. After nearly 80 years, the park is living up to the promise of experiential education that was made in the 1930s. On the very same grounds where segregated housing was built, NatureBridge centers equity in its student programs. Not only is the promise being realized, but it is being expanded and made better for the next 50 years and beyond.

When Isabel Esparza was nine years old, she said goodbye to her family, greeted a crew of friendly flight attendants and flew half-way across the country to Michigan — alone. It was one of many trips for the former NatureBridge educator that was driven by her mother’s adventurous spirit. Isabel shares how that infectious spirit influenced her career path and the way she dreams of raising her own children. She also reflects on how an equity thought experiment she would propose — “Imagine a scientist” — helped students at our Mid-Atlantic campus see themselves represented in environmental education.

Miho has dedicated her life’s work to increasing visibility and access to environmental education, careers, public lands and outdoor adventure for those whom our system has failed to provide these opportunities. Miho’s journey with NatureBridge began in 2000 as an Environmental Science Educator at our Golden Gate National Recreation Area campus, on the traditional territory of Coast Miwok, Ohlone and Graton Rancheria.

When she was a child on the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe’s reservation, Cameron Macias would listen to her grandmother tell tales of 100-pound salmon swimming up the Elwha River. Read on for our interview with Cameron, a NatureBridge alum and graduate research assistant at the University of Idaho studying wildlife on the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe reservation.