MAINE MONITOR • January 3, 2025
I came to Maine in 1999 and I started working in natural resource agencies, including Inland Fisheries and Wildlife as a biologist and Department of Marine Resources as the aquaculture policy coordinator, and I really got a strong sense of how Maine communities were engaging in discussions around how to make decisions about how we use our land, how we use our water. I then got the opportunity to join the Land Use Planning Commission where I could think deeply about how we use our land, how people who live in the local area can have a strong voice. And then from there, I went to The Nature Conservancy, then did a little bit of consulting along the same lines. All of my jobs have been about: How can communities have agency and good discussions about how we use land? Now I’ve landed in this role. It’s housing, it’s land use, it’s how we conserve lands. It’s a coastal program. It’s lots of threads, but it’s all about how our communities can be healthy.