I manage the Partnerships Program for Grand Canyon, working as the liaison between NPS and Grand Canyon Conservancy, and more recently supporting many of the community partners as well.  

I've worked for Grand Canyon since 2012, primarily in the Flagstaff office. Starting out in the Office of Planning and Compliance (formerly known as OPAC), I began my NPS career in the Pathways program working in NEPA compliance as an Environmental Protection Assistant. NPS is actually my second career, though. I moved from Seattle to Flagstaff in 2005 with my young family and decided to go back to school while I was doing the stay-home mom thing (also knowing that I did not want to go back to my first career in marketing for Architecture and Engineering). By the time I converted to a permanent position in OPAC, I had earned a couple of bachelor's degrees from NAU, one in Environmental Science and Policy and one in Parks and Recreation Management. 

My liaison responsibilities for compliance included donor-funded projects, which is how I started working closely with Grand Canyon Conservancy and became acquainted with the Director Orders surrounding partnerships and philanthropic stewardship. After about 10 years of primarily working on the Desert View Inter-tribal Cultural Heritage Site project, I left NEPA compliance to focus on partnerships full time when the Office of Communications, Partnerships, and External Affairs was created. I recently moved to the park to grow the partnerships program and have more face time with our non-profit and community partners.

What do you enjoy most about your job? 

As federal employees, we all work to steward public lands and we hold positions of public trust. I view partners as the organized public. All non-profit organizations coalesce around a mission and vision. When that mission aligns with the mission of NPS, we have the opportunity to expand the footprint of the stewardship work we do as the government. I really love supporting our partners in the work they do connecting visitors to the canyon in ways our federal framework can't support, whether from lack of funding or staffing capacity. 

Is there a specific project that you've worked on that stands out to you?

I mentioned Desert View, and that was by far the most fulfilling career project I've worked on. It was, and continues to be, an incredibly complex effort, where partnerships are key to its success. In the program development phase, it was working closely with the Inter-tribal Working Group, and through the project design and compliance phase, we worked with outside planners and park inter-disciplinary teams. And throughout the entire project, we worked with philanthropic supporters, the success of the entire project is propped up on the relationships and trust built through partnerships.

If you could swap jobs with any other NPS employee for a day, who would you choose and why? 

I would swap jobs with someone in Legislative Affairs for a day, primarily because I think that's one direction I would like my career to take. I love that my job requires a lot of time in the policy space. When there is the potential for privately donated funds to support government activities and decisions, there is a heightened scrutiny around policy and ethics regulations. It would be very interesting to me to be in a job where we're proposing new legislation for Congress to consider, and therefore new policies are created. Of course, I may have an idealized picture in my head of what Legislative Affairs is really like because I watched the West Wing too many times... so yeah, I would do that for a day.