People

Bridget Booth is an 8^th-grade science teacher at Haslett Middle School and a certified environmental educator in Michigan. She got her start in education at Woldumar Nature Center in Lansing and has been taking students outdoors to learn ever since. In addition to being an NAAEE CEE-Change Fellow, she is the past president and current board member of the Michigan Alliance for Environmental and Outdoor Education (MAEOE), and is chairing the Climate Education Committee. Bridget lives with her husband and two sons in East Lansing and spends her (scant) free time reading, playing in the woods, swimming in the Great Lakes and enjoying live music.

My grandfather taught me to love and respect the land. When other cattle ranchers were killing coyotes, his response was, "they're doing me a favor. They weed out the sick ones." He got his pickup truck stuck between two trees once and was forced to cut one down -- and cried. When I asked why he was crying, he answered, "it takes a lot of years to grow a tree."

I am immensely grateful to my grandfather for teaching me to respect and revere the world around me. Because of him I see Nature not as something to be tamed and/or controlled, but as Life, to be appreciated and shared, if not fully understood. My grandfather taught me to understand that I have a place in that world, but today I understand he was also teaching me that it's not enough to know that I have a place in the world. I also need to make a difference. For me, part of that is passing his lessons on.

A focus on the environment, education, the arts, human service, social justice, and sustainability has been at the core of Dave’s professional life for more than forty years. For twenty-five of those years, he successfully led and managed a variety of nonprofit organizations within these fields at the local, regional, and national levels. For almost twenty years, Dave has worked as an independent organizational consultant, concentrating his work as Founder and Principal of DRC Consulting on various aspects of organizational development, including strategic planning, board, and staff training and development, process facilitation, program evaluation, and conflict resolution. Dave has also served as Adjunct Faculty at Antioch University, where he has taught and advised graduate students in the Environmental Studies, Education, and Management departments. He holds a B.S. in Natural and Human Resource Management from the University of Maine and an M.Ed. in Organizational Teaching and Learning Environments from Harvard University, as well as post-graduate certificates in Organizational Development, Leadership and Management, Nonprofit Administration, Human Resource Management, and Professional Coaching. Dave is a Lifetime Member of NAAEE and a past recipient of the organization’s President’s Award. He, his wife Amy, and their Black Lab Grendel, live in a 19th-century farmhouse on the coast of Maine.

We are a family-led company in the process of joining the New York State cannabis industry as social equity candidates. We aim to operate a processing plant to facilitate a supply chain amongst BIPOC-owned companies using sustainable technology. Our mission is to show that processing plants could operate in alignment with the decarbonization goals of the 2019 New York State Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.

Emily Schaller's appreciation of the natural world started during her childhood in Connecticut playing in the mud with her brother, hiking in the woods with her dad, and picking flowers and berries with her mom. She was a dedicated Girl Scout for 10 years, which helped instill in her a love of exploration and a sense of civic responsibility. 

She pursued her interest in connecting people to the natural world and inspiring action to sustain it by earning her MS in Ecological Leadership and Education from the Audubon Expedition Institute of Lesley University. This unique program included 3 semesters of living and learning outdoors while traveling across different bioregions of North America in a retrofitted school bus. This transformational experience provided her with a deeper knowledge of herself as well as the role she could play in building connections between people, their communities, and their place. 

She has since developed and delivered a variety of environmental education experiences for all ages at Naturebridge Yosemite, Teton Science Schools, and the University of Michigan's Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research (CEDER). Emily currently supports professional learning programs offered through Shelburne Farms' Institute for Sustainable Schools, focusing on education for sustainability, climate education, and food systems education.