Andrew Thoms

Executive Director

Andrew Thoms grew up in rural Upstate New York State. After studying Environmental Sciences at SUNY Plattsburgh, he worked for 10 years in Latin America as an environmental specialist in international development projects. Most of his projects focused on the interface between the sustainable use of natural resources and the conservation of tropical biodiversity. One of his favorite jobs was developing and integrating new techniques for cultivating coffee in an environmentally sustainable way on a Guatemalan Coffee farm that he managed for a few years. Andrew received a Master’s degree in Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development at the University of Wisconsin where he concentrated his studies on conservation and economics. Andrew enjoys being outdoors hunting, birdwatching, fishing, and exploring.

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Katie Riley

Deputy Director of Policy and Programming

Katie Riley was born and raised in Sitka, Alaska, and is happy to be home and working on supporting innovative policy initiatives and engagement at the Sitka Conservation Society. Katie has worked in the commercial fishing industry for over 10 years, both at a processor, on a commercial troll tender, and a gillnetter in Bristol Bay. After graduating from the University of St Andrews in St Andrews, Scotland with a Masters of Arts in International Relations and Italian, she went to work in Madagascar at an international non-profit focused on conservation, sustainable social and economic development in a small fishing village on the Southwest coast. After a couple years on the reef, the mountains and stormy seas came calling and Katie returned to Sitka with a desire to apply her knowledge and experience to research and catalyze policy solutions to help conserve the rainforest she calls home. Katie enjoys playing rugby, hiking, being out on the water, and exploring near and far.

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Kylee Miguel

Operations Administrator

Kylee Miguel was born and raised in Sitka, Alaska and has always been passionate about family, community, wild foods, and her role in caring for the natural world around us. As a child she gained an appreciation for how vital these lands and waters are each day, and she tries to inspire her children by passing down the same lessons and traditions that were taught to her. Today, Kylee continues to utilize and depend upon the forest through annual hunting camps and harvesting wild foods. She is thrilled for the opportunity to take part in protecting the irreplaceable environment around us here on the Tongass National Forest!

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Bethany Goodrich

Storytelling Program Director

Bethany Goodrich is the Director of Storytelling with the Sustainable Southeast Partnership and the Sitka Conservation Society. She is a wandering conservationist with field experience working with wildlife, diatoms and humans in Antarctica, Alaska, California and Africa. She holds a masters degree in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management from the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment and a bachelors of science in Biology with minors in Fine Arts and Neuroscience from the University of San Francisco. She first experienced the Tongass while working with the Sitka Conservation Society as a storytelling intern in 2012. She reluctantly left to pursue her masters degree in merry old England. Her thesis investigated how commodity crops influence human-elephant relations among cocoa farmers in South Central Ghana. She is now happily rooted in Southeast Alaska where she focuses on how storytelling and communications can empower communities and connect with policy.

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Bethany's Portfolio

Chandler O'Connell

Community Catalyst

Chandler O’Connell was born and raised in Sitka, a guest on Lingit Aani. She moved back home in 2016 to work as the Sitka Sustainable Community Catalyst with the Sitka Conservation Society and the Sustainable Southeast Partnership. Chandler graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Human Evolutionary Biology and a minor in Health Policy. Following graduation, she worked in Sitka and San Francisco, before moving to Burundi as a Global Health Corps Fellow with the Clinton Health Access Initiative. At the end of her fellowship year, she moved to Rwanda to work with One Acre Fund, a fast growing social enterprise that supports smallholder farmers to build resilient communities. Five years later, humbled and grateful for the experiences she had living and working Internationally, Chandler headed home. Alongside her community, she hopes to contribute to creating a healthy, vibrant, just and sustainable future for the people and place of Southeast Alaska.

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Caitlin Blaisdell

Communications Director

Raised in the farm country of Illinois, Caitlin became a guest in Sheet’ká Ḵwáan in 2014 when she served as an AmeriCorps VISTA at the Hames Center, and immediately felt a connection to the community and the wild landscapes of Southeast Alaska. Her professional journey evolved into founding her own successful photography and marketing business, where she worked with families, artists, small businesses, and organizations across Alaska.

“Being surrounded by the beauty of the Tongass on Lingít Aaní, my desire to learn, appreciate, share, and protect this place is strong—and raising a child here has deepened the way I experience this home,” Caitlin shares, “I'm so excited to bring my love of storytelling and commitment to conservation and community to amplify the voices and stories that make Southeast Alaska—and the Tongass—so extraordinary.”

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Lione Clare

Wilderness & Community Engagement Coordinator

Lione was born and raised in Sitka, and eager to get off the island for college. Throughout those years however, her studies and working as a summer intern with SCS shaped her values and passions and she realized how special and intertwined this place and community is. The pull to return home grew stronger and stronger and Lione has been back in Sitka full time since 2019 and working again with SCS since 2020. She helps manage the Sea Pony Farm property and programs, and works on a variety of Wilderness stewardship projects, including kayak and other remote expeditions in West Chichagof-Yakobi and other Wilderness Areas as part of our partnership with the USDA Forest Service. She is also part of the communications team and uses her photography and storytelling skills to document and share our work. Lione’s degree is in Resource Conservation from the University of Montana with minors in climate change studies and media arts. Lione has endless gratitude for living here and enjoys nature photography, hiking, biking, trail running, backcountry skiing, surfing, exploring on her skiff, kayaking, enjoying wild foods – basically anything you can do outdoors on Lingít Aaní. 

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Heather Bauscher

Fisheries Community Engagement Specialist

Heather Bauscher is the Fisheries Community Engagement Specialist for the Sitka Conservation Society and SalmonState. She has fifteen years of experience in state and federal environmental resource management: working in the spaces between policy, public engagement, and management of fisheries and forest resources. She is an adjunct professor at University of Alaska Southeast Sitka Campus teaching an experiential course focused on the Federal Subsistence Board Process. For six years she served on the Sitka Fish and Game Advisory Committee to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. In her final three years she served as the chair, representing the Sitka Fish and Game Advisory Committee at the 2022 Board of Fisheries Southeast Meeting, and received the Excellence in Service Award from Alaska Board of Fish and Board of Game. Through her leadership on the advisory committee she supported efforts to work across inter-jurisdictional fisheries issues by also engaging with the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council and the Southeast Regional Advisory Council to the Federal Subsistence Board.

In 2022 she moved from Sitka to Petersburg and now serves on the Petersburg Advisory Committee. She is passionate about sharing knowledge of these democratic processes to support the future generation of resource management leaders in Alaska. Heather enjoys observational drawing, birding, hunting, fishing, and crewing on small commercial boats in various fisheries in Southeast Alaska.

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Lee House

Southeast AK Sustainability Strategy (SASS) Storytelling Specialist

Lee works to creatively communicate stories that embody respect, collaboration, stewardship, and positive change. He first came to know Lingít Aaní Southeast Alaska through two summers of storytelling internships with the Alaska Conservation Foundation from 2015-2016. Since then, he has lived and worked in Sitka, bringing an array of creative skillsets to mission-driven work throughout the region and state. With a communication design education from Massachusetts College of Art, and self-taught principles in writing, photography, and video, Lee seeks to continue to share stories that inspire a healthy world.

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Maury Skeele

Future Leaders Catalyst

Born and raised in Sitka, a deep gratitude and respect for the natural world and community was instilled in Maury from an early age by her family and community mentors including teachers and afterschool program leaders. She attained an education in Therapeutic Recreation and has worked with youth in many settings around the country, including a residential boarding school, afterschool programs, and wilderness therapy programs. She also has experience in non-profit management and international business. The culmination of her experiences has led her to join us as our Sitka Youth Community Development Catalyst. She is committed to engaging, supporting, and inspiring Sitka's youth through mission-driven recreational programming to empower tomorrow's leaders.

Kolby Sirowich

Youth Program Coordinator

Kolby is our Living with the Land and Building Community Coordinator Jesuit Volunteer supported by JVC Northwest. She is from Seymour Connecticut where she spent lots of time playing sports with her siblings, camping, and going on boating adventures in Rhode Island. Kolby holds a degree in Elementary Education from Saint Anselm College. Through pursuing this degree, she learned to pair more hands-on experiences with classroom education and developed a passion for deepening her understanding of student needs in order to identify tangible support resources that are structured around the student interests. Kolby aspires to continue learning from the youth through the 4-H programs, and develop additional programs that offer youth opportunities to teach others while simultaneously learning new skills and knowledge. She is grateful and excited to have this opportunity to learn from and be a part of the Sitka community. 

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Debra Brushafer

Board President

Debra moved to Sitka AK in 1992. She has worked as a family practice physician since her arrival in Sitka. She is an avid outdoors person. She enjoys kayaking, hiking, camping, and boating to explore the beautiful Tongass with her family and friends. Her husband, children, and she regularly subsistence hunt, fish, and gather. She believes in preserving the Tongass for future generations. Debra joined the SCS Board in 2015 and became Board President in 2020.

Krystina Scheller

Board Vice President

Krystina is originally from Hawaii and has always had a close relationship with the land and water around her. In 2015, Krystina moved her family and her Arctic sailing business to Sitka via the Northwest Passage. Her passion for the environment and sustainable living has taken her to some of the most remote parts of the Northern Hemisphere including the Central Arctic Ocean, Northwest Greenland and Ellesmere Island. During her voyages she has seen firsthand the devastating results of climate change, the disappearing sea ice and the side effects of industrial practices in remote locations. Her lifelong relationship with the natural world and firsthand knowledge of the effects of climate change motivated her to join the SCS Board. She has a degree in Political Science and Economics from Drew University. Krystina became Board Vice President in 2021.

Marian Allen

Board Secretary

Marian is a longtime Southeast resident and former fisherwoman. Marian’s roots are in Maine. From her father she got her love of the woods and mountains and from her mother love of the sea. As a young person during the 1960s her passion for a healthy planet where there would be equity for everyone, drove her into political activism. A spontaneous trip on the ferry up the Inside Passage in 1978 opened the possibility of living the quiet, off-the-grid life she yearned for. After living that lifestyle for 16 years on Kasiana Island, she had to move to town for economic reasons. It was the rescinding of the Roadless Rule by the Bush administration that convinced her that she had to get actively involved in activism again. Her first action was a GreenPeace protest on Kupreanof Island and shortly after that she joined the SCS Board, recognizing that working in an organization is more effective than simply as an individual. She has worked in commercial fishing, as a seasonal Forest Service employee, for Alaska Marine Safety Education Association, taught at UAS Sitka as an English as Second Language Instructor, on a Title III Grant and as an adjunct, among other work. Retired now, she spends her days collecting and growing edibles and dye stuff, working with fibers, walking in the woods, being on the water, reading, and baking. She especially enjoys visits with family in Seattle, New Mexico and returning “home” to Maine. Marian has been a board member since 2006, and became Board Secretary in 2021.

Adrienne Wilber

Board Treasurer

Adrienne Wilbur is a life long Sitkan, artist and mariner. As a board member she most values SCS work driving strategic policy forward to protect the Tongass, seeking out the priorities and values of indigenous leaders and storytellers to inform our actions and philosophies, and approaching conservation with the needs of healthy and sustainable communities in mind. 

Jasmine Shaw

Board Member

Jasmine grew up in Long Beach, CA, and currently works for the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service. She first arrived in Sitka in 2010 and immediately fell in love with the community and the surrounding environment. Within the first few weeks of her arrival, she sought out volunteer opportunities with Sitka Conservation Society. Jasmine has been a board member since 2013.

Steve Fish

Board Member

Steve left the San Francisco Bay area and rode the Alaskan ferry Malaspina to Petersburg in 1974 at the age of 19. Somehow, he ended up buying a plywood, gas powered boat the following year and soon after caught his first halibut despite knowing nothing about halibut fishing, and little enough about anything else. Well, life should be an adventure. The greatest adventure for Steve has been trying to be a good husband, father, and person. Steve met Kari Johnson in Petersburg. They then moved to Port Alexander and, finally, to Sitka in 1991. They have three children: Lexi (pictured with him above), Eva and Erikson. Steve served on the board of the Alaska Marine Conservation Council including two years as Chair. He is currently president of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association. He has been on the SCS board since 2010.

Khaasda Tláa Edith Johnson

Board Member

Edith Johnson, Khaasda Tláa, was born and raised in Sitka, Alaska and is the owner and creator of Our Town Catering. Edith is an incredibly passionate and dedicated community member and business owner, who has helped support and serve Sitka in a variety of ways. In 2020 and 2021, Edith and Our Town Catering partnered with SCS to serve hundreds of free seafood dinners to households needing food assistance. 

Patricia Kehoe

Board Member

Pat grew up in Western Washington in an area noted for clearcutting and “tree farming.” Maybe it was the comparison with years of seeing those spindly, fragile trees that made the Tongass so compelling and convinced Pat that we need to avoid the ecological mistakes here that were made decades earlier in her home state. She studied at Western Washington University, became a registered nurse, and after a few years of working as an RN, moved to Alaska for a summer and stayed for 40 years of adventure and hard work commercial salmon trolling and longlining from the southern border to Unalaska. Pat always kept her art supplies with her and spent her spare time working to interpret the special place where the ocean meets the edge of land. Pat and her husband Howard built a home on an island outside of Sitka and homeschooled their two daughters involving them in all the aspects of life in Alaska from subsistence gathering and fishing to protesting water pollution with the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior. Pat took a sketch book and some paints along in all their adventures and is so grateful for the incredible places she has been able to explore.

Brendan Jones

Board Member

Brendan Jones, born in Colorado, raised in Philadelphia, attended Columbia and Oxford Universities. He has been a MacDowell Fellow, as well as a resident at the Anderson Center, Caldera, and Ragdale. He worked eleven years as general contractor, starting Greensaw Design & Build, guiding Pennsylvania’s first LEED Platinum reconstruction. He continues to carpenter and commercial fish in Alaska, and also teaches philosophy and creative writing at University of Alaska, Irkutsk Technical University in Russia, and Stanford University, where he was a 2013-15 Wallace Stegner Fellow. He has published work in The New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, Smithsonian, Sierra, Ploughshares, Fine Woodworking,National Fisherman, Narratively, The Seattle Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Narrative Magazine,and recorded commentaries for NPR. His novel The Alaskan Laundry, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, won the 2017 Alaskana prize, and was longlisted for the Center of Fiction debut prize. He recently returned from Siberia, where he spent a year with his family as a Fulbright Scholar. His upcoming novel Whispering Alaskais forthcoming with Penguin/Random House in October 2021. He lives in Sitka, Alaska, with his wife and three daughters.