Advancement Notes Trustee Transitions

Happy New Year! 2020 already seems both long ago, far away and yet like just yesterday–what a tumultuous time. I hope your 2021 is filled with hope, joy and prosperity for you and yours.

Sam Schneski is stepping off the MFFC Board of Trustees this summer, where he has served since 2016. Born and raised in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Sam attended the University of Maine Orono, worked as a carpenter in Colorado and then was hired as the Forest Manager at Merck Forest and Farmland Center in 2000. While at Merck from 2000-2003, Sam met his wife Laurie (Snyder) Schneski - who was working on the farm at the time. Sam learned crucial skills and developed professionally and personally, gaining experience in chainsaw training, logging, forestry, sugaring, the art of supervision, and most of all teamwork. Sam worked on the sugarhouse build (material logging, milling, and building), sugarbush expansion, parking lot expansion, trail building, marking, and administering a shelter wood timber sale, road maintenance with the bulldozer, field clearing/reclamation, view clearing, and cabin building, to name a few. He then obtained a Master of Science degree in Forestry at UMass Laurie went on to Tufts Veterinary School. Sam is now the Windham County Forester, as well as the supervisor of the other 3 southern Vermont County Foresters for the State of Vermont, and Laurie is a practicing veterinarian and owner of the Brattleboro Veterinary clinic in Brattleboro. They live in Guilford, VT with daughters Genevieve “Genny” and Rosalie “Rosie”.

A warm welcome to our many new members and donors–your financial support in 2020 allowed us to operate and continue to deliver mission during an unprecedented time for us all. Our team worked quietly last year, doing its best to capture the energy and spirit of signature events and programs by offering them on-line or in modified live ways. We missed having our usual throng of day visitors, outdoor enthusiasts and workshop participants on site. We missed campers stopping in the Visitor Center for a chat and some hiking tips. We really missed greeting the many area students who use Merck Forest as their outdoor classroom as they conduct their environmental science and citizen learning. We didn’t get to host as many young day campers on-site last summer as we might have liked, but hope to turn that curve in 2021! Not being able to interact and engage with people on the property was most certainly a downside to 2020, but Vermont’s ably handled Covid-19 response protocols were all followed to a T here.

“Through my job as County Forester I have been able to continue honing the skills I learned while working at Merck. I have my own small scale sugaring business and work with sugarmakers throughout southern Vermont. I am one of two Vermont Forestry Department Staff Chainsaw Trainers. I also work with various forestry-based non-profits and enjoy putting together timber sales for a handful of towns and continue working with loggers and private foresters through Vermont’s Use Value Appraisal Program. Merck Forest has shaped who I am, what I believe in, and most importantly led to my meeting my wife and mother of our wonderful children.”

This Ridgeline issue illuminates just how remarkable experiencing “place” can be–whether that experience is live and tactile or via an Instagram post or Nearby Nature online video. The images in this Ridgeline document how the sun here rises and sets every day, how animals here capture everyone’s hearts–whether on the farm, in the woods, or on a leash. Staff contributions explain how to track animals in the snow

Sam will continue to serve on the MFFC Program Committee as an Advisor. Thanks for your service Sam!

Jill Perry Balzano is an educator, writer, and farmer from Pawlet, Vermont. She holds an undergraduate degree in English and a Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of New Hampshire. Jill has spent twenty years balancing education, writing, and farming: first as an English teacher writing and farming during the summers, then as a farmer running marketing and communications and teaching part time. After managing her family’s farm business, Walnut Hill Farm, for several years, Jill shifted back to education as the director of communications at Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester, Vermont. She enjoys helping out in her community at the Mettawee Community School and with the Pawlet Scholarships Committee--and she loves doing everything with her two children Leo and Julian, including reading, hiking, biking, and especially farm work alongside her husband Rico.