Fall 2012
Volume 16, Number 3
Turning Point Panel: Environmental Activism Energy and enviro nmental sustainability were featured topics of a panel discussion among Princeton alumni, students, and community members who gathered at AlumniCorps on September 11. The panel included leaders of two environmental education organizations with ties to the Delaware River; an author whose book explores the implications of hydrofracking in the Marcellus Shale, which contains one of the world’s richest natural gas deposits; and moderator Elyse Powell ’11, who recently completed a Princeton Project 55 fellowship in New York City. Jeff Rosalsky ’85, Executive Director of the Pocono Environmental Education Center (PEEC), described his unanticipated trajectory from work as an investment banker and entrepreneur to an encore career promoting sustainable living and appreciation of
In This Issue 1
Turning Point Panel: Environmental Activism
1
A Note from the Executive Director
2-3 Roundtable Discussion with New York Emerging Leaders 4
Board Member Spotlight: Anne Tierney Goldstein ’79
5
Turning Point Panel (Cont’d)
5
Partner Organization Spotlight: AppleTree Institute
6-7 Regional Updates
Visit Shared Effort online to read these articles and more! Blog.AlumniCorps.org
nature. What began as a volunteer opportunity with PEEC evolved into a position as a board member. As Jeff’s commitment to PEEC grew over more than a decade, he was ultimately offered his current position when his predecessor resigned. “Doing things like budgets or projections is not very challenging if you have done them for much larger organizations, and it allows me to concentrate on . . . moving the organization forward. Taking skills from a prior career and applying them to a nonprofit organization has been very rewarding and something that I wholeheartedly encourage,” Jeff said. He described one of the greatest challenges in his field: “We are still facing the issue of how to preserve natural resources while finding a balance with the need for water and power in a growing society.”
Seamus McGraw explores a similar tension between conflicting needs in his critically-acclaimed book End of Country: Dispatches from the Frack Zone. At the panel he described how several years ago someone knocked on the door of his family farm to inform them that they were sitting on top of the Marcellus Shale, considered to be one (continued on page 5)
From Left: Seamus McGraw, Jeff Rosalsky ’85, Eric Clark, and Elyse Powell ’11
A Note from the Executive Director In early October I spent a day visiting some of Princeton AlumniCorps’ partner organizations in New York. I knew, of course, that we place our fellows with great organizations, but that day I was frankly awed by the work our partners and fellows are doing to build strong communities, provide caring and joyful learning environments for kids, promote improved mental health and developmental outcomes in early childhood, combat public health crises affecting New York’s poorest neighborhoods, and connect isolated families to the resource networks they need to move from generational poverty to secure and thriving futures. To learn about AlumniCorps’ partner organizations is to learn about some of
the most effective and innovative nonprofit organizations around. No single issue or volume of Shared Effort could adequately capture the work of AlumniCorps’ hundreds of volunteers, fellows, Emerging Leaders, affiliates, and partner organizations. Princeton AlumniCorps is a family, but we are also a 23-year -old movement of civically engaged alumni dedicated to building our shared capacity to tackle complex systemic challenges. I hope this issue will give you a snapshot of where we are—and who we are—in this work. Thank you for being a part of Princeton AlumniCorps. We are doing great things, and we could not do it without you. In Community, Andrew Nurkin