Talk NERRdy with Ellen Leroy-Reed

Nik: How long have you been the director of the Friends of GTM Reserve?

Ellen: It’s coming up on four years at the end of July.

Nik: That’s a presidential term!

Ellen: I hope I get re-elected. I’ve figured out all the systems around here, so it’s more trouble than it’s worth to get rid of me.

Nik: The power of incumbency. 

Ellen: What has amazed me about this position—I’m kind of the Forrest Gump of my circle, I’ve done a lot of stuff—is that I have never had a job that has been so consistently wonderful. My worst day at the Reserve is better than my best day at other jobs I’ve had.

I don’t work for the Reserve or DEP , but I am the most inside outsider at GTM. We really feel like a family. We have Zoom hangouts on Friday afternoons and play trivia and have a grown-up beverage. We don’t have to do that. We’re off the clock. But it’s something we crave: conversations that start with ‘What are you doing on the weekend?’ and usually end with ‘GASP! We should do this new program for kids on the trails…’ 

Nik: How’d you find GTM?

Ellen: I knew nonprofit work was what I wanted to do, but I wasn’t quite sure where I was going to fall. Before GTM, I worked with the American Heart Association, and before that I was in marketing, business development, and communications. I was in the construction world for many many years. That was where I got very involved with the US Green Building Council (USGBC). I became the first marketing and communications person in the state of Florida to receive their LEED accreditation!

Nik: Is that what you were interested in? Why green building?

Ellen: No, not at all! When I was a kid I wanted to be a comedian.

Nik: No!

Ellen: My claim to fame is I was offered an internship with Comedy Central when I was 17, and my parents said no, I was not allowed to move to New York. I still blame them that I’m not Amy Pohler. But I do think my talent was in storytelling. So I got into marketing, communications, and selling stuff. 

Nik: The more profitable way to tell stories.

Ellen: Yeah. Ask my cousin who’s a struggling stand-up comedian and sleeps on a lot of couches. When I got involved with the USGBC, I really fell in love with a mission-driven organization. I started my own consultancy. Then the American Heart Association. But I’m a jack-of-all-trades, so being forced to do one specific job was not gratifying to me. 

Nik: You should be an executive director!

Ellen: Yeah! When I saw the listing for this job at GTM, I had lived in the area for over 10 years and had never heard of the Reserve. I worked with people on climate change and sea level rise, and I had not heard of GTM! I had a professional connection with a board member who thought I would be perfect, but he said “you have no biology background, do you?” and I had to say ‘Nope. I’ve been camping. I went fishing once!’ 

Nik: Why GTM?

Ellen: The people are extraordinary. The staff, the volunteers, the Friends. They are genuinely passionate about this place and chose this work because they love it. And because they love it, they are always looking for ways to do it better. There’s this camaraderie and collaboration—they know they can do better by asking for insight, by being wrong, by being vulnerable, by being humble.

Here, we’re loyal to the mission of preserving natural biodiversity. If you wake up and everything on your work list that day doesn’t get you closer to that goal, what are you doing? Even when things are stressful, you know you’re going to be surrounded by people that have that beautiful mindset.

Ellen with her family: husband Fred (right) and two of her three children, Libby (left) and Will (center).

Nik: Before the pandemic, before systemic racism was brought to our attention once more, you were already working on access and equity issues at GTM. How did you all get there before the rest of us?

Ellen: When you’re in love with a place, you want other people to love it. Our mission has always been to protect and promote natural biodiversity and resources using science, education, and stewardship. That word, biodiversity, kept coming up for us. We talked about an ecosystem, where plankton is as important as a shark. Maybe not as sexy or cool, but as important. And as we were talking about biodiversity, someone pointed out: we’re not very diverse. We have a diversity problem in our own halls. When I go to the annual meeting, I look around and say “boy, we are homogenous.” We do not represent the communities we serve.

GTM is part of a larger watershed. We serve a whole region. We wanted to challenge ourselves. So we asked: ‘who’s not coming here?’ People in wheelchairs, students with autism—but we didn’t know how to work with them. We had started to work with people who are low-sight or blind, low-hearing or deaf, but we didn’t have programs organized around helping them. So we were failing our community. 

Nik: But, but, but… how can you justify spending resources to reach such small segments of the overall population?

Ellen: There are a million questions about what programs we can create. We decided to just ask the community! Novel concept. A NERRA National Assistance Program grant helped us facilitate a workshop that led to an initiative we call GTM for All. Saying we’re going to try to serve everybody goes against everything we know about programming. But at that point we were not ready to exclude. It was about low-hanging fruit we could implement quickly to help people.

After the workshop, a representative from the ARC brought five adults with developmental disabilities came to our visitor’s center after hours  so they could do it in their own time, on their own terms. We were able to do it for no cost, and now they come once a month. This is one of their favorite places to be because of that $0 initiative. 

We brought in a group from a local Title I elementary school. We told them “we’ll pay for the bus, lunch, and snacks. We’ll put on activities. Just get yourself to school on Saturday by 8:00 AM. Bring mom, dad, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents—just fill the bus and come out. There were kids who saw the beach for the first time in their lives. And it was 30 minutes away! They asked if they were allowed to go to the beach or if they had to pay. I believe that day is going to stay with those kids. And it only cost us $800. That’s not a lot of money to, in my humble opinion, change a life. 

Nik: And all of those sub audiences do make up the community, the cultural biodiversity. But it’s not always so easy. You recently put out a Black Lives Matter statement and led the Friends & Foundation sector of the NERRS in thinking about these things. How did that go?

Ellen: I had one person unsubscribe from my email list. Otherwise, positive responses. We wanted to get that message out quickly, but it’s not in our culture to rush something out the door. We monitor and do research, we think about stuff. It’s my job as the non-scientist to be a little more aggressive. This makes some people a little bit uncomfortable. So there was a little bit of dynamic tension on how to do this. 

What I heard over and over again was, “we do not want empty platitudes. We do not want another message on a black background in white Helvetica with our logo at the bottom saying “Our hearts and thoughts and prayers go out to…” or “We will continue the conversation…” because it’s been 401 years of conversation. We can’t just keep talking. 

So we put together a list of things the Friends could pledge to do. I wish there could have been more. But I knew if I could just put some things down on paper, and if we could put that out to the world that we would be held accountable. So in a year, when people say, “what did you do?” It won’t be empty platitudes. It’s not easy to move forward on some of this, because our community is 94% white. Unfortunately we have a lot of white people sitting around a table trying to figure out what to do about systemic racism.

Nik: Hey, I’m in Kennebunkport, don’t worry about it.

Ellen: We have to be vulnerable, we have to be wrong, we have to admit our own stereotypes, we have to admit our own privilege. When we first started working on GTM for All, I really thought I had hit all communities—the aged, people with mobility issues, blind, deaf, autism, developmental disabilities, people at economic disadvantage.

Who did I not specifically address? People of color! I grew up a poor kid, and when I looked for underserved communities, that was where I looked. And that was my own stereotype. And I was wrong! And now I’ve been able to look at myself and say “yeah, that was my whiteness getting in the way of true discussion and moving forward.” Being able to have those difficult, open, honest conversations is what I hope is going to get us closer to real change. 

Nik: Nothing else can!

Left: Ellen with colleague Alee Knoll, a biologist at the Reserve. Right: Ellen with another “colleague,” one of the Reserve’s educational critters.

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