For the last five years I have been privileged to work along side of Nancy Dooley, ICL’s first North Idaho community engagement associate. Nancy came to ICL with a gregarious personality and deep ties to the greater Sandpoint community. Having previously worked out of our Boise office, I was amazed to see how well she could turn out people to events in North Idaho’s much less populous communities. There was something about Nancy’s personality that attracted people to our events and to our community-and we are really going to miss that.
Nancy built an outreach program in North Idaho that became the model throughout the rest of the state for how we engage our members and communities. We now have community engagement associates in all three of our offices who are working to tell ICL’s story, reach out to our members, build a conservation community, and get people involved.
All of our community engagement associates deserve to be recognized for the tremendous work they do. While they may not be involved in all of the details of the issues that we work on, it’s clear that we would not have the impact that we do as an organization without our community engagement team-and that team would not exist if it were not for Nancy having charted the course.
While we understand that change is a part of life, we’ll miss Nancy. She had a truly incredible impact on ICL. We wish her the best of luck wherever her path leads, and surely we will still see her around Sandpoint where she will remain part of the fabric of our community.