Hello. Today we are so pleased to share thoughts from Elizabeth Palchak, our new executive director! Elizabeth comes to Groundwork from the University of Vermont, where she directed the University’s Office of Sustainability. She has worked in the private sector, nonprofit sector and academia during her career, and all of her work has been unified by a love of community and deep care for the environment. That environmental ethos will be central to her work at Groundwork. In today’s interview, we ask Elizabeth to share a formative experience from her early years and to discuss how her concept of leadership took shape. We explore how she sees those skills guiding her and Groundwork in the days ahead.—Jeff Smith
Groundwork’s new Executive Director, Elizabeth Palchak, opens up about experiences that shaped her devotion to the environment and formed her leadership principles.
Q: First, welcome, Elizabeth! How about we start the conversation back when your love of the environment began. Can you share an experience from your past—perhaps even from when you were a child —that played a role in guiding you to a career in environmentalism?
Elizabeth: I took a trip in middle school that was organized by an incredible science teacher. He was an eighth grade teacher in Marshall, Michigan, who, over the years, took dozens and dozens of his students to Alaska to study the effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prudhoe Bay. Mr. Dale Rosene was responsible for turning a lot of us on to the grandeur and the fragility of the environment. These trips to Alaska moved a lot of us toward greater awareness of environmental issues and also helped us understand how much power the environment has to bring us joy and awe and all these beautiful things. So that’s an experience I can remember as being very meaningful and pivotal.
Q: Color that in for us a little bit. How did you get there, what did you see?
Elizabeth: We flew, about 20 eighth graders on a commercial flight, and then we all got into giant conversion vans. Six vans rolled together all over Alaska. We camped. We visited glaciers. We went to Denali National Park. We went to Homer. We met Jewel’s parents—the singer. She’s from Alaska. That was memorable.
Anyhow, we were so dirty because we were camping out all the time and things just became very real. There’s less to hide behind when you’re dirty and living outside.
Q: She actually went to Interlochen Arts Academy and played in a coffeehouse on Front St. in Traverse City when she was there.
Elizabeth: Oh, wow. I didn’t know that. Anyhow, we were so dirty because we were camping out all the time and things just became very real. There’s less to hide behind when you’re dirty and living outside. You learn to connect with people in new, authentic ways. For many of us, it was our first time camping, our very first time camping in the rain and the whole thing. And we all came back changed.
Q: So your trip was some years after the actual spill …
Elizabeth: Yes. We were doing follow up science. After the oil spill occurred, Mr. Rosene took students up there, and they began water testing, testing the sand for remnants of oil. So by the time I got up there a lot of the cleanup had occurred, and so we did not see the dramatic effects of the spill that some of the earlier students did, but there were still effects. This was a dozen or so years later and there were still effects, and that was striking for us. So Dale built this great citizen science collection—data collection that we developed over multiple years of students spending time there. It stopped when he retired, but it was incredible. The Marshall Michigan School System deserves a shoutout for supporting that.
Q: Did you see much in the way of wildlife?
Elizabeth: Yes we did, I remember picking up a Pycnopodia, a type of seastar. We saw Horned puffins, Tufted puffins, loons, cormorants. To spend time with the wildlife that had been impacted was very meaningful. It’s one thing to look at pictures or see animals on the movie screen, but it was quite another thing to be with these animals that rely on a clean environment.
Q: And 30 years later, the memories are still fresh for you.
Elizabeth: It opened my eyes to environmental science and that whole field of study.
Q: Did you study an environmental major?
Elizabeth: When I went to college, I pursued the liberal arts. I just really wanted to learn, and was drawn to many areas of study but ended up with history, and chose to focus on environmental history. So I studied John Muir and Rachel Carson and Henry David Thoreau, and others, and looked at the environmental movement through a historical lens. So I got sort of an academic understanding of the progress we’ve made in this country.
Q: And by then the true outdoors was calling.
Elizabeth: Yes, I decided that I wanted to spend more time outside, and I went west and got a job as an AmeriCorps member in Bozeman, Montana, and spent time camping, a lot of it in Yellowstone, and learning to build trails. I learned to camp in grizzly country and learned what it feels like to not to be the highest member of the food chain. That’s when I became convinced that I really wanted to take my career in the direction of doing more of that kind of work, outside, more directly connected to the natural world, and in the mountains.
That’s where I learned a lot about leadership, both how to travel in the mountains and take care of yourself physically, but beyond the mountains, in work environments.
Q: So eventually you ended up working with the National Outdoor Leadership School—a deep immersion into both the out-of-doors and into the human experience of teaching resilience and leadership. What were the life-changing takeaways from that experience?
Elizabeth: Yes, I worked to get a master’s degree, and knew that I wanted to do more teaching and spend more time in the mountains. So I worked for NOLS for a few years. I spent time leading students on 30-day backpacking trips in the Wind River Mountains and parts of the Rockies. That was fun, so awesome. That’s where I learned a lot about leadership, both how to travel in the mountains and take care of yourself physically, but beyond the mountains, in work environments. NOLS is known for its leadership curriculum. They’ve conducted training for NASA astronauts and Google executives and the Army, and many others.
Q: From what you learned in that work, what are some of the specific skills that form the pillars of leadership?
Elizabeth: You learn to be a clear communicator. You learn what it means to be a resilient person. You learn how important flexibility is in leadership. And you learn about decision-making, about decision-making models. What it means to have a collaborative decision-making approach versus a more directive decision-making approach. You also learn a lot about your own leadership style.
Q: How does that all come into play for you now?
Elizabeth: What I learned at NOLS I still lean on almost every day in my career. It’s the foundation of my leadership training. Most of their leadership curriculum is based on academic research from business schools, so then you get to test it out, in the world—in my case, the very real world, the actual wilderness. And the consequences are very real and very immediate in the mountains.
Q: I hear you saying the NOLS lessons stood up, stood the test of time.
Elizabeth: Yes, those lessons have been crucial for me, and how I think about leadership.
Q: OK. Go a little more into that—how do you think about leadership for yourself?
Elizabeth: One of the principles at NOLS is a focus on self-leadership. We can all be leaders, but what does this mean? We first focus on how we’re showing up. How do I manage my communication? How do I manage my habits? What is my role in any given conflict or challenge? We make sure we’re being very deliberate about the language we’re using, and the fact that in designated leadership positions, we’re also role modeling. Leadership is sometimes perceived as just leading other people, but we first have to take responsibility for ourselves.
Q: Deliberate, intentional … that’s where it starts.
Elizabeth: Yes. And over time, I’ve developed, I think, a very collaborative leadership style. I think that it’s helpful to have many good minds on tricky problems, so I look to my team to help make me smarter. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and so I think a collaborative leadership style allows for more perspectives at the table and hopefully, better solutions. I try to be flexible in my approach. In some cases, it’s helpful to use an analytical approach to solving a problem. In other situations, building relationships is the most important approach. In some situations, a leader may need to help stoke the fire and be the cheerleader or amplify the great work already happening. And then in some situations, I think this is what we’re most familiar with, a leader is a driver, setting the course and helping to push goals forward.
So I do my best to adjust my style depending on what the situation needs. And I think Goundwork is full of a lot of really brilliant, highly motivated people who care a lot about their work. I think a lot of my job will be to help connect dots across the organization and externally, building relationships and partnerships, especially as we develop new areas of focus. Then when it’s time to push our work forward or amplify it, I can do that too. 
