Bethany's new role, and welcome John Heidke to our board!
We’re excited to announce that Bethany Allen has been named our Wild Habitat Director!
Bethany joined the PCEC team in March 2022 to run the Noxious Weeds Monitoring Program, and she expanded her role beginning in January.
In her new role, Bethany will be leading PCEC’s education and outreach efforts around native habitat and land restoration. This includes the Noxious Weeds Monitoring Program and education work that Bethany is already doing, as well as our new Wild Seed Initiative, promoting successful native planting and reseeding efforts.
Bethany has already been an outreach rockstar, leading Native Plant Hikes, organizing educational workshops and field days with partners, teaching landowner and volunteers about vegetation monitoring, and hosting community weed pulls. She’s also helped spread native seed bombs and helped organize the Native Plant Sale Community Event with local partners Montana Freshwater Partners and Montana State University Extension (Coming soon!).
The Noxious Weeds Monitoring Program has been a success. We have met all of our goals and are going to continue to support local monitoring of weed treatments as well as reseeding and revegetation projects, while developing a system and tools for the state to share this platform to other communities. The work isn’t done, we’re continuing to provide capacity for partners and inform land owners of best practices by creating workshops and education events around integrated weed management, which highlights using additional and alternative forms of treatments like biocontrol (bugs), mowing, re-seeding, grazing etc.
Bethany is also excited to expand outreach to other groups that are doing weed pulls or trail building and help provide seeds and knowledge to their restoration efforts.
We’re also excited to welcome John Heidke to our board!
Many of you know John from his time on the Park County Planning Board, where he served as chairman, helping to find common ground during a time when that’s been pretty difficult.
John has also been the generous benefactor of the Barbara Hays Fellowship, which was launched in honor of his late wife in 2022 and helps provide capacity to address our most complex problems, while receiving technical assistance and support from PCEC staff. The fellowship is a one-year interdisciplinary, mentored program focused on community service and leadership development. Joanna Massier is our current Barbara Hays Fellow.
Here’s more about John:
John grew up in a small town in Wisconsin with a rich introduction to conservation guided by the works of fellow Badger, Aldo Leopold, as well as hunting with his father. It was idyllic. After getting his undergraduate and master’s degrees in Wisconsin and his doctorate in policy and leadership at Ohio State University, John taught at the University of Michigan, and then began a career consulting with organizations and their leaders around the world.
After coming to visit a childhood friend in Paradise Valley nearly thirty years ago, John and his late wife, Barbara Hays, realized there may be those who can live without wild things, but they were not of that group. And they thought about settling in Montana, while still traveling across every continent except Antarctica. John, a year-round resident of Park County, has actively contributed his time and talent serving and volunteering, including six years on the Park County Planning Board – three years as chair, and at Livingston HealthCare. His interests on the PCEC Board include finding ways to bring people with differing views together to consider ways of finding solutions that sustain and steward this beautiful Yellowstone ecosystem we live in and love for generations to come.