Rebecca Brown, Executive Director

Rebecca Brown and others founded ACT in 2000 as the North Country’s first locally-based, grassroots land conservancy. She served as ACT’s first board president. Rebecca graduated from Mount Holyoke College and took an M.A. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania. Her early career was in Philadelphia, where she did policy work for political campaigns and elected municipal officials, and was government relations director for an investment bank. She left the corporate world to start a company renovating historic Philadelphia homes, and later evolved that business into a non-profit contracting enterprise training inner city women in the building trades.

After arriving in New Hampshire in 1993, she took a job as a cub reporter for The Courier, the newspaper of record in northern Grafton County. She became very active as a freelance journalist doing environmental reporting, focusing on forestry, land use, and outdoor recreation. She also reported for N.H. Public Radio for some years before becoming editor of The Courier. Rebecca’s book, Women on High: Pioneers of Mountaineering (AMC, 2002) was honored by the National Outdoor Book Awards. Her most recent title is Where the Great River Rises: An Atlas of the Upper Connecticut River Watershed (University Press of New England, 2009) which she edited and was a contributing writer. After leaving the newspaper business Rebecca served as Communications Director for the Connecticut River Joint Commissions. She will soon complete her second term on the the North Country Region Advisory Board of the N.H. Charitable Foundation, and is past chair. She is on the board of the Arts Alliance of Northern New Hampshire, and is a member of the state’s Scenic and Cultural Byways Council. She is a trustee of the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, Vt., and serves on is on the board of Conservation New Hampshire. In her spare time Rebecca can be found on trout streams, running, or birding. She also enjoys photography, hiking, writing, hunting, and reading in philosophy and integral theory. She lives with her husband Harry Reid and their canine Wily-Mo in Sugar Hill.

Jessica Nellson Bunker, Land Protection Specialist

Jess is a “native” who spent her childhood in the 80’s and 90’s in northern New Hampshire.  Her family’s 50 acres in Franconia was a great place for her to watch deer and moose, and a nearby fire pond was an excellent spot for tadpole catching. Her daily routine after coming home from school was to don her “mud clothes” and head for the great outdoors where she and her friends built “forts” and imagined themselves to be various animals.

Jess didn’t watch TV or play video games.  But every night her mother read to her….such books as Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden and The Little House on The Prairie.   Her mother also made “critter boxes” for Jess and her younger sister to observe, and then release, various snakes, toads, butterflies, and the like.

At the University of New Hampshire, Jess majored in English with a minor in Environmental Conservation, and she was a teaching assistant for both Ornithology and Contemporary Conservation Issues courses.  In the years between graduating Summa Cum Laude from UNH in 2001 and entering Antioch New England’s Resource Management and Administration masters program in 2006, she had a variety of experiences including giving green building tours at the AMC’s Highland Center and working at Boston Harbor Islands National Park sleeping on a dock rising and falling with the tides! Jess worked in land protection and stewardship for the Harris Center for Conservation Education in Hancock, N.H. after earning her M.S. Desiring to be back in the North Country, she first volunteered and then joined the ACT staff in January, 2010.