Jeanne McCarty  Executive Director

Growing up in the Piney Woods of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Jeanne spent hours watching the frogs and crawdads in the meandering creek behind her family’s home.   

Terri McGuire  Chief Operations Officer

Terri remembers sitting in the middle of pitch-black nowhere, cupped inside the close walls of a West Texas deer blind. No roads. No houses. Just silence and a million twinkling stars all around.    

Charlotte Sassman  Program Assistant

Ask Charlotte to remember her earliest interaction with nature, and the smiling educator compares the question to asking a first grader when he or she first learned to read. The child’s bewildered response: “But I’ve always known how to read!” Similarly, Charlotte has always been close to nature.   

Scott Feille  Fort Worth Program Director

For Scott, fishing trips with Granddad “J” at Caddo Lake in East Texas weren’t about fishing. “Looking back, catching fish was secondary,” he recalls.   

Kerry Renta  Garden Design Consultant

Kerry grew up in a small, North Central Texas farming town surrounded by corn, cotton and sorghum fields. Hiding in tall rows of corn, he’d try to ambush meadowlarks. “Thank goodness I was unsuccessful,” he remembers.   

Eric Vanderbeck  Resource Coordinator

Deep in the quiet woods behind his home, 10-year-old Eric felt content and protected as he explored nature’s hidden mysteries, poking his finger into every conceivable crevice for investigations of what lived there.   

Jennifer Fitzgerald  Community Relations Director

Carefully, carefully, Jennifer's small fingers worked the scissors, trimming the green beans for her father to sell for the family business to Chicago's restaurants, hotels and hospitals. With both sound...