Mongabay welcomes new board member, Jeanne Sedgwick

Mongabay is pleased to announce its newest board member, Jeanne Sedgwick.

Jeanne brings deep and varied experience in the conservation field, and is currently vice chair of the Resources Legacy Fund, a Sacramento-based conservation organization and environmental philanthropy platform.

“We’re very excited to have Jeanne join the board,” said Mongabay founder and CEO Rhett Butler. “Jeanne brings passion, strategic thinking, and an extensive network of contacts in the conservation world that will help accelerate Mongabay’s growth and impact.”

Jeanne grew up in New York, where her connection to nature was sparked by spending many hours exploring the estuaries that feed Long Island Sound — from a tender age, she was captivated by seeing baby sharks, rays, horseshoe crabs, and all the rich bird life. She later studied at Stanford University and has lived in northern California ever since.

Her interest in working on behalf of the natural world was catalyzed by a trip she took to Borneo with her husband in the early 1980s. The couple spent a week upriver trying to get back to an area where he had found interesting invertebrates on a prior trip, but when they finally arrived, they discovered that loggers for a foreign company had cut nearly every tree in the watershed, silting the river up and devastating wildlife that the Iban people depended on for their livelihood. The idea that a place this rich and remote could be so utterly ruined for short term profit set her on a trajectory to help change this narrative.

As Director of the Conservation Program at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in Los Altos, California, she oversaw the program’s growth from an annual grants budget of $500,000 in 1989 to over $100 million annually. She also has brought her passion to the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity, for which she acted as chair, and also became a trustee for WildAid, a San Francisco-based organization working internationally to reduce demand for wildlife products.

“It’s an honor to be part of such a high-quality, high-integrity news organization like Mongabay,” Jeanne said after officially joining its board.

She is also vice chair of the Stanford Habitat Conservation Board, which oversees implementation of habitat plans that protect endangered species on Stanford University lands, and is a member of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve Coordinating Council for the university.

She lives in Woodside, CA, with her husband, where they’ve been enjoying the recent arrival of 40 great blue herons, who are busily setting up a rookery adjacent to their home.

Banner image of a great blue heron courtesy of Rick McMeechan, US National Park Service