As with all volunteer organizations, there is a continual turnover of people. In this email I would like to update you on our latest changes.

 

Francisco Valenzuela, Board Director

I am very excited to present to you all Francisco Valenzuela who is now in the process of retiring from the US Forest Service as a recreation planner and promoter of research and new frameworks for visitor management. Francisco is a big thinker with so much experience in recreation management mostly in the US but also abroad. He is always in search of new and more effective ways of operating. In fact, he was also the first person to review the book by Steve McCool and myself, The Future Has Other Plans, which he did on his own. He has worked out of Washington DC, Albuquerque, New Mexico and calls Golden, Colorado home, which coincidentally also happens to be the city where our book was published and printed.

 

Dr. Jessica Fefer, Vice President

Until 31 July Laura Calandrella was our Vice President. She came on basically to do an analysis and advise us on how to deepen our strategic planning and identify our value proposition, a process that is now underway. We want to heartily thank Laura for stepping in and making this very important contribution.

In her place Dr. Jessica Fefer steps. Jessica started as a general member, then become our Publications and Conferences Coordinator, then our annual report co-editor, and now is Vice President. Coincidental with her ascension to VP, she graduated her PhD program from Clemson University and was hired as an associate professor at Kansas State University where she has begun working alongside PUP members Dr. Ted Cable (retired), Dr. Ryan Sharp (who reviewed Steve and my book, The Future Has Other Plans), and in the same office where PUP member Marisol Mayorga is working on her doctoral research. I first met Jessica during her Master’s research at the University of Maine where she was conducting a Delphi study on the effectiveness of the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum. She will be teaching park planning and interpretation at K-State, two themes closely aligned with PUP.

 

Dr. Trace Gale, Secretary

For more than a year Marina Rothberg has served as our enthusiastic board secretary AND PUP Notes Editor. But now that she prepares to attend Law school in a couple of months and is vacationing in Europe, so she has stepped down. It took two people to replace her. The first is Dr. Trace Gale, an established researcher and practitioner based in Chile. She directs the tourism research unit at the Center for Patagonia Ecotourism Studies and has specialized as of late in public use planning, which fits the PUP Consortium very well. She has also read Kohl and McCool’s The Future Has Other Plans. Fortunately, she already knows from prior work Steve McCool and Francisco Valenzuela. She will fit right in at PUP.

 

Christine Hanna

Christine will fill Marina’s other shoe as PUP Notes editor. Christine is Egyptian and lives in Cairo where she works for the World Food Programme. A couple of years ago she was the communications officer for UNESCO Viet Nam when Pham Huong, who is the culture officer, was a PUP board member. PUP Director Jon Kohl met her on a trip to Hanoi. Given her wide background in communications and development work and her perfect English, she will make the perfect PUP Notes editor.

 

 

Dr. Jeremy Radachowsky and Dr. Bernal Herrera

Both of these PUP advisors have been with PUP for quite a while. In fact, Bernal was at CATIE University when PUP was founded in 2013 and currently works on a condition-based zoning project with PUP in Costa Rica. Jeremy is a fell holistic thinker currently working with the Wildlife Conservation Society. Unfortunately, due to family and work obligations both will be stepping down as advisors. PUP wants to thank them for the work and support they showed PUP. We hope they stay on in some other fashion.

 

We also reported a few weeks ago about Kirsten Clauer, our new webmaster.