MCCULLOUGH FELLOWS: THEN AND NOW, PART II

UNC Asheville Sustainability Students’ Journeys After Graduation

By UNC Asheville

June 21^st, 2022

It’s been six years since the McCullough Institute at UNC Asheville was established in 2015, and with it the prestigious McCullough Fellowship. Through this competitive program, undergraduates complete an applied research project in collaboration with a faculty advisor and local partner organization. These projects address land use and conservation; urban planning; sustainable agriculture; or resilience and environmental sustainability—or even a combination of these areas.

So what happens next? We’ve caught up with several former McCullough Fellows to see where their lives and careers have taken them after graduating from UNC Asheville, and to learn how the McCullough Fellowship impacted that journey.

Kim Rhodes

Kim Rhodes, a member of the first McCullough Fellows cohort in 2015, found her entire career path changed by her experience, and the skills she learned while working on her project.

“I was looking at lands within Buncombe, Henderson, Haywood, and Madison Counties and the natural and open space that were disappearing and being converted to developed property, and looking at the impact on scenic quality and cultural heritage,” Rhodes said.

In order to map out “hot spots” of areas of scenic and cultural significance—in places ranging from the Biltmore Estate to Max Patch to farmland—Rhodes had to learn to use GIS (geographical information system) mapping.

“I sort of spent the summer Googling things about GIS and teaching myself, and pestering the folks at NEMAC,” Rhodes said. The folks at NEMAC (National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center) at UNC Asheville didn’t seem to mind the pestering, as they hired her as their GIS intern the following semester. And then, once she graduated, they hired her full time.

MCCULLOUGH FELLOWS: THEN AND NOW, PART II

“Until February of this year I’ve been working with NEMAC doing GIS, because of the McCullough project,” Rhodes said.

Rhodes is now a GIS and resilience specialist at FernLeaf, a sister organization to NEMAC, which helps businesses and governments with climate resilience planning and support.

“We're able to perform climate vulnerability and risk assessments using a tool called AccelAdapt,” Rhodes said. “It's also a platform for displaying results and it's interactive. So the client is able to use it to drill down to the parcel level and look at their vulnerability and risk to flooding, for example.”

Clients might also need information about their area’s risk for landslides, wildfires, or storm surges, depending on their location.

Though learning GIS for her McCullough project has had a clear impact on Rhodes’ career path, it’s not the only connection she finds between her current work and her work as a student.

“It’s really this systems-thinking approach,” Rhodes said. “How does this project affect a different area of the city, or how would that affect the population that lives here? Would there be public support?”

“It's the idea of decision making,” Rhodes continued. “Why are people going to decide to live in a place or not, and how that really impacts the community and the greater environment.”

Elsa Haun

Elsa Haun’s 2019 McCullough Fellows project surveyed the status of the Rock Gnome Lichen along the Blue Ridge Parkway, providing important information to the National Park Service to shape their decisions about how best to continue protecting this species. After graduating in 2020, Haun moved to Washington State, where she now works as a production supervisor for the Nisqually Community Garden.

“The Nisqually Tribe near Olympia, Washington, has had some sort of community garden for 30 plus years,” Haun said. “It was created to improve tribal food, sovereignty. The reservation is a food desert. It's hard to get fresh food, so the garden is there to supply fresh vegetables to the tribal members.”

Haun’s work as an environmental studies student at UNC Asheville—particularly her Agriculture and Environment class with Professor Kevin Moorhead—along with her experience working on a farm in Pennsylvania led her to apply for the community garden job. Although she’s not working with lichen these days (though she does note Washington State has very high lichen biodiversity) she still finds the skills she learned while completing her McCullough project useful in her day-to-day work.

“The biggest overlap I see is science communication,” Haun said. “I learned a lot about the specific research project I was doing, but also I had to explain it to so many different people. That’s still definitely part of my job is explaining to diverse audiences what's going on from a scientific perspective.”

Haun sees the importance in science communication in everything from learning how food grows to understanding climate change. While she’s enjoying her work in the Nisqually Community Garden, she recognizes her career may still lead her elsewhere.

“The biggest thing that will probably cause me to change jobs is the conflicting feelings I have around being a white person in that space,” Haun said. “The people who hired me want me there, and have told me that and have been really gracious with teaching me, but I don't think that it should be a forever job for me. I do think that I could see myself making a career in sustainable agriculture, whether that is just growing food or working for nonprofits that do education support for farmers or distribution of food.

“Science looks all sorts of different ways.”

Soni Pitts

2019 McCullough Fellow Soni Pitts partnered with BeLoved Asheville to create a Sustainability Action Plan to support the environmental and human sustainability aspects of BeLoved’s Asheville’s Micro Home Village—a community of “deeply affordable” small-footprint homes with a focus on sustainability, community resilience, healthy environments, and producing equity. It’s the kind of meaningful work that Pitts hoped to continue after graduating in December of 2019.

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, threw a wrench in those plans, and resulted in Pitts being laid off from her job at the time.

“And then, a month after that, I was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer,” Pitts said.

Pitts wryly calls her experience that year “Pandemic-Breast-Cancer-Unemployment-Apocalypse 2020.” Now, with surgery and treatments behind her and more than a year cancer-free, Pitts is still finding ways to engage in meaningful work in the community while she looks for her next career move.

“I just spent a lot of time reflecting on—as you do when you're faced with a mortally existential threat on all fronts, internal and external—what the heck am I doing with my life? What do I want to do with my life?” Pitts said. “If I only have a year, what do I want to do? If I only have three years, five years, 20 years?”

For Pitts, the answer is clear: addressing the current and future impacts of climate change. “It’s the one thing that if you’re going to put energy and effort into something, that’s where to do it,” Pitts said. She’s particularly interested in addressing food security and food waste, a continuation of her work at UNC Asheville, where she helped to establish the University’s Food Equity Initiative.

In the meantime, Pitts has been volunteering with the Oakley Neighborhood Association, and helping them with community-building projects like the Fairview Resilience Garden, Open Streets Oakley, and improving their website.

Soni Pitts and her husband, Thomas Pitts

“My goal is to find meaningful work, whether that’s something I do for a living or as a volunteer,” Pitts said. “I will find some way that I can spend what time I have left doing something meaningful for the community. I want to be out there swinging.”

Dylan Ryals-Hamilton

2017 McCullough Fellow Dylan Ryals-Hamilton focused his project on the successes and challenges of city offices and local residents involved in public urban food projects nationwide—especially as those successes and challenges related to Asheville’s own urban agriculture projects, such as the “Green Mile” and “Adopt a Spot” program.

After graduation, Ryals-Hamilton worked as an earth skills instructor for the Firefly Gathering, and took an extended trip through Europe with his wife before settling near family in Tallahassee. These days, you can find him working with the Northwest Florida Water Management District as their dam and storm water inspector.

“Any new construction over a certain area has to have a storm water pond to attenuate for the rainfall that is going to be displaced by that impervious surface,” Ryals-Hamilton explained. “We make sure that they have their best management practices in place–they have silt fences and they're protecting their storm drains, and there's not just muddy water dumping into a wetland immediately adjacent.”

It’s a role that allows Ryals-Hamilton to see the impact of climate change on the land and in the water–and on people’s homes.

“Bay County, where Panama City is, has received record rainfall levels this year,” Ryals-Hamilton said. “I’m getting calls from concerned citizens. A few weeks ago, I was out looking at a site where these folks had a property right next to a lake, and the lake was at historically high levels. They had 3,000 sandbags and they had built a wall 30 feet from the back of their house, about 100 feet long…. If the wall wasn't there the foundation of their house would be completely underwater.”

It’s a challenging line of work, but Ryals-Hamilton enjoys that challenge.

“One of the interesting things that I really enjoy about the job is every situation is a bit different,” he said. “Every construction site is a little bit different, every issue that gets called in is a little bit different. That is what keeps it interesting.”

Ryals-Hamilton’s coursework at UNC Asheville in environmental management and policy, with a minor in economics, has helped him to see a fuller picture of the issues he encounters at work on a daily basis. “It helped me understand that environmental issues and resource issues aren't just a one-sided thing. There are a lot of drivers and sometimes it comes right down to somebody's livelihood,” Ryals-Hamilton said. “That helped me to navigate some of those discussions and issues with the public in terms of their water use and their practices with a little bit more grace and tact.”

And while his current work doesn’t involve public food policy directly, he still sees connections to his McCullough project experience.

“There’s the community engagement piece, and the concept that many individual issues can seem really important and really one-sided from one person's perspective,” Ryals-Hamilton said. “But when you take into account that there are many different stakeholders in any given situation… every situation is unique and dynamic, and has to be managed with a little finesse… The Fellowship was really valuable to me, and my life.”