By Karen Grey, President

In 2011, Wildlands embarked on a commitment to support and mentor the next generation of land trust practitioners with our early adoption of the MassLIFT (Land Initiative for Tomorrow) AmeriCorps program. Our first round of AmeriCorps members did not disappoint; Alex Etkind, Sarah Kugel, and Allison Gillum were bright, enthusiastic, eager-to-learn young conservationists who were a delight around the office. This impressive trio spent two years with us, and their work opened strategic opportunities for Wildlands that are still bearing fruit over a decade later.

Allison Gillum arrived at Wildlands Trust fresh from a UPenn master's program in planning. We immediately sensed her professional abilities and excellent people skills and felt comfortable handing her a challenging assignment. The Town of Plympton, one of the most rural towns in our coverage area, was at the bottom of state rankings for conservation land. Plympton was facing a surge in development, and the Town was unprepared to address it, lacking the most basic tools, including an Open Space Plan. We tasked Allison with assisting the nascent Plympton Open Space Committee in completing the plan and building a toolbox for a land protection program. Thanks to the groundwork laid by Allison and her Plympton partners, the Town went on to protect its first significant pieces of open space, Cato’s Ridge and Churchill Park, and since then, has saved nearly 1,000 additional acres of conservation land.

Allison was a bright light and, to no one’s surprise, went on to do fantastic work as a Land Protection Specialist at the Piscataquog Land Conservancy, as the Executive Director of the Southeast Alaska Land Trust, and as a Land Specialist for the U.S. Forest Service. We learned recently that this amazing woman succumbed to a cardiac arrest while giving birth to her second child. We are so saddened by her loss and are reminded how lucky we are to have had this amazing person as part of the Wildlands staff.