As an alum of Prospera Partners’ Emerging Social Sector Leaders who went on to become an Associate Facilitator for the program, Eileen has experienced first hand how social impact can be made through systems change while learning, dreaming, growing, and being in community. She brings two decades of experience in the social sector, a unique skill set working across multiple sectors, and education background to her consulting and facilitation work. As the Chief Transformation Officer for Prospera Partners, she handles business development and systems change consulting and facilitation for the company.
Eileen first began the journey into systems thinking and interconnectedness when she studied human ecology in the late 1990s, identifying the critical need for water in the Rio Grande for humans along with natural and built systems. From there, she went on to get an MS in Wildlife Science from NMSU, applying that knowledge to several years as a field biologist across New Mexico. During this time, she began seeing that land, wildlife, and water conservation are all dependent on people and made the switch to working with youth and adults through outdoor and environmental learning two decades ago. Since then, she has worked in and adjacent to New Mexico’s education system, having brought over 25,000 New Mexico kids from over 100 schools outdoors through multi-day, standards-aligned programming.
Most recently, Eileen served as executive director where she built one of the largest capacity outdoor learning networks in the country serving over 150 organizations that support 285,000 New Mexican youth annually. During the six years in this role, Eileen tripled the operating budget, increased staff capacity fourfold, advanced state level policy in outdoor learning (and has a 100% success rate bill passage on the first year of introduction of 6 bills at the New Mexico Legislature), and created a variety of new programs including the first fellowship program of its kind supporting interconnected interests like environmental justice, conservation, outdoor recreation, and outdoor learning and education in many forms.
Eileen is an ongoing student of embodied social justice and conflict resolution, and has worked for over 15 years in collaboration with others to change systems for education, the outdoors, and conservation to be more authentically inclusive, equitable, and just for all. She has facilitated conversations on equity since 2016 including about the intersections of identities and experiences, the need for cross racial solidarity, viewing the world through the lens of queerness, and the necessity for social justice in conservation and education in New Mexico and nationally.
In her free time, she can be found tending her goat herd or trying out new practices in shared leadership as Board Chair at TOTAL (Teaching Outdoors to All Learners) NM. She also serves at the request of the Governor on New Mexico’s State Park Advisory Board and is a co-founder of the Queer Environmental Educators Network.
