In 1982, my dad recognized that he was spending too much time in the city at work—he was a vice president/treasurer at a corporation in Manhattan—so he looked for something that would allow him to spend more time with his family. He literally had a choice between purchasing a flagpole company in Boston or a CPA practice in Vail, and he chose the CPA practice. (My mom was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Denver; my dad is from Gould, Colorado—they met and married as students at CU—and they were very unhappy living on the East Coast).

I was a sophomore in high school at the time. I played field hockey, I was on the state championship soccer team, and I was happy. We had a house in a town on the Long Island Sound  in Connecticut where we lived. But my family moved to Vail, and I enrolled at Battle Mountain, when the high school was in Eagle-Vail, where Homestake Peak School is today. My class had under 70 kids in it, and I was just a fish out of water. However, within six months I was a completely different person. The kids at Battle Mountain were genuine. They embraced me, took me skiing, and taught me that it wasn’t so much about your skill as it was a social sport. The friends I made in high school are still my friends today. Like Mike and Cindy Brown; they were ski racers and their parents [Vi and Byron Brown] ran the Eagle Valley Community Fund Rummage Sale in Minturn. We had some of the best times working at the rummage sale, and it instilled this ethic in me that volunteering is important to building and retaining community, and that it can be really fun. 

After graduating from George Washington University with a degree in journalism and political science, I stayed in DC for a few years doing research for a prominent writer about all things politics—it was one of the most fulfilling jobs I ever had—and then I moved back here and started working for the Vail Daily. I missed that sense of community I had during my three years in high school (harkening to those community values that were built in high school, I started serving on the board of the Vail Breast Cancer Awareness Group). I was only in my twenties, but Vail was the only place I knew where I could let my breath out and breathe. I met my husband, Dave, who was an editor at the newspaper. We got married in 1995, and we left for two years—we wanted to get outside of this bubble and build our relationship—and spent a year in DC and a year in Seattle. Then my mom got breast cancer and we decided to move back here to help her through that. We came back in 1997 and quickly realized that if we wanted to truly build a life here and stay here, one of us needed to find a different career than journalism.

So I dipped my toe in public relations and learned the ropes over many years and several positions, including starting my own consultancy business and serving as vice president of mountain community affairs at Vail Resorts, working on a lot of really contentious, complicated situations—including the Booth Heights workforce housing development in East Vail—where I learned that the legal or business argument isn’t necessarily the winner. If you have the patience to truly understand the human behavior that is driving a particular position on any given topic, you can start to build a resolution. 

After 10 years in-house at Vail Resorts, in 2018 I resurrected Commfluent (the consultancy I founded in 2005), a strategic planning and communications firm that specializes in building consensus among disparate groups that are navigating challenging and complicated or controversial projects. I only work for clients who genuinely are interested in building community for all the right reasons. After Pepi Gramshammer died in 2019, I was at the memorial service and Sheika shook my shoulders and said, “Keep this community going, keep it alive!” And I took that very seriously. 

A year earlier, having termed out as board president at SOS Outreach, I was asked to serve as president of the board of Habitat for Humanity Vail Valley, transitioning from service supporting our community’s youth to building safe, healthy homes for local families. Habitat for Humanity is providing home ownership for our critical workforce—our first responders, our educators, our healthcare providers, and our hospitality workers. It’s an amazing, impactful nonprofit that’s retaining community. So I gravitated just sort of organically to that. At Habitat, we have a tremendous board of community leaders and very smart people on staff who collectively were saying, “We build six to eight homes a year, but we need to do more. We are the only developer of home ownership at the affordability that we build for. We’ve got to do more.”

What’s preventing us from doing more? It’s the seasonality of construction and a lack of land. So we started thinking, who owns land? The county school district, and they have a teacher housing crisis. So we partnered with the Eagle County School District, which gave us some of the land they own in Gypsum on Grace Avenue (where we built six homes in 2019 and six more in 2021), and a challenging parcel in the town of Eagle on Third Street. It’s on a slope side and didn’t have any infrastructure, but some of the best in the construction industry came together and we’re finishing up 16 homes there this summer, with 12 going to school district educators. For the first time, instead of stick build, we’re piloting modular construction; that’s not necessarily cheaper, but it does bring units online faster. 

Nationally, Habitat is starting to think this way, too. Again, it’s threading that needle with patience and commitment to retaining community, and it’s been extraordinary. We just announced that we’ll deliver 10 Habitat homes for the first time ever in the Town of Vail in 2025, in private-public partnership with the Town of Vail, Eagle County Government, and Triumph Development. Every single groundbreaking ceremony we do, when we turn over the keys for the families to walk in their doors, we are building neighborhoods of people who support each other like you’ve never seen. Not only are they getting out of overcrowded, unsafe, horrible living situations, but they’re saying, “Yeah, I’m here. I’m going to stay.” There are positions that we now have in our school district—behavioral health counselors and super-popular math teachers—that we otherwise would lose to another community where home ownership is more attainable. And that’s incredibly important.

When I moved here in 1982, people supported me, they built me up, they taught me all about their scrappy ways of building community, and they were my friends. I feel like it’s a duty to continue what they built. And, yes, I love doing it. And if a little bit of that passion can rub off on the next generation and the next generation, and we can bring home ownership back to young people who can give back in their own ways, I guess I just look at it right now as my responsibility versus my legacy. Because there’s so much more work to be done.