MWA-118

Hannah Spencer

Program Development Manager

Hey y’all, I’m Hannah! I’m the Program Development Manager here at Mountain Watershed.

I was born and raised in West Virginia, where I grew up exploring the woods and making mud pies in my make-believe diner up on a hill in a rural place called Mountain, just down the road from Mole Hill. I guess you could say they made a Mountain out of a Mole Hill.

When I graduated from high school, I knew I wanted to protect the forests. I just needed to figure out how. While I was at West Virginia University, I volunteered and worked with local watershed organizations like Friends of Deckers Creek and Friends of the Cheat. I graduated from West Virginia University with a Bachelors degree in Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Resources. Immediately after finishing college, I became President of an environmental non-profit in Morgantown, West Virginia called Aurora Lights. Together with the founder of Aurora Lights and our close coworkers from past environmental work, we formed the Mountain Stewardship and Outdoor Leadership School in 2014. I taught skills from tracking to gardening. Seeing the excitement and confidence in kids’ faces during outdoor lessons is the best part of being an outdoor education teacher.

Which direction was this rabbit going?

A decade of experience in non-profit work has equipped me with the skills to assist Mountain Watershed staff with building education programs and managing outreach for projects in conservation and advocacy. I love chatting about big ideas and how we can bring those ideas to fruition.

I enjoy spending time in the Indian Creek headwaters within Forbes State Forest. The headwaters flow steadily in the wintertime with rain and snow melt, creating small, gushing streams off the hillsides into a raging Indian Creek. I normally spend time on land, walking along the water.