Roger has over 15 years of experience in strategically planning, building partnerships around, securing funding for, and implementing large scale conservation and environmental education initiatives. He has worked for two of the largest environmental non-profit organizations in the country:  The Nature Conservancy and The National Audubon Society.  Through these organizations he has worked with a broad range of public and private sector partners at local, state, regional, and national levels.

As State Director of The Nature Conservancy of Missouri from 1996 - 2001, Roger led efforts that resulted in significant conservation results.  These included the two largest grassland conservation projects in the state’s history, restoration of landscape scale short-leaf pine habitat in the Ozarks through an innovative public-private sector partnership, and an urban habitat restoration and education effort in Kansas City that focused on bringing cultural diversity together to enhance biological diversity.  For these efforts, the Missouri Chapter was recognized with the Conservancy’s most improved chapter award in 1999.

While serving as a Vice President with The National Audubon Society from 2001 - 2010, Roger led some of the organization’s largest and most successful initiatives.  He was directly involved in the planning, stakeholder engagement, and fundraising efforts that brought two nature centers to Missouri; one in a large market—St. Louis—and the other in a smaller market—Joplin.   Roger subsequently led Audubon’s Mississippi River Initiative, an effort that wove together Audubon’s assets across the region into an integrated program focused on conservation of the Mississippi watershed and its threatened bird species.  He pulled an interdisciplinary staff team together around the program, engaged top stakeholders across the Mississippi River Basin, directly participated in testing the feasibility of a $150 million capital campaign to support it, and personally cultivated and secured investments to advance it totaling over $10 million.

Through this work, Roger has developed specific expertise in strategic planning, fundraising and capital campaign planning, management and organizational development, and facilitation of conservation planning techniques, including the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation and Miradi planning software.  He is interested in helping organizations adopt new technologies to enhance their staff integration internally and for their mission outcomes externally.  He brings a collaborative approach to his work and believes that if the process isn’t fun, something just isn’t right.

Prior to his non-profit conservation career, Roger worked for three years as a Russian political analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, in Washington, DC.  He holds a BA degree in Political Science and an MA degree in History from the University of Missouri.  He currently lives in Columbia, Missouri with his wife, Cherise, and has two children:  his son Brady, a sophomore at Carleton College, and his daughter Abby, a fourth-grader.

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