Abstract

Deb Yandala is the CEO of the Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park. She was instrumental in the development of the Environmental Education Center. Under her leadership, the Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park has funded restoration and land acquisition projects for the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. In this oral history, Deb discusses her career path, colleagues, challenges and success stories.

Loading...

Media is loading
 

Interviewee

Yandala, Deb (interviewee)

Interviewer

Jones Macko, Rebecca (interviewer); Schnack, Erich (participant)

Project

Cuyahoga Valley National Park

Date

8-12-2023

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

120 minutes

Transcript

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:00:00] Now she pushed the button. Today is August 1, 2023. My name is Rebecca Jones Macko with the National Park Service, and we are here today with Deb Yandala. We also have Erich Schnack and Eilish McGee on tech here. And we are here to talk about the inclusive storytelling project. So to get us started, Deb, can you tell us your full name?

Deb Yandala [00:00:27] Yes, Deb Yandala. My legal name is Deborah S. Yandala, but nobody calls me Deborah. Just Deb would be fine.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:00:37] Okay, so can we ask what year were you born?

Deb Yandala [00:00:41] You can. 1955.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:00:45] And where did you grow up?

Deb Yandala [00:00:47] So I grew up on the east side of Cleveland in Euclid, which is a suburb of Cleveland as well. The early days in Willowick and then- But most of my childhood in Euclid.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:00:57] I know Willowick. So tell us about your family growing up. Your like your parents names, any brothers, any sisters?

Deb Yandala [00:01:06] My dad, Ralph Yandala. My mother, Edith Baker Yandala. I have one brother two years older than me named Douglas. Doug Yandala.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:01:18] Was there a D theme going?

Deb Yandala [00:01:20] Doug and Debbie. It was cute in the 1950s, wasn't it?

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:01:25] We had R and R. Yeah. So what sort of work did your parents do?

Deb Yandala [00:01:29] So my dad was a CPA. He did his under. He was in World War II, served in World War II, and then had gone to West Virginia University before he went to war and then after the war, finished up on the GI Bill at Ohio State University, got his degree in accounting. My mother also was an accounting major at Ohio State, got her degree from Ohio State University. And you know, back then, a little rare that women went to college. And my grandmother was a college graduate. She went to Antioch College. So I have a long history of educated women in my family. My dad both had his own business in accounting and also worked for Legal News Publishing Company in Cleveland. My mother assisted in his accounting business. In later years became an accountant for Euclid General Hospital, now part of the Cleveland Clinic.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:02:24] So what's your educational background then?

Deb Yandala [00:02:28] I did my undergraduate degree in American studies and history, double major at Miami University in Ohio. And then much to my parents chagrin, remembering that they met at Ohio State. I have a master's degree in natural resources from the University of Michigan. No comment from the interviewers about my being a Wolverine, a proud Wolverine.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:02:53] I'm from the state, so I don't get that whole thing.

Deb Yandala [00:02:55] But I was born in Boulder, Colorado. Oh, so who cares? They can reach their own. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Somebody cared.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:03:07] So growing up in Euclid we don't think of Euclid or Willowick as green spaces. So what experiences inspired or led you to this love of nature and conservation of nature?

Deb Yandala [00:03:21] Well, I'll tell you two things about that. You might not think of Euclid as green space, but think about geography. It's right on Lake Erie and my house was a two minute walk to Lake Erie. I was very lucky. I lived close to the lake. And when we first moved to Euclid, I hate to say these dates, but I will. We moved in 1962 and I took swimming lessons in Lake Erie. And then the next year, 1963, we were no longer allowed to go in the water. The water was so polluted, there were so many fish kills that we were not permitted to go in the water. And I distinctly remember as a child being very upset by that. We could play on the beach, we could play along the lake and we did. We spent all of our days over at the. We had a little beach club and we spent all of our waking hours down at the lake. And my parents would go every night and watch the sunset over Lake Erie. And that was a thing, but we couldn't go in the water. And that never made sense to me. And it developed within me a pretty strong environmental ethic about, you know, an understanding at a young age about pollution and what polluted water meant. Then the other piece of the story for me is my dad having. He grew up, born in southwestern Pennsylvania, then spent a good chunk of his growing up years in West Virginia. His dad was an immigrant from Czechoslovakia, a glassblower who got jobs, couldn't get a glass blowing job at first and started in steel industry and then ended up blowing glass, making street lights because that was a new thing back then. But that's a whole other fun story. But because my dad grew up in West Virginia, he loved the mountains and he loved the woods. And so when we went on, we did go on family vacations and we went to the West Virginia quite a bit. I remember as a young child my mother being really concerned about us falling over the edge and pulling us back from the edges of the mountains and Great Smokies. We spent time down there and then also up into Canada, starting at age 9. I had an uncle who loved to fish. My dad loved to fish again, the West Virginia boy and him. And so we would go up to Canada where my dad fell in love with the lakes, the woods and the lakes. And When I was 12, my family bought an acre of woods on a lake in Ontario. Which to this day is our family cottage. And so every summer we spent at least two or three weeks up at the cottage in Canada. So I love the out of doors. When I was 13, I asked for a canoe for my birthday. So I do have a family history tied to the work I do now.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:05:55] So did you have early job experiences that set you on this career path? And what were those?

Deb Yandala [00:06:01] Yes. So we were also a church family and I went to church camp as a kid, liked it. And when I the summer after I graduated from high school, I got an offer to work at a church camp in a program they called PedPad. When I applied, I admitted that I knew how to canoe, which I did up at the lake in Canada all the time. So I got hired for this tripping program as the junior counselor for PedPad, where we biked half the week with the kids and canoed half the week with the kids. So PED pad for pedal paddle. And I loved camp. I loved camp. I loved being a camp staff. I love taking kids out. Ended up working there for three more summers. And then when I graduated from college, the camp director offered me a job to- I had been, I did camp counseling and then I was a camp naturalist one year and he offered me a job to come and help this church camp develop a public school based residential environmental education program. So when I was 20, when I graduated from college and I started working in environmental education as director of environmental education for Luther Memorial Camp in central Ohio.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:07:13] Wow.

Deb Yandala [00:07:13] So I started environmental ed and camp administration at a young age.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:07:18] Yeah. So how did you get from there to Cuyahoga Valley National Park?

Deb Yandala [00:07:26] Mostly as a trailing spouse. So I fell in love with environmental education and worked for four years at this camp. And really I loved working in the public sector. My denomination is a pretty liberal denomination. We especially worked with integration and working with urban children, giving them outdoor experiences. And I just loved that. And I went to Michigan for graduate school. It was a two-year program. Did a thesis around teacher education and moral development tied to environmental education after grad school and got married right after grad school. And I was hired as executive director of a another church related camp in southern Ohio, southeast southeastern Michigan, northern Kentucky. And was it camp director. Yeah, it was kind of that corner where southwest Ohio, southeast Indiana, northern Kentucky meet.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:08:26] Okay. I thought you said Michigan in there.

Deb Yandala [00:08:27] And I was like Michigan down to the south. And my husband was working in Dayton at the time and developed this camping program where we did regular summer camp and we would rent camps in those three different states. We also did day camps at churches, and we especially worked with urban churches to do day camps and youth programming. I just loved it. My one little claim to fame in the Lutheran church is I was the first female executive director of a camp. So I got asked to do a lot of leadership things, which was kind of exciting at the time. And then my husband got a position in Akron. And so I kind of drug my feet because I did not want to come back to northeastern Ohio. I loved the area we lived. I loved our lifestyle there. But he was asked to. He's a Lutheran pastor, and he was asked to be an assistant to the bishop in northeast Ohio. It was a calling. He couldn't say no. And so I kind of unwillingly moved back up here. I worked for a year at the volunteer center in Akron. Had had three kids by this point, and the third had just been born.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:09:37] So what year about are we talking?

Deb Yandala [00:09:39] This would have been? We moved in 1988 and then in. So I have to add my years up together. My daughter had just been born. She was about six weeks old. 1992, I got a call from Dr. Jim Bull, who the National Park Service had hired to put together a new Environmental Education Center. And Jim had got his doctorate from the University of Michigan in the same program I got my master's. He didn't know me, but we had the same advisor, Bill Stapp. And Bill Stapp said to Jim, you need to call Deb Yandala, she's in Northeast Ohio. Then the other fun part of the story, because you want to hear the fun parts, is when I worked for the volunteer center for a year, I headed up corporate volunteerism and certifying volunteer programs. And we had a big program we did with the National Park Service to that was a kind of an annual experience to help pull weeds, trim trees, to build a soon to be developed Towpath Trail. So we did that. I worked at a lock, volunteered with some of the folks that day at a- What ended up being, I think, the. The beaver marsh, like near the beaver marsh. And it was a mess. It was just a mess. I mean, this was before you could barely see that there was a towpath there. You could just barely see it. And we worked. Oh, we worked all day and pulled and pulled stuff and cut stuff and used big scissors. And it was a lot of fun and exciting. And, you know, who knew at that point that this was going to be such a tremendous resource. And at the end of the day, we did kind of a cookout for all the volunteers and the corporate executives, the CEOs cooked hot dogs for their employees. It was a really fun day. Well, one of the CEOs was Superintendent John Debo. And I had a Michigan sweatshirt on the day that we did this. And John was a proud Michigan grad and came up to me and then we talked about University of Michigan. So he remembered me. And so when this opportunity came up that maybe I could work here, he remembered who I was and remembered my work. And because I had worked in residential, worked in camping and residential, Jim was really attracted by experience. So I was hired on a part time basis and I had three little kids. So I was hired on a part time basis to be the curriculum developer for the Environmental Education Center. This was October of 1992 when I started. Pam Barnes was here. Harley Beal, who was a seasonal ranger with the Park Service, retired science teacher from Lakewood, was here. And I worked. I was the first person hired on the nonprofit side. Peg Bobel hired me. She was executive director, CVA. She hired me to be the curriculum developer. And they gave me a computer that I could take home with me to write because they didn't really have office space for me and the computer. I wish I- I'm being tape recorded. I wish I was better at the measurements. It was big, it was huge. And I had to lug this big, big, big computer home with me long before laptops to be the writer. And there was no internet. It was just the writing, just the writing part.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:12:54] So I'm going to jump around just a little bit. So who influenced the decision to focus the curriculum on the watershed? How did it get focused there?

Deb Yandala [00:13:05] Yeah, so I'll give Jim credit for that. And I joined in. Our program at Michigan actually had a big influence on both of us. And Bill Stapp was internationally known, had worked across the globe. He'd worked for UNESCO for a time on water quality as a means of understanding environmental issues. And you know, at that time we defined environmental education as needing the knowledge and the skills and the awareness and the values around the environment. And water became really the anchoring point in Bill's work and other graduate students work at the University of Michigan. So I think both Jim and I had that strong ethic around water. And then, you know, being in this location, Jim was the one quickly said, well, watershed, we've got the Cuyahoga River right here. These kids all live in the watershed. And I jumped on that bandwagon right away because again, I had that same training of living in a watershed and understanding the connection between land and Water between what we do on land. Impacting water was something we felt really strongly. We also, as you know, as educators, felt that Cuyahoga River was the main resource that went through this park. [00:14:17] Why wouldn't you lift up the Cuyahoga River? And the Cuyahoga River is what connects Cleveland and Akron. You're working with kids from Cleveland and Akron. So this was 1992, 1993. We were saying that the Cuyahoga River should be the focus of this park, so, the focus of education in this park. 

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:14:35] So you preceded the SAP? 

Deb Yandala [00:14:38] By quite a bit.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:14:39] Yes, the action plan by - Strategic Action Plan - by a number of years. So you've spoke a little bit about some of the key people who developed the residential curriculum. Can you tell us about the creative process to get there? You know, like who were some of the key people? There was- You've already mentioned some influences and Jim Bull, but who were other key NPS people? What were their influences?

Deb Yandala [00:15:04] Well, Diane Chalfont hired Jim and Diane. I give Diane a lot of credit. Diane wanted from day one, said, if we're going to do residential environmental education, this needs to be the best in the world. We need to be world class. We need to spend the right raise and spend the right amount of money to do this. Well, if this is being done by the National Park Service. And I really appreciated her call to excellence in this. You know, the goal to be award winning wasn't much about getting the awards, but it was about making sure Northeast Ohio kids had the best experience possible. So Diane really gave the overarching insight and she's. She's probably the number one person I would give credit to as chief of interpretation. Jim certainly brought in, you know, a lot of good ideas and good thinking. Jim was not an easy person to work with. So it was sometimes a difficult situation. What I appreciated about both of them, first of all, they helped oversee the raising of significant dollars. So we had money to work with. We could bring in experts, we could hire science specialists, art specialists. The first group we hired was a group that did arts education. The name is escaping me at this moment. They're now defunct. They didn't last really very long, but they were very talented, very highly creative, had arts in the name. It'll come to me at some point who helped put arts right in through the middle of it. Then I have to say the internal. Then we brought in experts from the Park Service. So science, resource management people. I remember when Jennie Vasarhelyi started and she was very helpful. I remember when Lisa Petit was in the science and resource area. And she was very helpful. Travis White. I'm really pulling the cobwebs out here. To some of the early rangers. Paul Motts, you know, you, Rebecca Jones, I remember.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:16:56] I wasn't here at '92.

Deb Yandala [00:16:59] But you were later. Some of these folks were later, but still came in and influenced the kind of work that we did, the kind of emphasis that we did. Yeah, not a lot of those people were here. I mean, I think Paul and Travis were. Lisa wasn't until later. Jenny wasn't until a little bit later. But I remember a number of these folks bringing in content expertise to the development and some of the interpretive expertise. I'm proud of this. I will say those of us on the nonprofit side probably were the drivers in this. So the arts folks recommended that we hire an arts specialist. And we hired Janice Matteucci in 1993 to make sure that the arts was thoroughly integrated as a part, not just of the curriculum writing, but of the implementation stage. And then Harley Beal was at a point of retiring completely from the Park Service, and we convinced him to stay and work on the nonprofit side. And we were kind of a triad, the three of us. I was asked to head it up, but it was all the three of us in this together. Harley, from the science background, you'll remember, my undergraduate was history and social studies, American studies. So I had social science, and Janice from the arts. And weaving those three together was just really fun for us. The other thing I will say, in addition to kind of like what I've used the experts, the content people from the Park Service, our experiences as educators. Janice had taught at the Cleveland School of the Arts, and I had, you know, obviously worked in environmental education, plus I had the residential experience. The three of us, you know, covered a lot, but we really relied on local educators. We right away put together a teacher education group to be able to tell us about. Yeah, to be our advisors. And we picked teachers from local school districts. Akron Public Schools, Brecksville, Broadview Heights. I could name a few of those names. I'm really digging here, but Karen Grindle from Akron Public Schools is one. There was a principal in Brecksville, Broadview Heights, a science teacher. There was an outdoor ed specialist in Independence schools that helped us. So we really relied on local educators who everything we wrote would go to them and they would critique it. They would try it out with their students. It was really important from day one that the, you know, that who we're serving be at the table and what we're creating. And I think that was another thing that would lead to, I think a much better product was, easn't us. It was really the community that created this together. We also looked at local experts. We worked a lot with Elaine Marsher on the Cuyahoga River and content and Elaine, who headed up Friends of the Crooked River for many years. We worked with folks in the EPA, Seward District, other nonprofit organizations to make sure that what we were saying and doing really was relevant and accurate. It really, truly was a massive team effort that really worked well for us.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:19:51] Wow. And how did- how do you pull Alex Bevin into this?

Deb Yandala [00:19:56] Oh, yeah, Alex should have mentioned Alex. Absolutely. So that was part of the arts. And folks had known Alex. John Reynolds knew Alex quite well. John Reynolds from the Park Service. And Alex had performed a number of times in the park. Local folk singer, composer, poet. Really a wonderful human being. And interestingly, Alex, he knew camping. [00:20:20] He had been to camp as a kid. He understood the camping. He knew what we were trying to do. And so we hired Alex to create a CD of songs so that music could be integrated into the program. And he composed them, wrote them all. And again, he's such a poet. So, you know, like, he wrote the theme song, All the Rivers Run, which was our theme song and still is used at the Environmental Ed Center almost 30 years later. Yeah, Rebecca knows the motions. We all knew the motions. It was really fun. One of my favorites was he worked with Harley to come up with a song about fungus, bacteria and insects. FBI, the FBI and what they do for decomposing. And he designed a chant for us to use in our opening session, the Cuyahoga Chant. The Cuyahoga Story here, what it says. The big crooked river in the watershed. What I loved about Alex is he would sit and listen to us as educators. He would sit with the teachers and listen to them. We also looked at state standards for fourth, fifth and sixth grade. He would pull concepts out of there alongside of us and then wrote music to bring those concepts to life in the Cuyahoga Valley. A wonderful CD. He did a follow up. He did two CDs for us. When we performed the first CD, we performed it, meaning we, the massive we because we brought in school children from around the area. Old Trail School, Portage Bass School in Akron, I think, Independence school. One other we, where the kids actually sang on the album, the cd, the first CD of music that we were. It was really a magical concert and a magical moment to have that again. Those songs are still played and sung by kids. It's really pretty remarkable that it has that long of a shelf life.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:22:01] This is one that I know. So this curriculum, I'm biased, I think is pretty phenomenal. But what made it so cutting edge? Can you give us some examples of- of what made it so cutting edge? I love this. The fact that you've got this, this tripod of science, history and music or arts.

Deb Yandala [00:22:25] So I think what made it cutting edge is we, you know, education can be trendy and maybe we hit some of the trends of the day, but I also think we hit some of the deeper needs that are still existent in education. So it was interdisciplinary. You're right, Rebecca. I think the fact we had, you know, we were day one out the door interdisciplinary. We didn't want this just to be science, and there are great science schools and science programs. And we just felt with the number of urban kids we serve, urban school districts, knowing the different way the kids learn, that being interdisciplinary was much richer in telling relating to the national park. Frankly, this park is not just science, it's also history and culture. So we felt strongly about that. We also, we put a global initiative over it. And, you know, I'll say maybe Jim's in my training in global watersheds might have been a part of that, but that was also becoming important in the 1990s that we understand we're rooted here in the Cuyahoga Valley. Water is around the world and water systems are connected. So we put a nice global. One of the evening programs was Global Rivers. We named the rooms in the dormitory after rivers of the world to help so that everything was educational. I think that helped. It was very hands on. That comes from, I think, all of our background environmental education, where we know kids learn by doing, at least a lot of kids, it's not always what they hear or see or read. It's actually being engaged in learning. I think that made it cutting edge and made it long lasting. You know, I think Cuyahoga Valley National Park has a lot to work with. We took kids down to the river to do water quality. The 500 acres that the center is on has, you know, woods and meadows, a hemlock ravine. We had a lot to work with to build in, to what kids learned. We were recognized quite a bit early on for our innovation. I think teachers being highly engaged in creation was another reason it was kind of ahead of its time.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:24:35] And then at some point you brought in technology to that. Tell us about the integration of technology.

Deb Yandala [00:24:41] Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, again, leaning into the future is something I think you always have to do in life, you know, if you're an administrator especially, or running a program. And we were lucky that by the point the technology was coming into things, that we had a reputation. People like to affiliate with us again, I'll give Jim some credit for this. Early on, we used computers. They just were not easy to use. But we used computers because he kept saying, this is the future. And we wanted kids to be outside, but we wanted to use real science and real data. And we loved the idea that computers would allow us to do that. The bigger push to technology came a few years later when we had established this reputation. And a group in Akron that still exists is a wonderful organization called Summit Education Initiative, had some major money that they received to help implement technology in education circles. And they came to us and said, you know, we'd love to do a pilot with you in the nonprofit sector or non profit, non formal sector on schools or formal education. Were non formal in the non formal sector to show when kids come out to the park, if they're collecting data, using technology for analysis and recording, does that enhance their learning back in the classroom? So we had a major grant. Jim had seen that we had computers when we first opened, owned by the Park Service. We were able to then put a layer onto this at the time, sophisticated software to use. It also allowed us to do distance learning, which was a thing back then. You know, kind of what Zoom is now really comes out of that distance learning, you know, thinking where kids could connect. You know, if they came to the Environmental Ed Center one week, they could connect with the kids who were there the following week when they were back in the classroom. Or we could connect with schools who maybe couldn't make it to the center. We could also connect with schools around the country that were also doing water quality testing and compare the Cuyahoga River to other watersheds. So we were able to be pretty creative about it. I'm a big believer that you always look for those next big things. That money will come if you do that. We did the same with our Artists in Residency program. You know, you're just constantly looking for money in the next big thing to help make your program better and more relevant, because Northeast Ohio kids deserve that. So.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:27:05] And I remember when the artist in residence and we were one of the forerunners.

Deb Yandala [00:27:08] We were. We were, yeah. And I thank Congressman Regula for helping get us money, federal money for that program. And we had several years of a really top notch artist in residency program here.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:27:21] And then at some point you brought in problem based learning.

Deb Yandala [00:27:24] You know, actually that was pretty close to the beginning as we designed it. Again, Jim and I had had some training in that. And then the whole PBL, as it was affectionately called Problem Based Learning, PBL and units of PBL. Some of our teachers in the classroom are using those and feeling like problems. I don't, I personally don't like problems because it sounds negative, but real, real actual problem, you know, solving issues and learning about issues. Teachers were doing that in the classroom and they really recommended that we, especially when we started developing a middle school curriculum on top of the elementary curriculum, they suggested that that be the focus of that. That we look, we give kids real life environmental issues and develop the curriculum around how to work with those issues and using the park as a setting for doing that. 

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:28:21] Wow. So you came from a background where you were working with. I've heard themes of, you know, you want to get in inner city schools, you want to get into urban schools. So how is equity and inclusion considered as EEC is in its stages of development?

Deb Yandala [00:28:37] Yeah, thanks for raising that, Rebecca, because that's an important question. You know, I look back today and I wish we'd done more with it, given today's society. But at the time, we were probably a little ahead of the rest of the culture on this. We were working with city kids, we were working with diversity in the student population, we were working with diversity of teachers and with teachers working with the diversity of kids. So all of that made some of this work really, really critical from day one. And we again used local teachers and educators to help us make sure that we were bringing in a variety of cultures, that we were being culturally sensitive, that we weren't viewed as, you know, I'll be critical of our field. Environmental education tends to be an upper middle class, a little bit of who can afford to go, you know, who can afford this? You know, the environmental movement in general tends to be white, upper middle, upper class, suburban. And we really, from day one tried to change that. I will say the Park Service was very committed. Diane was. Jim was in know. I brought this background of having worked with, in diverse audiences, having lived in urban neighborhoods where, frankly, I was one of the few white people in the neighborhood. I was very comfortable in diverse settings. And also I think we had an understanding that and a commitment that, you know, all children are equal and all children deserve a good education. And you can't teach just one way for every child. So I think from day one, those of us that were engaged, you know, Janice came from teaching at Cleveland School of the Arts. So she had the urban classroom experience. Harley had taught for years in Lakewood, which wasn't as diverse, but had some diversity. So I think all of us that were hired early on had a background experience and commitment to this. We really worked to try to integrate our staff. It wasn't always easy. I look back, it's probably the place we failed the most. I would have liked to say from day one we have a more diverse staff, but that was not easy. And, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have worked harder at it. So I do wish we did.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:30:45] I remember a greater diversity and your staff, I remember some diversity and some [00:30:54] of those faces were still in contact with you. 

DB Well, let me say this because this is going to tie back to the non profit side of things where we weren't as diverse in staff, we always were with our board. We always made sure that our board, our advisory committee, when it was before it was a board, always had black educators, local black leaders, Latino leaders. We always had, I think, a pretty healthy percentage because we knew that voices needed to be heard as part of our movement forward.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:31:22] I'm glad you said board because. So how, how is it that the Park Friends Group came to co manage EEC? What's the story there and how does that relationship change?

Deb Yandala [00:31:40] Yeah, it's quite a story that. I'm glad you're recording it and I hope you're getting multiple voices in it. But it, you know, I did live through all of this. When I was hired in 1992, what I was told was you're going to work for Cuyahoga Valley Association, but ultimately you're going to work for the University of Akron. They were to be the original, the partners through the biology department. They were going to run this program. That was the original intent. And yeah, the Park Service had an agreement with the University of Akron that would give our interns would be interns of the University of Akron getting 10 hours of credit. And I was told that at once the center actually opened and the University of Akron was running it, that then I would become an adjunct faculty of the University of Akron. That's what I was told. And the thought had been, and this was the work that John Debo, his superintendent, had done with the university. There was a university president at the time who was very supportive of this. The biology faculty, very excited about this, is that the food service would be run by the University of Akron out of their food service, if you like, a cafeteria out of University of Akron the teaching staff would be interns of the University of Akron. There would be university faculty that would be involved in the oversight and instruction, overseeing the instructors. And that's where the thought was that I would become adjunct there and work alongside of the biology faculty. This was in 1992, when I was hired. In 1993, Ohio had one of its, you know, multiple years of bad budgets and budget cuts. And there were cuts made to universities. And University of Akron, like the other universities in Ohio, made cuts. And this was one of the cuts is we are not taking a chance on co managing a residential Environmental Ed Center. And I wasn't in a leadership role at that time. I was just the curriculum director. But what I remember is kind of a big panic of now what do we do? And John asked the Cuyahoga Valley Association, who had already hired me, hired them by that point, Janice, on contract, we were contractors. You know, would Cuyahoga Valley Association step up and be the partner? John knew that the Park Service couldn't do this on its own. It couldn't do food service, couldn't do interns. It couldn't, you know, all the 24/7 work of a residential center would be hard with Park Service hiring policies. So he knew he needed a partner. And there was a lot of consternation by the Cuyahoga Valley Association about whether they wanted this Environment Ed Center or not. They had raised a significant amount of money for the curriculum development program, development from area foundations. But the thought of taking on an Environmental Ed Center, they knew nothing about that, what to do. So it was interesting. This is my memory of it is there were some board members who were very excited about this opportunity, felt it was, you know, would be great for the association. And there were others dead set against it. So there was a lot of angst. And I frankly think, you know, at the time I thought this, and I even think it more looking back, those that really wanted to run it philosophically, really agreed with it and had no idea what they were getting themselves into. No idea at all, you know, hadn't really thought about, wow, it means we need to hire food service staff and custodial staff. And, you know, they had one executive director who worked 80%. That's all they had was Peg Bobel. And, you know, and she was great, but she had no background in this. They were really happy that I had a background in running a camp, you know, and Jim had had some background in environment in residential. So the Park Service had some skill set. I had more. And we, you know, together we were able to kind of cobble things together to get it where it needed to be. But the board finally voted to take it on. And again, it was not 100% and it was, it was controversial, but they did. And then, you know, I switched over to becoming a staff member. Janice became a staff member and they began hiring then food service and custodian and teaching staff and administrative staff. I was not the first director. Dave Irvine was, was the first director hired by the Environmental Ed Center, by CBA to run the center. You know, we made it work and you know, no looking back, but it was a difficult decision for this park to kind of know how to, how to move this forward.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:36:07] And how did that relationship change as we went through?

Deb Yandala [00:36:11] Yeah, so there was. Those early days were really difficult. And the product, the product, the Environmental Ed Center was glowing and never suffered for it. I give a lot of credit to the great staff that were hired at the time to run it, who did not let the behind the scenes conflict impact what happened with kids. Teachers loved us. Kids were having great experiences. Parents were feeling good about it. They never saw the behind the scenes. Behind the scenes. Jimbo was really, really hard to work with. He was a bit of a top down, you do it my way or the highway kind of person and did not have people skills, didn't work. Now how to work with people. Dave Irvine, who was hired by CVA, lasted about a year, year and a half maybe, and then left and was offered the job at Crown Point to be a good executive director. Left. Dave was great. I had known Dave for years. I actually had suggested he apply. Dave was wonderful and it was really tough work environment for him. So he left. And then a second person was hired, Jerry Unger, to lead the center. She left after a year more that there were just some things that administratively this wasn't her passion and didn't work well with the board or with Peg. When Dave had left, I was asked to be the interim director, which I did for a short time and then they hired Jerry. When Jerry left, they asked me to be the interim and I did that again. At that point, my kids, I still had these three young kids and a busy husband and I didn't want to work full time and I said that and that kind of took me out. I don't think I, I was being considered at that point anyhow. Again, the front facing all worked really, really well. The back facing was just really challenging. They started a search and then I remember this distinctly. The chair of the board, George Klein, came to me and said, well, would you consider this on a regular basis? We're really nervous about going out after two directors in like three years time, going back out. And I said, well, you know, I just have these demands of three young kids. If I could do it like 80% so I could have a little bit of flexibility in my schedule. And he said, no, this is a demanding job, full time or nothing. I said, fine. And two weeks later he came back to me and said, well, we've been talking and maybe 80% of you is better than 100% of somebody else we'd risk on. So the negotiation I made was, I want to. Then you could get me for 80%, but I want to bring Janice Matteucci with me as associate director full time. In between the two of us, we'll run the center and make it work and make it sing. That was my promise, if it could be both of us. And there was a little bit of hemming and hawing about me demanding one more position, but they said yes. And Janice, I made it work and we, I think, made it sing in our skill set together. What I saw in Janice was not only was she a good educator in terms of arts education, but Janice's degree was in theater. And she was a behind the scenes theater person, basically a director of a theater, the backstage stuff. And as a stage manager, she knew how to administrate. She had to direct. She also directed her partner, now her wife's skilled living business. So she had business skills that I didn't have. I was an educator, I was a program person. I know knew how to run a camp, but I didn't know how to do all the finance stuff and the HR stuff. I didn't like any of that stuff, you know. And she did. She was great at that. She had experience in that. So together, I think our skill set worked really well.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:39:47] And what year was this?

Deb Yandala [00:39:48] And that would have been 1996. 1996, yes. '96, '97, kind of in that range. It was summer '96, when we had the fall of '96 when we started working together. And that worked. We worked well together. We hired, you know, we had some great people already at the center that Jerry and David hired. Harley stayed on. It was really a great. We just had a lot of energy together, working together. We worked well with the Park Service. By that time, Jim Bull had left the Park Service, pulled him out, which was not easy to do, but, you know, said that had to change. And Ari Rosser came in in his place. She had worked under him. And we worked well, with Ari it was really- we had a good thing going there. So then the rest of the governance story is that we really grew the center by leaps and bounds. It was at the time when we started, it was about a $300,000 operation. By the year 2000 we were a million dollar operation. We were getting lots of grants and we became the tail wagging the dog for the Cuyahoga Valley Association. And you know, to this day I think Peg is a lovely person who did a brilliant job with the Friends Group. I would never say anything disparaging about her leadership. It was outstanding. We just became bigger. We just became bigger and we had to, we were required by policy. We made a policy decision early on that 25% of the schools we serve would come on scholarships. So we had a big fundraising need and I had raised money in my camp director job. I knew how to raise money. It wasn't a new skill for me. We hired a development person part time, first part time and then full time development person. So we were raising a lot of money. And you know, again, I would never ever want this to be taken as negative about- against Peg. She was really wonderful at what she did. But we just became bigger and we had, you know, we had a lot of personnel stuff going on because we had, you know, staff at 25 and we had changes in staff and we were working with a lot of young adult staff and all kinds of drama.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:41:55] Drama.

Deb Yandala [00:41:56] Yes. You know, it just was not a problem. But it took just caused us to be bigger than the rest of the work of the association. And from a governance standpoint it was awkward because the board really was there for the Friends Group. And I was given five minutes in every meeting to give a five minute report about the environment, about the million-dollar Environmental Ed Center and the $250,000 Friends Group, you know, got, you know, an hour and 55 minutes. You know, it just never made sense. And sometimes was awkward with fundraising because Peg really was, you know, she was the executive director. I should have run everything through her. And I tried, but we were so moving so fast. You know, again I look back, could I have done that better? I don't know. But we finally brought in an outside non profit person to look at what was the best governance structure. And the consultant the association brought in the consultant. Not, when I say we, it was really the association, not the rest of us, the Environmental Ed Center. And this consultant said either you've got to merge this better and Peg has to be more engaged in the Environmental Ed Center. Making more of the decisions at the Environmental Ed Center or you should split. And it was a lot of soul searching, I think, for Peg, for me, for the board. And we made decide to split. So we became Cuyahoga Valley Environmental Education Center Incorporated and you know, continued to do really well, continued to grow, continue to raise a whole lot of money. It got harder for the, for the association because they had become dependent on the Environmental Ed Center. We had provided their, you know, all their finances were run out of our office, all the secretarial office, not all of it, but most of it. We had fundraising staff. They, you know, when they separated, they didn't have much. And I don't think anybody realized how dependent they'd become on the Environmental Ed Center, which was never the intent of the Friends Group. And meanwhile, the Friends Group movement in the National Park Service was really picking up. Yep. And because becoming much more sophisticated. And so here's a fun and very vivid memory for me. In the year 2001, John Debo, as superintendent, asked four of us to go to a training workshop on partnerships being held at Golden Gate National Recreation Area. And asked Tom Bradley, who was the deputy superintendent, asked Katie Hoy, who was chair of the board of the Cuyahoga Valley Association and Janice and me to go. And Janice and I were like, why are they sending us? But let's go. It's a trip to San Francisco, you know. Well, that week changed my life. I couldn't believe the way this friends group was working with this park. Hand in glove, seamless work together, the things that they were getting done for their national park. And I kind of came back here and thought, why aren't we raising a lot more money for our park? Why aren't we getting, you know, they had retail, they had co volunteer management, they had co arts programming. It was amazing what they were able to do. Now they had a huge fee income because they ran Alcatraz or still run Alcatraz and get a big fee. But I was blown away by how thinking at the edges, kind of the edges of Park Service policy and potential could create a much bigger entity. Well, so John, who never missed a beat, you know, he had intention about sending the four of us. And Peg was at that point, I think had decided she was going to leave Cuyahoga Valley Association. So they brought in another consultant. It was somebody from the National park foundation who basically said, you should have a friends group like Golden Gate. You should merge these two, you know, bring them back together under one banner and have this be your friends group. And the education program as just one arm of your friends group. And I thought it was a brilliant idea, even though I knew I'd probably be losing my job. I was executive director of the Environment Ed Center and I- I was sad about that. But I- I couldn't help but think this was good for the for the park to have a really what John called a high functioning friends group. He wanted a really and he- he used those words constantly.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:46:00] That's a Johnism.

Deb Yandala [00:46:02] That's a John is a high functioning friends group. 

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:46:08] Wow. So let me go backwards a little bit first.

Deb Yandala [00:46:11] Sure.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:46:12] You talked about the internship and this is what I remember about the Environmental Education Center is that there was a major focus on developing the- They were originally called interns, but developing the staff. So can you speak to that? Why was- How is that important?

Deb Yandala [00:46:33] Yeah. Well, thanks. Because that's one of my favorite stories about the Environmental Ed Center. I love that it started out every six months and then we switched to every school year nine months. It was three to four months to nine months switch. It was modeled after Glen Helen Outdoor Education center, which used interns. And with the intent being that not only are you serving the kids, but you're creating a whole new training program for environmental educators. You're really training young adults to be environmental educators. And hopefully whatever they do in their career, the fact that, you know, right out of college they learn environmental will impact them the rest of their lives. So we always felt we had two audiences. The children we served and then our interns. So this was designed originally as a class through the University of Akron. They got 10 credits kind of a methods in environmental education and a practicum in environmental education. So the program again designed after class Glenn Helen, was that one day a week you spend the interns in class. That was our Mondays. You might remember that when your came and then Tuesday to Friday they'd be teaching with kids. So we copied that model from Glen Helen and put that into practice. And we did that for a number of years. Really up until maybe about five years ago, that's how we did it was interns. And a lot of those young people have gone on to brilliant careers. We love, we love, we love. Look back and you know, school principal Sam Chestnut, you know, ended up coming back and working for us, then being principal of Lippman School. Candy Bates, who is a successful high school teacher at Hoban. A number of park rangers started as interns, just being with Vicki Mates, who ended her park service career as chief of interpretation at Tetons. 

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:48:17] She retired?

Deb Yandala [00:48:18] She's now- Yes. She doesn't quite use the word retirement. Well, she retired from the Park Service, but she has her own consulting business now, which is really wonderful and is serving as a consultant as executive director of the Friends alliance, the National Park Friends Alliance. But Vicki had just a fabulous Park Service career at Theodore Roosevelt and Yosemite and then chief of interpret Tetons. She interned with us. Janice interviewed her at Allegheny College. Emily Garrison started as an intern for us. A wonderful park ranger.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:48:53] We think so.

Deb Yandala [00:48:54] Yes. I think you should think so. We've had a number of folks go into park service around the country that started as interns and again, you know, school teachers, principals, other college professors. I think fondly of a number of folks in non profit leadership that was really a great place for young people to start their career.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:49:17] Yep. Some of these questions you've already addressed. So I'm like. So let me skip ahead a little. So what are some of your favorite stories or memories from your time at EEC?

Deb Yandala [00:49:42] Well, the kitchen was both the blessing and curse of my existence at the Enviromental Education Center. 

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:49:48] Was it the fridge? 

Deb Yandala [00:49:49] Yeah, equipment was often breaking down. We had a requirement that all the teaching interns spend a week back in the kitchen. It gave them a little break from the kids and a break from teaching. But some interns were better than others at preparing food and running the dishwasher. So I have some funny memories of trays of food falling and dishes being broken because if you take them out of the dishwasher too soon, they're too hot. And you know, so those are some fun ones. I love the night hikes at the Environmental Ed Center. I just, I love watching kids the magical experience. But one group got lost one time or the stories of the kids. One of my favorites in a positive vein is a teacher from a school in Cleveland who loved nature and loved the out of doors and took her seventh grade students. She'd wake them up at 11 o'clock at night and make them go outside and lay under the stars. And how many times the kids would say, I've never seen stars before and I know I live in Cleveland, you don't see them. You just. They don't. It's not dark enough. And one of the children in particular was so mesmerized by the sky, it really changed his life. He ended up going to college in Texas and getting a degree in astronomy based on that experience at the Environmental Ed Center. You know, I remember some kids walking into dorms and they'd be so amazed to get their own beautiful bed that was really a thing for some of the urban kids. And it was, you know, pretty moving to have kids. And three meals a day was important for some of the kids. One of the teachers from Akron who reminded us that her kids, most of her kids live in apartments and don't. And running on grass was a big deal to them. They didn't run on grass in the city. So giving kids those kinds of experiences really start with me as teachers talked about them. And frankly, it's not just urban kids. Suburban kids, you know, these days especially, who are plugged in, whose lives change by being in nature and who, you know, find either a later vocation or an avocation that they didn't know. They had teachers who were reluctant about hiking in the woods and ended up falling in love with environmental education and doing school plots talking to us about how they used school gardens and school grounds to teach. After having this experience, a number of teachers, I really loved the classroom teachers we worked with. I have great memories of, you know, late night conversations with them outside of the dorm at Lipscomb. I love the Environmental Ed Center at night. It's kind of magical to be there and watch kids experience at night.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:52:41] Hair raising memories. Other than losing a school group.

Deb Yandala [00:52:43] Yeah, we never lost an entire school group. I'll tell you my most terrorizing memory was it was over a weekend and we had two groups on campus and one was Independence Middle School and a young person from the other group, and I don't remember where they were from, but had a BB gun with him illegally and shot a kid at Independence in the rear end. In the rear end, but with a BB gun. And I'm at home with my kids and I get this call, you know, come right away. We just called law enforcement come. And luckily everybody was good spirited about it that the child that was hit with the BB gun was fine, was not injured. But, you know, I look back at that now and I think, wow, that was, you know, pre preschool shooting. It's probably mid-'90s, probably before Columbine even, but. And this other kid was just joking around, just joking around. So that was probably my hair raising, my most hair raising. One trail group getting lost and one night hike getting lost. Those were also a little hair raising or, you know, we had a kid fall out of the bunk one night. We didn't have much like we have not called 911 very often over there even to this day. But those are the things, and that's the old camp director in me that you recognize when you have somebody else's children and you're responsible for them 24/7, keeping them safe. And I always said that to the staff. I don't care about the education. At the end of the day, safety is number one. Safety is number one. Kids being loved and cared for and safe in this environment is number one. The rest will fall together, but that's number one. So.

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:54:25] So there's been changes at the Environmental Education Center. And one of the great additions to the Environmental Education Center was the November Lodge. So can you tell us how the November Lodge came to be? Tell us about Morton Iris.

Deb Yandala [00:54:40] Yeah, well, let me back up just a smidgen from that. At the merger in 2000. No, I'm sorry, I'm going to go back earlier. I should have to go back November Lodge. Before that, when I was asked to be director of the Environmental Ed Center, I knew this was tied to a change in my life. When I was asked to be director of the Environmental Ed Center. I'd been in this role maybe a month. And one of our teachers, Susan Scott, Cleveland public school teacher, called me one day and said, you know, I've got this guy who gives us money to take our kids every year to Greenfield Village in Detroit and I'd like to see if he'd use that money to send us the Environment Ed Center because Greenfield is fine, but it's not that big of a life changing experience. And I think coming to the center is the life changing experience. So she brought him out to the center, had him come out and to see our program. So she couldn't stay. She introduced us and then she had to leave. And so Martin November and I were walking the campus and we were walking, I took him over to White Pines, you know, started in the office, took him over to White Pines, and then we were walking the campus path back over to Lipscomb. And we were getting close to Lipscomb. I remember this as clear as, you know, as clear as glass. It was a beautiful sunny September day and we were not far from where the November Lodge is right now on the, on the trail. And he turned me, said, you know what I've always wanted to do is build a building. And not a week before that, I had said to John Debo, this campus is one building short. There is no place where all the kids can gather together. We were, in order to do teaching after every meal, every meal we had to take the tables down and the chairs down so that there would be room to do classroom-type things. So we were constantly as staff taking chairs and tables up and down, setting them up, taking them, setting them up. And I had said to John Debo, this center needed to have a program building. And I don't know any camp that doesn't have a lodge or a program kind of building that was just normal. But nobody thought about that. When I started the Environment Ed Center, the physical plans were already done. I didn't have any influence on the physical plans, but I always thought that was odd that there's no classroom space. And the response was, well, we want the kids outside. Well, my response is, this is northeastern Ohio. You can't always have kids outside to 24/7. So anyhow, Mort. Mort, on this beautiful September day, says to me, what I've always wanted to do is build a building. And I said to him, well, I want a building. And I talked about that to the park superintendent last week who told me I could only have a building if I raised the money for it. And again, I'd been in this job all of a month, you know, And Mort turned to me and said, well, I've got the means. I can help you build a building. So, I mean, I about fell over, now I didn't know the dollar amount at that point, but I couldn't believe it. And I do want to tell you the Mort story because it's a really moving story and should be recorded for history. Mort November was a- Grew up pretty impoverished on the east side of Cleveland, and his dad ran a flower shop in Cleveland on the near east side and grew the flower shop and grew his business. And then more significantly, Mort, he became a financial advisor and was highly successful financial advisor, had just raised, earned a lot of money in his day, so had had significant wealth by the time I met him, he had significant wealth. But he had tragically lost his daughter, I think she was 21 or 22 years old, to suicide. And he found her. It was very, you know, kind of the worst, parents' worst night nightmare is to find your own child dead. And that was just traumatizing to him. And he really searched for ways to bring meaning to that loss. And if you want to add to that, which you don't, but I will, is his wife really struggled with their daughter's death. Founded an organization called Survivors of Suicide for parents of children who had committed suicide. Was leading that, was really just, was well respected, both of them, well respected in the community. And Mort came home one day and she'd taken her life. So he lost both wife and daughter to suicide. 

Rebecca Jones Macko [00:58:59] I didn't realize.

Deb Yandala [00:59:00] Yeah, it was really an awful, awful thing. And it took him a long time to even put one foot in front of the other. It was really devastating. And, you know, dealing with that severe grief, he felt a need to do something, especially his daughter Debbie's memory, so that her name and her legacy could live on. That was really, really important to him. So when he said to me what I wanted to do is build, build a building, he said, I want something physical that will show the kind of person she was. And she ran a little camp for neighborhood kids in her backyard, an arts camp. And she loved kids, loved camping. And he, and he told me that day, he said, this just might be what I would like to do. And he loved national parks. He had remarried by this point, and his wife Iris. Wonderful. And Iris's big hobby is she loved the Statue of Liberty. Her family were immigrants and came through Ellis Island and often talked about the site of the Statue of Liberty. So she had such a fondness. She was president of the Statue of Liberty Club, the National Club. There is such a thing. She collected statues. She wears them around her neck. She had millions all throughout her home. She had a huge collection of statues of liberty. So the fact that we were in a national park and the Statue of Liberty is run by the National Park Service, you start to see all these dots, right, that are connecting. So I went to the superintendent, John Debo, and said to him, John, I think I might have it. You know, that building we just, just talked about, I think I might have a donor. I'll never forget it. John Debo said, now Deb. That was his words. Now Deb, you work with the National Park Service. These kinds of people come at you all the time, always thinking they're gonna, you know, do something good. Then you find out their donation is pretty small or they don't really have money or, you know, so don't get all excited about this, don't. I said, John, will you just please meet with this gentleman? Please meet with this gentleman. Now. You know, you could hear him. Rebecca can hear him. Well, John met with Mort. And John called me afterwards and said, all right, he's for real. And Mort loved that story. And Mort ended up making a $300,000 gift. We hired an architect and we had a place picked out. It used to be tennis courts. So the land had already been disturbed. It was easy to put a building there. It ended up being about a million dollar building. We went back to foundations who had originally funded the center and asked if they would contribute. We first thought it was going to be about a six to seven hundred thousand dollar building. Then a lot of the things that people wanted, the building, the cost went up. We went back to Morton. He gave us a second gift for it. And the one thing he wanted was a building named after his daughter. Well, Park Service does not do naming, as we know. That's Park Service policy and directors order 21. But we included a little thing and a little bill that Congressman Regula did that allowed us to name that building November Lodge. And, you know, we really, all of us, believed it. Had Mort had a weird name, you know, that was clearly a name that wouldn't have been common. We might not have gotten away with it. There was also a president's precedent set, the Environmental Ed Center, that part of the agreement with the Gund foundation for early funding was to name the campus after James Lipscomb, who was a president of the foundation, who had really supported. So it was already the Lipscomb campus. So November Lodge at the Lipscomb campus, most people don't know it was named after somebody, but we did put a portrait of Debbie that-

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:02:35] In the foyer.

Deb Yandala [01:02:36] Yeah. In the building. And so we were able to fund it and opened it up in 1999. Mort was there for the dedication, cut the ribbons. And Mort sadly passed away a few years ago. He was 90 years old. And Mort went on to do philanthropy all around Northeast Ohio. We were his first project. He always told me that we were his first and we were the best, that he loved the way that we cared for him. Our development director at the time, Debbie Day, made him this wonderful scrapbook of pictures of the November Lodge. And we, you know, we had a big party at the groundbreaking, and we had another big party at the ribbon cutting. And he just felt like we really cared for him as a donor. And indeed, I became very close to him and Iris. They're just dear, dear people. And Iris is still alive, and she still underwrites a school every year. And she and I have lunch together periodically. They're really delightful. But it's a nice- It's a really wonderful story. And I think did carry on Debbie's legacy.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:03:39] Wow. That's a hard story to tell.

Deb Yandala [01:03:42] It's even for this, not just for the Environmental Ed Center. I think for this park is the story of the connection of people to this park. And, you know, we've raised millions of dollars since. Millions.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:03:51] We got more on those questions.

Deb Yandala [01:03:52] Yeah, we'll get to those. But I look at that as the first really large, large gift for this park from one individual. We had foundation gifts, but not individual gifts. And I think that changed in some ways. This, this whole park, about our connection with human beings and their willingness to financially support things in the park. [01:04:13] 

Erich Schnack [01:04:13] Can I interject for a little bit? 

Deb Yandala [01:04:14] Yeah, please. Yeah. 

Erich Schnack [01:04:15] Deb, are you okay on time? It's a little bit past 3:30. I know the meeting was scheduled until- 

Deb Yandala [01:04:20] You're my last thing of the day, so I'm fine. 

Erich Schnack [01:04:22] Perfect. All right. 

Deb Yandala [01:04:24] Keep at it if you want. Yeah. Go by your time. Thanks.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:04:27] So what are you most proud of as a staff founding member?

Deb Yandala [01:04:33] Well, I love kids and I'm most proud of the kids we've served. I'm most proud that we've had kids come here and had, you know, life changing experiences and even for those who for whom it's just a fun week, you know, even that to me is worth it if you can give children joy in learning in a week. We have some staff now, two right now that are, you know, regular staff members who went to the Environmental Ed Center when they were kids. And I'm just really proud that that program is still going and still serving children and that this park has prioritized education. You know, I've been able to be a part of a lot of great projects in this park, but I will, my heart will always be at the Environmental Ed Center that children are being served through this park.

Eilish McGee [01:05:20] This gives us. That's a. You must have had these in advance because that's a great lead.

Deb Yandala [01:05:21] I didn't.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:05:25] That's a great lead in for the next question, which is why did you decide to leave the Environmental Education Center?

Deb Yandala [01:05:33] So when we decided to remerge, when that decision was made, I was. I had no indication that, that I would be anything other than still directing the center. I just assumed I would go back to being a director of the center, not being executive director of the center. That was my first love and always will be my first love. I even gave some names to the board chair of people they should consider for running the whole organization. And again, these things that stick in your brain. The day before Thanksgiving in 2000, must have been 2001. I have to think about. That was the day before Thanksgiving, 2001. I had a whole lot of company coming in for Thanksgiving. That's why I associate with this. And then I was distracted all weekend. John Debo called me into his office. He and George Klein, the board chair, wanted to talk to me. And they sat me down and they said, we think that you ought to head up the whole this merged organization, the new, what would be the new Cuyahoga Valley Association, which would become Cuyahoga Valley National Park Association. John wanted National Park in the name. And I was flabbergasted. I did not think that I didn't see coming at all. So I, you know, I said to them, I love the Environmental Ed Center. That's, you know, that's still like where my heart is. And their response was, John's response was he said, you might love it now, but you're going to outgrow it. And when you outgrow it, you're going to leave us. And he said, you've raised a lot of money there. You believe in the park. You saw what Golden Gate has done. You know, start to see the method in John's madness here. He said, I think you have the capability to run the whole thing if you're willing. He said, you'll make a lot more money. For one thing. We have a pretty good salary for this. And then he and George taught to me about my clothing and said, you, you take this job, you'll have to wear a suit. We want somebody who will be out and about in town representing the association, representing the park. No more running around. And the park wasn't really about my clothing. That's what I had to figure out. It was, you know, instead of running around the Environment Ed Center with your khakis and, you know, your EEC polo, you will be, you know, in boardrooms in Northeast Ohio. You will be working at a high level, you know, trying to create, you know, an organization that is high powered, the high functioning. You'll be viewed as a community leader in a whole different way. You, you at the time, he said, leave Janice at the Environmental Ed Center. Let her run that and you run this. And I spent that Thanksgiving weekend really soul searching was I willing to leave. And I have to admit there was something that John said to me that was right and that's that at some point you'll, you know, you've run a camp, you've run an Environmental Ed program, will you really be challenged enough? And I like challenges. I like to, I don't like to be bored. I like challenges. This would be completely new for me. So I was intrigued by the challenge. And the other thing, I'm going to be honest and say I was really worried that they would hire. If I said no, they'd hire somebody else who didn't value the Environmental Ed Center. I was really worried about that. And I thought to myself, the best way I can serve the Environmental Ed Center is to move into this position and protect it, you know, at all costs. And I'll say this I have, I had- I was high- I've had really good bosses. Early in my career I had one bad boss. I'm not a good employee. Like I'm not good at being supervised. I recognize that about myself. It's better if I'm the boss. I was fearful of having another bad boss. That was the other thing is, did I want to be an executive director, big organization. I'm a big believer in pretty flat organizations and you hire good people, you get out of the way that we're a family as employees. I'm not a top down leader at all. And I like that. And I don't like working under somebody who is top down. And I had fears the one two times I had bad bosses with the fear of bad bosses in me. So all of that was why. It was selfish. It was a little bit selfish. I liked the challenge of it and so I said yes to it. And we went into planning mode knowing that I would be in charge. The one thing I said though to the board chair is I want Janice to come with me to the new organization head. I don't want to leave her as director of the center. I'd rather hire a director of the center and have Janice be the COO of the new organization because I knew her skills and I was fearful. Like me, she would feel under challenged there in a while. So they couldn't really say no because I kind of made it a package deal once more. Once again. Once again.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:10:20] So I do not remember, who became the director?

Deb Yandala [01:10:23] Dave Irvine came back. I called Dave and said, come back. And. And he became director of the center and he stayed for a few years at that point and he got a great offer out in Arizona and they were looking for a family move, so. But- 

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:10:36] But that was what year? 

Deb Yandala [01:10:37] That would have been year- He came back in 2002 and I want to say he left like 2005, 2006 somewhere in there. So. So. And it was great. He, you know, again, he and I worked together years ago. I had hired him right out of college at the church camp that I worked at. And he was really wonderful as a director of the center.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:11:00] So conservancy CEO. So other than talking to us, what does it- What does a usual day look like?

Deb Yandala [01:11:11] A typical.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:11:12] Is there a typical day?

Deb Yandala [01:11:14] No. It's part of what I like about it. It's part of what I like about it. I view my work as kind of half external, half internal. The work of an executive director. So the internal is supporting the staff that I supervise the next tier down and supervise. I use lightly because, again, I'm a believer. You could hire great people and I have great people that I work with. I'm very lucky that way. You know, internal is doing some of the, you know, helping with, oh, proofreading things that are going to be public messages, fundraising letters, keeping tabs on just giving a little bit of a footprint, you know, fingerprint on the things going on around the organization. The other half, the external is, you know, fundraising is certainly a big part of my work, working with especially our larger donors, the foundations, and then being the external representative. So I'm very active in both Akron and Cleveland. I'm on boards. I, you know, show up at City Club. I show up at, you know, Akron Roundtable. Just being out and being present, being active in community things. So that the park has a, you know, the park slash conservancy has somebody that's, you know, it's also, I know the superintendent's job, so working closely with the superintendent, but, you know, just being as engaged in the community as we can.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:12:34] Showing up at ribbon cuttings for roads.

Deb Yandala [01:12:37] Yeah, right.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:12:40] So you're addressing some of this, but are there any other rewarding parts of your job as CEO that you haven't touched on yet?

Deb Yandala [01:12:51] I love our donors. You know, I talked about Mort as a donor, but we now, you know, we have hundreds of donors and working with them. I'm doing dinner tomorrow night with a couple of them, lunch tomorrow with another one. You know, spending time with people who love this park is really a joy. I don't view. For all those who say, oh, I'd never want to raise money, I find it, I hate to say this, but a little on the easy side because it's relationships with people and telling the stories that if they support us, this is how their money will be used. It's not hard. I love this park. I'm passionate about this park. I think having a national park can connected to two cities is a remarkable story. We know you all know people just love this park. And so working with donors is a real joy for me. I love working with staff. We're now up to 85 staff here. We're one of the larger friends groups in the country and I don't get credit for that. It's really been a team work all these years. I think we have a great relationship with park staff. I love working with National Park Service staff. I find you all to be an incredibly interesting group of people with dedication to, you know, land and water and history and all that. You know, it really is the people. And everything I do, it seems to be the people is what brings me joy. And then the resource. Knowing that this park will be protected, you know, forever is really incredible. And it's. There's not many things you can say that about, but. But national parks, you can.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:14:23] In the interest of time, I think I'm going to skip to down in here. So we had spoken a lot about the November Lodge. So did you learn things from the November Lodge that helped later? Which we'll get to some of those later things in a moment.

Deb Yandala [01:14:44] Yeah. Yes. You know, both good and bad. Building a building is a is- designing a building is. Is not easy. Having a really good architect is important. Having kind of thinking through a whole lot of things, you know, you know, for me, custodial closets defines a building. Storage space defines a building. And we learned that at the right at November Lodge, which did play into later projects. Designing buildings that are easy to clean, easy for staff to take care of with materials that will make a building look good. We also designed and led that process with private dollars. And for. As much as I love the National Park Service, it's one of the slowest agencies you can ever imagine working with. And so wherever we can, to have us be the leaders in projects, it's not like the Park Service doesn't have a huge voice in it, but we are able to work with local contractors and get things done. I learned that much faster. And at that time, it was easier for us to be environmental than it was for the Park Service. I think that's shifted now. But at the time, and also being able to work with local vendors and pump money back into the local economy, you know, I had a bad experience with the facilities at the Environment Ed center, which were not designed and built locally. And I was pretty critical of some of the things like pipes that were not designed for Ohio winters and bursting and freezing and. Yeah. So learning from both the good and the bad is how I said.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:16:17] I don't think I realized that the environment buildings were designed by. So one of the special projects that the Conservancy has been involved in is the extraordinary spaces. How did that get started?

Deb Yandala [01:16:36] Yeah, well, this is a great story. We were selected. The Conservancy was selected as one of six or eight local nonprofits in the Cleveland area to participate in a program that was designed to train nonprofit leaders to create business plans and to think more like businesses. And some. Our staff here jokingly called it Deb and Janice Going to School. But that's what it was kind of like. We went to monthly classes on business planning, business skills, marketing plans and how to create a business plan. And then we were asked each of us to create a business plan. And John Debo had been in my ear about Heinz Hill Happy Days being underutilized. You know, Happy Days used to be a visitor center that nobody went to. And so it was used somewhat as program space, but not regularly. And here it is, the most beautiful building in the park. Same with this campus. Underutilized. It was used by one private group. A private individual lived here. But the public wasn't seeing this property. And so John had said, you know, if you can find a way to get use these and we can find a mechanism to let you use these things, wouldn't that be great? So he and his staff worked on this and came back to us and said, what if you lease these buildings? You know, you'd have to pay us for the lease. But if you could figure out something that would make be an earned income to you. And you know, I also do a fair amount of work nationally, which is a whole other story. But I'm president of the Friends Alliance, that kind of thing. But one of the things we see in other friends groups that are highly successful is they have earned income. That's what we saw at Golden Gate. They had retail stores that were successful. They leased out buildings successful, you know, so that Alcatraz earned income. So you're not just counting on philanthropy, you're counting on also earned income. So we wrote this business plan about using buildings here in Cuyahoga Valley National Park as opening up to the public, public. And it would be a business for us and we would manage it, we would host it, we would do the cleaning, we would take care of it. And we, in our business plan, we put business meetings and weddings and private events. And I'll never forget this, this was, this would have been. I want to say, I want to say 2006, 2007, that the, the company that we work for, the organization doing this training said weddings and the outdoors, that'll never work. Brides will complain about getting dirty dresses. I don't see. And Janice and I were like stubborn. Like are you kidding? Green weddings, you know, all these nature loving people they'll love. No, that'll never work. That people get married in churches and have the receptions in party halls and we, we were just ahead of our time. Again, I love that, that we always tried to think at the edges and so, so we were cautious about the wedding thing. But we believed that it would happen. And so we wrote the plan. We hired. Part of this was the Cleveland Foundation selected us and gave us money to implement. So we hired a marketing firm who came up with the name Extraordinary Spaces. That's stuck to this day because they looked at these spaces and said, oh my gosh, these are jawdroppingly beautiful. So we put this together as a program of the conservancy, hired somebody to run it. At the time. We were able to use a chef that we had to help do food for it. [01:20:03] We've since walked away from that, but, you know, took over. 

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:20:08] Is this Larkin?

Deb Yandala [01:20:10] It was Larkin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We found some challenges working with the-

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:20:18] That's- Yeah, that's the tough part.

Deb Yandala [01:20:19] Yeah, but I loved it. I wish we could go back to it. I'm hoping there will be a day when we can. And it's tied to policy of the National Park Service more than anything, but because we saved a lot of money and did much better quality. But that's a whole other story for another day. But- But this really worked as people love to get married in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. And you know, for the Park Service, it's a win, win because we. We take care of those buildings. We don't do major maintenance on them, but we, you know, we keep them clean. I mean, I think Happy Days looks better than it used to look. By far. It's really clean. And the lights in there are just fun. It's just a nice feel. We asked for that shed was. Maintenance equipment was stored in there. And Lindsay was like, clear that out. We'll turn that into a space. And it's a wonderful space that- The little building.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:21:10] That little barn over here. 

Deb Yandala [01:21:11] Yeah, the barn- 

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:21:12] Where Goya used to store his spare parts.

Deb Yandala [01:21:13] Yes, yes. And it's charming for weddings and for receptions. It's really worked well. The biggest part of this story for us, the thing is it needed to be mission related. And for us, the biggest thing is people still don't know that a national park exists in Northeast Ohio. So that's what we said. Bring in events, bring more people here. Let them be introduced to it. And these couples are so proud to be national park brides and grooms. 2016 they love being centennial brides. They call themselves that.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:21:42] Oh, man.

Deb Yandala [01:21:43] Yeah. I mean, it's really. Talk about mission. People love doing events here and feeling like a part of the park. And then it gives us an earning income source. It's not a huge income source for us. People think we're making a ton of money. We're not. Weddings are expensive. It's, you know, and there's a price point, you know, all that. But it's been a great part of our operation and I think has changed people's image of the park.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:22:08] So right shortly after that, the Conservancy got into the retail business.

Deb Yandala [01:22:15] Yes.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:22:16] So you were. You'd seen it at Golden Gate. So tell us why you thought that was important.

Deb Yandala [01:22:22] So we watched, we saw that, that, you know, for people's park experiences, they, you know, the retail is a part of the park experience. People taking home a memento. And the quality of the stores that we saw at Golden Gate were really inspirational. They really were educational. They really related to real park experiences. I don't know that we would have gotten into this, except that it's part of park history. The little building that was our first trail mix store in Boston was an in holding. And the woman who ran it ran a little. She sold ice cream-

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:22:58] Grandma's Watering Hole.

Deb Yandala [01:22:59] Grandma's Watering Hole. And she sold ice cream popsicles, you know. 

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:23:05] Vintage candy. 

Deb Yandala [01:23:07] Mm-hmm. And it was very popular from visitors. And she passed away. And it was an in holding that was a life estate. So it wasn't an in holding, it was a life estate. I'm sorry, I'm using the wrong words. It was a life estate. So when she died, that building came back to the park and John Debo was superintendent. And John was like, oh, my gosh visitors love that. The park service can't run at his grandma's watering hole. One way to keep this would be for the Conservancy to run it. We weren't a concession. He didn't want it run as a concession. We weren't the Parks Cooperating association, so he couldn't put us there. Eastern was. The one thought he had is if you could take that building out of park ownership. And the only way to take a building out of park ownership, do a land transfer. So we kind of pitched this to the board. Somebody worked for First Energy. We got into First Energy's maps and found that they owned a piece of property north of here, right on the Cuyahoga River, where they were planning to put a, some kind of station, transformer station or something in. And, and never did. So the property was, you know, no buildings, nothing on it on the Cuyahoga River, worth a lot more than that property was. And we did a land and they donated it to us, and then we did a land transfer. So it was pretty magical. This is one of those magical moments of, yeah, Right. How does this happen? And it did. And it took having, you know, the community engagement, having a board member at First Energy helped and park staffing, brilliant about helping look at these land ownerships. And they knew that this was here and said, go to First Energy and see if they'll do it. And convincing them that this was, you know, charitable for them. So it went through their foundation. And so we own that building, which is surprising to everybody because here it is in the middle of the national fire. So we raised money. We went to a couple foundations and did capacity building grants to raise money to. We sunk, I don't know, 10, 20 thousand into that to early on and then added more money to that and more money. But to make it be as charming as it is and the outer grounds. And we worked with an arts program to do some artistic design around the- around the building. It was a little controversial. The neighbors were very nervous about this and have since grew to love it. It's not a problem at all. So once we got into that retail, then we were hungry for more retail. And the head of the railroad at the time, Steve Waite, knew that the building in Peninsula was coming open and there it was right next to the where passengers get on and off the train. And so the Peninsula Foundation had approached him, would he be interested? And he came to me and said, what if we do this together? He said, I don't want to run a store, but I'd be willing to go in with you financially because we think it would serve train passengers. And so they did. And we lease that space. That's now, we agonized over what to name it, and somebody said to us, well, Starbucks has a lot of stores with the same name. So that became Trail Mix Peninsula, this Trail Mix Boston. And then, you know, just recently we leased the former Boston store once the visitor center was out. And that's also our store. So we run three retail and it's been a nice again income stream, not huge, although this year it's been really good. We're getting better and better. And I'll say this, Rebecca, because I think it needs to stay in there for history. It's not just doing a park store. It's really helping create an experience. And I'd like to believe that our emphasis as educators come into this once again of creating experiences for people. So especially at Trail Mix of Peninsula, where we can do whatever we want there, we've really worked hard to get local artists in there, food items that are a little higher quality than maybe you might see in a concession store. I was just in a couple other national parks where I thought the stores were very boring. And I think ours are very interesting and I think have a nice variety of products and products that change up every year. We've really worked hard from a DEI perspective to make sure that everybody coming to this park finds themselves in that store. And you can tell if you look at the products and the kind of artists we feature. I'm really proud of our retail business. Our staff have done, I think, a wonderful job and great advisors, and the park's been very supportive. And I should add, another kind of nice, good feeling part of the story, is when we began working on the visitor center, we really lusted over that visitor center store. And I talked to Kevin, said it too fast now. Kevin Kissling, the CEO of Eastern national, and Kevin very kindly said, well, you're doing. You raised all the money for that visitor center. You know, under our agreement, we'll allow you to run that store and take all the proceeds from it. And that was really kind of eastern to allow us to run that store. And frankly, I think because we're local, we can do it a little better.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:28:06] There's not the-

Deb Yandala [01:28:09] Yeah, I think, you know, and again, Kevin and I, we're good friends, and we talk about this when. When you are local, sometimes you can get to local products so much easier than they can. And. And that store has been financially really great for us, so we're really appreciative for that partnership.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:28:25] And I don't. We are now at an hour and a half. I don't know what your time. You said you were the last thing flexible.

Deb Yandala [01:28:32] But it's up to you guys and your timing. 

Erich Schnack [01:28:35] I'm good. 

Eilish McGee [01:28:36] I'm good. 

Deb Yandala [01:28:37] Okay. Keep going while you have me. It's harder to reschedule.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:28:40] Yes. So you mentioned the Boston. Actually, let me go back one. Do you remember when the volunteer management office came under the Conservancy? What do you remember about that?

Deb Yandala [01:28:59] I don't remember the year, Rebecca. I could look it up if we won that for posterity. I don't remember the exact year it was when John was still superintendent. So I want to say it was '07, '08, something like that. So Golden Gate had set that model. You know, it's another thing we learned at Golden Gate, and John had seen that and what that did for their volunteer program. And he's the one. That was his idea. And he approached us and said we'd, you know, I'd really love to see you in a leadership role here, in part because you can recruit differently than we can. You know, at that time, the park had a halftime volunteer manager, and she was great, but half time volunteer manager, it just was not enough time. And he was looking at other national parks that were doing corporate volunteerism and student volunteerism and family volunteerism. And he just felt if there was more kind of, you know, power to the volunteer staff. So the Park Service agreed to give us a chunk of money to help us staff up to do that. It doesn't cover all of our expenses by any means. And we said we tried for years and if we, you know, financially couldn't make it work, we'd back off. Or if it didn't work, but it did. We hired Brigitte Ann Briscoe as our first volunteer manager on our side. And she was just terrific. She's really a go getter and yeah, she's just really gifted. And so having her here to run it, and we've been through several others since, and they've all been great. It's not an easy job. This is a huge volunteer program. We have two staff and then some seasonal folks. One who kind of does the overall management and somebody that then more does the database and the data collection. It took a big load off of the Park Service, I think, when we were able to step and with some staff capacity. And I think the key has been to have that staff all in one place and to work as a team. You now have not just a halftime volunteer director working on their own. You have a whole team of people. And it's allowed Josh Bates to go and work more in the youth area, which is service learning.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:30:57] Yeah. Service learning.

Deb Yandala [01:30:59] It's been great. And I have to tell you, the other story about this was facilities. We had no decent facilities to run the volunteer program out of. And. And I brought a donor who would give very generously to the Environmental Ed Center here to Boston and pointed out these buildings. John had said if we could figure out how to fix them up, we could turn them into volunteer offices. And I told her, you know, this. We've not done a big building project ever. We really wanted to launch this way. And she gave us a $300,000 grant that allowed us to rehab what's now the office and do rehab the other little building, that's the volunteer center and the little building behind it. And having a place to run this program out of made a big difference, I believe, when the volunteer staff. [crosstalk] And it also made Boston look much better to have those buildings rehabbed. You know, that was also a critical. And this donor to this day is very proud of that donation. So it was kind of magical all at one time. And that's really worked well for us. And that went so well. We took on Stanford after that.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:32:07] So we've talked about and talked around the Boston Visitor center project. So you had a role in it.

Deb Yandala [01:32:16] Yeah, pretty big one. Yeah. Let me step back for just a second and talk about Stanford if I can, because it does tie to Boston. Stanford House was run by AYH American Youth Hosteling for a number of years, was underutilized and was a dump. I'm sorry. I went in it numerous times and could hardly stand to be in there. It was really tired and dark and dark and dreary. And this was another one. While John was superintendent, he said, well, why don't you guys take it on? Why don't you take it on? This was a little after the volunteer center. And, you know, you know, we were very open to this. We were really excited about it. And then John retired from the Park Service and we hired him to do fundraising for us. And I turned to him and said, well, your first big project is Stanford. Remember that idea you had? Now you get to raise the money for it. And he did. He was really brilliant about it. We developed a program called Stanford Stars. And we went to our best donors and asked them for $1,000 each. And we raised 100 and some thousand and. And rehab that. And it's been, as you know, very popular and booked all summer and. Yeah, I rented it in the winter. Yeah, yeah, it's really worked out well for us. So we have this history now of doing buildings, of doing the volunteer center, doing Stanford. When John was still superintendent, he had shown us this property that would become the Boston Mills Visitor Center. There was a willing seller. This willing seller had come to John when he was superintendent, so said, I'd love for the park to have this. So, you know, roll had a couple years more. You go forward a couple years and. And the park was highly committed. When Craig Kenkel, Stan Austin, and then Craig Kenkel, all the superintendents said the same thing. Why doesn't this park have a central visitor center? You know, historically it had had these disconnected, you know, visitor contact stations, I think, and they were called. But as we had more and more national visitation, everybody wants to go to the visitor center, not to these contact stations. So the Park Service was highly motivated to do this, but the Park Service had no money to do this. And if you look around the national park service. I was just in Yellowstone, Tetons, you know, Gold Gate, you know, the visitor centers are being paid for privately. Government is not supporting their parks' visitors centers. We paid close attention to the national thinking about visitor centers, which is that smaller is better. And it seemed to us that that location was really ideal. Center of the park, historic building, room for parking. Just all the pieces. That location used to be room for parking. Yeah, used to be. I know now we're so popular. I still wonder if there's something that needs to be done to address that. But we're working on it. Good. Well, superintendents all along the way in this always said this is only going to work if the Conservancy raises the money. So I've said all these wonderful things about John. Now I'm going to say something a little negative about John. John had kind of one, and he would, I'd say this if he was sitting in the room. He had one formula in mind for raising that money and that's to go back to the five major foundations in Cleveland and Akron and ask them each for, you know, for a million dollars and we'd have a $5 million for park visitor center. That was his plan. Developed a case statement, went to all the foundations, all of whom said, well, no, or maybe 100,000, maybe 250,000. It became very clear within a few months time that was not going to be the answer. We'd had the same success at Stanford, going out to the public and saying, if you care about this park, support us. So John switched the technique to being, yes, we'll get foundation support, but that's going to be matched by individual support. And we began working with our individual donors. And I think John and I were both beyond pleased that our donors really stepped up to the plate. One individual donor, Cynthia Knights, stepped up with a million dollar gift. And I think that gave us the confidence that there are other people out there with significant wealth who knew that this park needed a visitor center. And so, you know, I'm happy to say $10 million later, we did it. We raised the money. We also oversaw the construction. We hired Patty Stevens to be our project manager. That's a trend among friends groups, is to not only raise money but to hire the project management for the reasons I mentioned earlier, that we just can do it faster. We don't have as much red tape. We can get to local firms. We're not sidestepping park service policy necessarily. I mean, we hired a woman owned construction company. We look for minority folks to be a part of the planning and a part of the implementation. We're not trying to get around the park Service. We just can do it faster. And frankly, donors expect that. So we were really pleased we were able to do that and hired the, excuse me, under Jenny's direction, hired the firm to do the exhibitry. We didn't like the first firm and fired them and hired another one. And again, easy for us as a non profit to do.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:37:27] Hill Freddy didn't rise to the occasion either.

Deb Yandala [01:37:29] Right, right. And there's some things I would do differently if I had to do it over again. I think, I think, I think we missed a few opportunities, but I think overall this. We get a lot of people nationally who say they love the interaction, the interactive nature of the visitor center. We wanted to geographically show the location between Cleveland and Akron. I don't know, you all are better at giving testimonials and also seeing the problems in it. Things we do differently. But I will say what I overall feel best about is the way that the community stepped up once more for this park is pretty phenomenal story. People giving $250,000 gifts, people giving, you know, even some that just gave a thousand or two, but are so proud that they were part of this visitor center process. So, yeah, where that was a feather in everybody's cap, in my opinion, Park Service and us and the community.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:38:20] Any special memories or stories from the construction?

Deb Yandala [01:38:23] Well, the story everybody loves to refer to on that one is the we had to lift the entire building, you know, to redo the foundation. And it was up there for quite a while. And people would drive by and there's this building up in the air. You know, that was always a story. I'd get these phone calls. Why is that building up in the air like that? That was pretty dramatic.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:38:42] Number one question on the train, as the train would roll by.

Deb Yandala [01:38:45] Yes, yes, yes, yes. Why is that up in the air? We had a lot of discussion about opening up that half of it is open to the- you know, that. And that was a hefty discussion because it meant losing display space if that had been completed all across. But I think we made the right decision. It just keeps it airy and open feeling and a nice feeling. But that was a challenging discussion. Oh, you know, we were worried to the bitter end that it would get done on time. But that's true of any building. I think the story that I will long take with me on that building, those that we dedicated in October 2019 and then closed it six months later, you know, five months later, that was really heartbreaking. And there were some things I think we would have done early on to celebrate that building that just we were going to do in the spring that we could never do because of Covid. So I always will associate that building. I was really proud of our opening for that building. And I seldom, I seldom brag. I always say it's the team. But I designed that opening. I was selfish about it, and I said, I want to see that every voice gets heard in this. And we were really, really clear to making sure there was broad representation in that ceremony. We kept it reasonably short. We didn't let people just stand up there and go on and on. I felt that was a moment of celebration for this park in a new day around diversity. And again, this is October of 2019. This is before the rest of the country cared about this. They do now. But we in this park took a stance and I thought that day we exhibited it through the speakers that we selected and through the feeling of that we had a couple political folks there, which is great. They did a great job. And it was just that nice feeling of park service, the political community, the regular community, and the Conservancy. I just really all coming together. Yeah, I felt really proud of that day. And it kind of again got lost because Covid took over the world a few months later. But I will long remember that magical day. That was pretty special.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:40:54] But maybe COVID has helped us because people still walk in to this day and they're like, is this brand new?

Deb Yandala [01:41:00] Yeah, yeah, right. So, right. Kind of. 

Eilish McGee [01:41:04] It still has a new smell. 

Deb Yandala [01:41:05] Yeah, right.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:41:08] So you get one project done and another one comes along. So what's the Conservancy's role in the Brandywine Golf Course?

Deb Yandala [01:41:19] Well, this is another great story. They all are great stories, aren't they? Aren't they? Yes. This really was on the tail of that project. And the Trust for Public Land had been working with the National Park Service to protect the former Brandywine Golf Course, which the owners, you know, had put it on the market, wanted to sell it, and a couple other folks stepped up wanting to buy it. And Trust for Public Land, like the National Park Service, cannot buy property without doing a full appraisal, which takes about six months. So again, these days, one never forgets. I got asked by Craig Kenkel, so Superintendent Kenkel, to come to a meeting in at the Trust for Public Land offices, where they were just moaning that there was no way that they could get this done, and turned to us and said, is there any way the Conservancy can get this, can get this done? I came back to our board. You know, we didn't have much money. We had spent it on the, we had just done this major fundraising. But I think all of us do what we do because we love the land. And so like I had this burning passion and we've, we've got to, we got to do this. But more important, way more important than me is that our board had that reaction. The board had said, oh my gosh, we can't walk away from this. That built that property. We knew vaguely who a couple these other folks were. One was housing developer, one was one to put a, a lodge and hotel and a kind of a convention place. And there's no way on that property did we think that was the right thing for the national park to have that high level of development, you know, and the, some members of the Peninsula community were like, you know, they really wanted the tax dollars and they really wanted develop it. But our board was like, oh my goodness, that, you know, there's no way. We don't know where we're going to get the money, but we're going to sign this and we're going to buy this property. So I give a lot of credit to Jim Nash, who was chair of our board, who just never hesitated on this, and Dionne Alexander, who was our board vice chair at the time. Later board. No, I have to get this correct. Order. Yes, later board chair. She too, you know, stood said, this is, you know, this is not even a question. Of course we're going to do this. This was 2019. This was summer of 2019. The board voted to buy the property. We hired a lawyer, Lee Chilcote, who came in and wrote a-

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:43:52] We haven't even finished one yet.

Deb Yandala [01:43:54] Right. We still, we had not dedicated. Yeah, it was pretty, pretty remarkable. And Jim was in his last month as board chair and Dion was coming on and yeah, you know, the timing couldn't have been some ways worse in terms of just having finished this other project. And we, but we did it. The board again, I give the board a lot of credit, really forward thinking. They had hefty discussion about it before they voted yes and it was unanimous. And it was really one of those moving experiences of people saying, you know, we don't know where the money's going to come from, but we can't let this land go. Again, the deep love for the national park, this is the role of the friends group is connecting the deep love of the national park with the community with the national park. And if you don't have a friends group, that doesn't happen. It just doesn't. You don't have the vehicle to work, to work that through. So they voted yes. We hired a lawyer that wrote a purchase agreement that negotiated with the owners for 5.2 million with the agreement that we would have a year in which raise that money. And if we weren't able to, that there was some room for negotiation at the other end, thank God, because then the pandemic hit and we could not go out and raise money in the spring of 2020. I mean you think back to there, nobody cared about a park visitor center in spring. People thought the world was going to end, you know. So luckily we had this, this agreement that we could go longer with extenuating circumstances. And these were certainly extenuating. But we did raise the money, the 5.2 by fall of 2021 of that about 2 million came from local individuals and 3.2 came as loans that we had to repay from area foundations. We negotiated that deal with the foundations and development staff once the worst of the pandemic was over. Work like dogs to raise the couple million bucks. And they did it. We did it. We bought the property, fully bought the property in fall of 2021 and then in December 2022 sold all but 15 acres of it to the National Park Service. And superintendent Craig Kenkel had come to me in my ear one more time and said keep, keep 15 to 20 acres and keep owning it yourselves. Keep the property along the water. You can more quickly and easily put in the services needed for the water community. Smart, smart man, very smart man. And so we did, we kept that. It ended up being 15 acres sold to the park service. Kind of in the midst of all this, it became really clear that the property would need remediation. Park service would not buy it unless we guaranteed that it would be remediated. We wrote a grant to the state of Ohio Department of Development for brownfield money and which the government, the federal government couldn't have gotten, but we could as a non profit and got four and a half million. And that's what's being used now to take the mercury out of the greens and teas. So again, the value of a friends group because we can, as a nonprofit do things federal government can't. So the property is now being remediated. We're in the process of hiring a landscape architect. We're really excited about the firm we're hiring to help us do some planning. Come up with a concept design for the 15 acres we're retaining and also inform the Park Service about the rest of the property. We're especially focusing on people who historically have not been served by national parks, who especially planning processes. So we're going to do a fair amount of community engagement. We really want to attract people who may not right now feel like this is their park and make sure that they know this is their park. [01:47:33] We really see this as that space that all people will feel welcome in. So we're pretty excited about this project. 

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:47:40] Wow. 

Deb Yandala [01:47:41] Again, I go back to board and donors. Board and donors. We did a lot of hikes and donors on that property, and the area community was like, absolutely, this land has to be saved. Absolutely. It's a pretty incredible story.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:47:55] I knew that land was in trouble when they were selling off large timber.

Deb Yandala [01:47:58] Right, right, right. Yeah. They desperately needed money, the owners. Yeah. 

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:48:07] So and maybe we'll end with this one, because we are running out of time. So you've spoke over and over about the Conservancy as a friends group, has a role in connecting park to people, connecting people to the parks. Can you speak to that? What is the conservancy's role as a friends group to connect people?

Deb Yandala [01:48:34] Well, I think a nonprofit has some. Has some flexibility and some things that we can do that it's much harder for the government, One of which is that with a reduced federal budget, you just don't have the number of staff that you used to have. And we can certainly supplement that, I think, because we're a nonprofit with a board of directors. Nonprofits all have boards of directors. We have community voices at the table. I often say to our superintendent, now, Lisa, you know, this is your board, too. You can't think of them that way. I know legally, you know, there's all kinds of things there, but emotionally, this is your board. This is. You get a way to have a group of people. In our case, we have a large board, 30 people who are advisors to where this park is headed. You get a think tank of local business leaders and community leaders right here. You know, we- As a nonprofit, I said, we're one of the larger nonprofits in the country with 85 staff, $8 million budget, nonprofit friends groups. We're able, because of the staff capacity we have to be deeply embedded in the community and bring community voices in a way that is just tougher for federal employees. You don't have the number. You're not necessarily embedded. You're also federal employees.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:49:52] And just the fact of being a federal employee, yes.

Deb Yandala [01:49:56] You've got rules and regs you have to live by, and people judge quickly, federal employees. And things that make it harder for you. Our folks are the voices of people who use this park. It brings the voice of park users. Everybody on our board, they are on our board in part because they love the park and who the park, you know, what the park represents. You know, I've watched again, I work some on the national level too, and I watch the power of what our network, our movement has brought to national parks. And, you know, it's game changing really for the National Park Service in terms of dollars, in terms of volunteer assistance, in terms of just listening to voices from the community. You don't have a natural way to do that, but you do through having a friends group. And I think our job is to leverage that community love for the park into dollars and programs and activities that the Park Service wants. I think increasingly, with tight federal budgets, you're gonna need us. Let me say one more thing, because I get to talk about this nationally a fair amount. At the same time, we're servant leaders. We get it. We don't run the parks. I'm not a park manager. I don't know how to run a park. I know how to run a non profit, but I'm here in service of the park. Lisa always stands in front of me. She doesn't like when I say that, but I say that you do, theoretically, you do. We're here to make you all successful and make you all look good and help you with things that you need money for and support for. And I think in the nonprofit friends groups kind of have to stay in our lane there and understand that while being edgy and being able to push the envelope on trends. So our work in DEI really goes back to 2015, 2016, when the park visitation survey came out. And your visitation was only 5% persons of color. And our board said that's not acceptable. And we began that work in 2015, long before many other groups cared about that stuff. You know, I feel that about I could circle us back to the education program. We could really push the envelope on some of these edgy things. We could connect with money, connect with the community, listen to teachers in ways that it's just a little harder for the park service. You guys have got a park direction run and manage, right? We have corporate leaders on our board that see things coming around the corner as leaders that can say to us, here's some things that, you know, you as a park ought to be thinking of. And I'll bring this to 2023. And we have a county executive in Cuyahoga saying, you know, we want to be the freshwater capital of the country. And, you know, Lisa and I have been able to talk to him about, what does that mean that you have a national park in your backyard that has the Cuyahoga River, that for years has protected the Cuyahoga River and the watershed. So we also can play a role in the community with community leaders to make sure that this national park is thinking beyond its boundaries. One of my colleagues who worked at the time up with the Mississippi River in Minneapolis used this phrase about how we tend to, in the- in national parks, talk about what the community can do for us. And our role as friends groups is to turn that on its head and say, what are we doing for the community? And I always think about that. What are we doing to make people's lives better? How are we connecting with the social issues of today? How are we working in this park, in environmental justice? How are we working in social justice issues? What good is a national park if it's not serving people? As, you know, protecting land is fine, but if we're not connecting with the communities around us, And I think that the friends group has an ability to help push that and help make that real. 

Eilish McGee [01:53:46] Rebecca, do you mind if I ask a question? 

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:53:48] Yeah, please.

Eilish McGee [01:53:49] So you've been talking a lot about the Golden Gate Friends Group as an example for this one. Do you see yourselves as an example for other friends groups in the future?

Deb Yandala [01:54:00] So we know we're examples. So this fall, the National Park Friends Alliance is coming to Cuyahoga. We're hosting this national meeting. We hosted it back in 2004. We've come a long way since then, and they're coming here now mostly because of our work in environmental justice and in community outreach. So, yes, you know, I get calls a lot from other friends groups, and I'm doing some contract work for the National Park Foundation because Cuyahoga has been successful. I'm doing a mentoring program now right now with the executive director of Point Reyes, their friends group, kind of doing for her what Greg Moore did for me at Golden Gate all those years ago. This park is looked at as a national model, a partnership, and the Conservancy is looked at as national partner, a national model, how to be a good partner to the National Park Service. So, yeah, thanks for asking, because, again, I'm proud of. You know, that's not about me. That's not just about our board. Not just about our staff. It's about, in my opinion, everybody. It's about the board, the staff, the Park Service staff who have embraced us. That's not always true, by the way. I feel very beloved in this park. I, meaning the Conservancy, feels very beloved here. And that's not always true. I think we have been able to create a national model of success here and we should be sure sharing it. It's part of our mission and we should be sharing that across the country. 

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:55:25] So, last question. What would you say are your most, your Deb Yandala's most significant achievements or milestones during your time leading the Conservancy?

Deb Yandala [01:55:36] Yeah. Thank you. That's a nice question. Yeah. You know, I am getting close to retirement. I, I have not announced a date yet, but you can Google me. And well, you asked the year I was born, so you can think, you can do the math how old I am. And I'm not going to be here that much longer. And when I think now, and looking back, I am really proud of what we did at the Environmental Ed Center. You heard the passion in my voice. I'm really proud and I hope that that work continues for, you know, generations of kids. That Environmental Ed Center was pretty precarious in its early days and I'm really proud of that. I'm really proud of the entrepreneurial nature of our organization, that that's in the fabric and the culture. I love startups. Every job I had before I came to Cuyahoga Valley was a startup. And so that was another thing that, you know, intrigued me when you asked the question about taking on the CEO job. I love startups and I love, I'm really pleased that we have had had a entrepreneurial spirit and may we never stop that here in Cuyahoga Valley. And then the third thing I'll say is this work we've done in DEI, I will admit to deep personal passion about that work. I think I mentioned before, my husband's a Lutheran pastor and he specialized in urban ministry and the first parish he served after we got married, we were the only white members of that congregation and we lived in the inner city, that's what they called it back then in the 1980s. And that was a life changing experience for me. I was on the other end of and saw in our parishioners the result of racism, of white privilege, because I was a white person living in a black community. I've had a few throughout my career, ever since that learning experience in the early '80s, a real deep passion about wanting to try to have a more equitable world, country, community. And I'm really pleased that we've been able to address it. We have a long ways to go in this park, but we've come a long ways. Right now half of our senior leadership are persons of color. That's just a start. You know, we have a long ways to go, but I hope that is a bit of. [01:58:00] I don't know how I feel about the word legacy, but I hope that's something else. People point and say that I work to be equitable as an organization in our hiring and our practices, our programming and that environmental justice and people's access to green space, it. It's a burning passion for me and I'm hoping that's a something. It's- It's something I'm proud that I could be a part of. Let me say it that way.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:58:27] All right, thank you. We have a lot of questions we went by, but I want to be respectful of your ending time. We do have some documentation that we do have to ask for your signature on. Unless there's any parting questions from Erich.

Erich Schnack [01:58:45] I think we covered everything. I was going to do a follow-up question about the DEI work, but-

Deb Yandala [01:58:51] That I just answered? 

Erich Schnack [01:58:52] You summed it up perfectly right there at the ending. 

Deb Yandala [01:58:54] Good. Thank you.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:58:56] I- I did my part.

Deb Yandala [01:58:58] There you go. Well, thank you for thinking I'm important to interview. I do feel piece of the spark for a lot of years. Do you want my legal name?

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:59:12] Whatever you prefer.

Deb Yandala [01:59:13] No, I won't. I'll keep it short.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:59:18] And I got here in '99.

Deb Yandala [01:59:21] '99. You came. Wow. So I was still at the Enviro Ed Center when it came. Yeah, and a long time too that you've been here.

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:59:29] But I remember- I remember the angst in the days of- Are we taking on the Environmental Education Center? Oh, it's bigger than us. And I remember the

Eilish McGee [01:59:43] [inaudible]

Rebecca Jones Macko [01:59:44] Yeah.

Deb Yandala [01:59:46] There's a lot of stress there. Andrea. In the days when - Andrea and Peg - and you had one full-time and one half-time person trying to run a huge-

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Additional Files
343021 Deb Yandala.txt (118 kB)
Download

Share

COinS