Our Growing Team!

An Introduction and Invitation

Dear Friends, 

At LegacyWorks Group we catalyze and facilitate collaborations that meet critical community needs. We’re always on the watch for promising opportunities and for the resources and partners necessary to move them forward. All three are fundamental to the work we do. 

There’s a fourth element that I can sometimes take for granted that is at least as important to our success: the LegacyWorks team members who facilitate our collaborative projects and lead our regional initiatives. We have been introducing you to our partners through the stories we share in these letters and Insights posts on our website. Now we’d like to begin to introduce you to some of the LegacyWorks team members who play central but often behind-the-scenes roles in each and every one of our collaborative projects. 

We want to begin telling their stories because there would be no LegacyWorks without the amazing group of leaders who make up our team. It’s the team that weaves networks, builds trust, holds space, and designs and facilitates collaborative processes. It’s the team that makes collaborative magic happen when they weave opportunities, resources and partners into successful community-driven change initiatives.

We started as a small but mighty team of 7 in 2012 working on 1 project in Teton Valley, Idaho. Today LegacyWorks Group is blessed with 25 committed paid staff, nearly 20 advisory board members across our regions and 7 board members advancing more than 30 collaboratives. We are thrilled to begin introducing the team to you with our new Deputy Director for the Santa Barbara Regional Initiative, Ellen Kwiatkowski. For those of you who don’t have roots in Eastern Europe, it’s pronounced quit-kow-ski.

Guided by her desire to create change through collaborative partnerships whose outcomes exceed the sum of their parts, Ellen found her professional home here at LegacyWorks last August. She believes that when organizations like LegacyWorks enable collaboration across sectors and cultures, the most innovative and creative solutions result. According to Ellen, “LegacyWorks’ generous spirit embodies one of my favorite mottos, coined by Senator Wellstone, ‘We all do better when we all do better’. LegacyWorks shows up in service to what the community says it needs, rather than what we think it needs, and actively works to build and deepen relationships, which are paramount for creating positive lasting change. When I learned that, I was hooked”. 

A little over two years ago, Ellen moved to Ojai from Wisconsin’s Lake Superior shoreline, one of many stopping points along her journey from her Connecticut birthplace. Her varied interests, desire to serve, and appreciation for different cultures are reflected in a career path born out of volunteering for the U.S. Peace Corps to conduct agroforestry extension work in Paraguay. Her path went on to include over 25 years experience in nonprofit leadership, administration, strategy and development in the fields of biodiversity conservation (international and domestic), land protection, health care for the underserved, and Native American tribal government programs and land-use/repatriation. She also co-owned an organic diversified fruit farm in Wisconsin with her husband Eric. 

In addition to working with LegacyWorks, Ellen and Eric serve as volunteer caretakers of Meher Mount, a 172-acre semi-wilderness area dedicated to Meher Baba on Sulphur Mountain in upper Ojai.  When asked about what she loves most about moving to the region, she says, “Learning about the native plants, the smell of coastal sage scrublands, the raucous calls of the Sulphur Mountain birds that greet me on my walks, and the warm and open people that continue to make me feel so welcome!” 

Interested in joining our team and doing this kind of work? LegacyWorks Group is growing! Each of our regional initiatives has more and more good work to do, and we’re increasingly undertaking an array of high impact projects outside of our three regions. We are currently seeking a Project Manager for the Santa Barbara Regional Initiative and candidates for a Regional Director for our Teton Regional Initiative. We’re always looking for accomplished, open-hearted facilitators and change makers to join our team for a variety of projects and engagements. If our stories, team member descriptions and the job descriptions spark your fire, please reach out to begin a conversation.

With gratitude,

Carl and the LegacyWorks Team