Meet Our Board

MARK STEVENS

Mark Stevens was born and raised on the front range of Colorado and moved to Washington, DC after college to pursue a career in international affairs, politics, conservation, or some combination. He worked for over two decades on international ocean conservation. In 2014, on a volunteer trip to Patagonia National Park in Chile, he realized that public land conservation was a stronger passion than ocean conservation. He returned to Colorado in 2017 and has been a grant maker for various organizations supporting environmental and other issues. He is grateful for the opportunity to apply nearly three decades of advocacy and philanthropy to protect the environment in southwest Colorado.

JOAN MAY

Joan May lives her life by principle and approaches each day with a desire to make the world a better place. She believes that we each have a role in shaping our communities and our world. An inspiring and optimistic leader, she empowers others to fulfill their potential as active civic participants.

Combining passion and experience, she has a proven record of environmental preservation and achieving positive outcomes through creative and effective collaboration.

Most recently, Joan has served three terms as a respected elected San Miguel County Commissioner in Telluride, Colorado. She has cultivated meaningful change via daily interaction with constituents. During her tenure of county leadership, San Miguel County has transformed, becoming known throughout Colorado for strong environmental practices and vibrant community participation.

Joan also serves on a number of boards that emphasize and engage significant environmental and social change initiatives.

To clear her mind and connect to nature, she spends as much time as possible in the San Juan Mountains of Southwest Colorado.

MARISA MARSHALKA

A graduate of Boston College, Marisa Marshalka moved to the Telluride region "for one year" in 2017 as an AmeriCorps VISTA working in the west end of San Miguel and Montrose counties. She has since worked in public health, navigating the intersection of immigration status and access to healthcare, as well as starting an immigration legal services program as an Accredited Representative for Tri-County Health Network. She currently works as a bilingual case manager with One to One Mentoring and serves as a board member and grant writer for local advocacy group Collaborative Action for Immigrants. She is excited to support Sheep Mountain Alliance in their efforts to preserve and protect the landscape and community that have inspired her since the first day she stepped foot in the San Juans. 

TERI STEINBERG

Teri was introduced to the wonders of hiking and the outdoors through a high school program outside of Detroit.  She graduated from the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan majoring in environmental policy and continued to law school with the aim of becoming an environmental lawyer. Instead she moved to New York City and became a literary agent where she had the pleasure of representing bestselling adventure and science writers. After a decades long publishing career, Teri decided to go back to law and chose Telluride as a gorgeous backdrop to study for the bar exam.  She fell in love with the magic of the San Juans, made Ophir her permanent home, and is happy to have the opportunity to support Sheep Mountain Alliance and to go back to her roots of focusing on environmental issues to protect one of the most beautiful regions in the United States.

MICHAEL GREGORY

Michael Gregory is a documentary filmmaker who lives in Telluride. For the past decade, he has served on the board of the High Mountain Institute, an outdoor semester-term high school based in Leadville, Colorado. He has also served on the board of Rios to Rivers, an exchange program for river and watershed students and activists between the US and Chile.

CHARLES DALTON

Charles is originally from Charlotte, NC and had a career in commercial real estate.  He has been visiting Telluride since the 1990s with a dream of living in the mountains.  He and his wife, Susan, became full time Telluride residents in 2016.  Charles is an avid trail runner, hiker, fly fisher and skier.  When not playing outdoors, Charles is a resort host for Telluride Ski Resort.  He is a member of the Planning and Zoning Commission and a One to One mentor.  Charles had been an active conservationist and environmentalist in NC serving as a Trailer Master for Catawba Land Conservancy/Thread Trail and continues his support of conservation and the environment in Telluride serving on the SMA board. 

Diana Madson

Diana Madson is the Energy Program Manager at Western Conservation Foundation, where she administers a philanthropic program to promote federal and state climate and clean energy policies throughout the West. Prior to WCF, Diana was the founder and first Executive Director of The Mountain Pact, a network of outdoor recreation-based mountain communities in the American West working together for climate action and public lands restoration through a shared voice on federal policy. Diana was formerly Sierra Business Council's Government Affairs Director as well as the Director of the Sierra Climate Adaptation & Mitigation Partnership (CAMP) where she advanced recognition of the value of the Sierra Nevada and advocated for investments in the region to support triple bottom line initiatives such as climate action, mitigation and adaptation efforts. Diana received her Master of Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and graduated with Highest Distinction from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.S. in Society & Environment and a B.A. in Rhetoric. Diana lives with her husband and giant fluffy white dog in Lake Tahoe, CA. 

Erika Zavaleta

As Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC-Santa Cruz, Erika Zavaleta maintains an active, diverse research group in conservation science and ecology with a focus on responses to climate, atmospheric and biodiversity change. She has published 85 articles, reports and book chapters in these areas, including 13 in Nature, Science, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and she is a member of the California Academy of Sciences. As a Ph.D. student, Erika led many of the first papers addressing ecological community and ecosystem responses to interacting climate and atmospheric changes. Erika won the Ecological Society of America Sustainability Science Award in 2007 for her work on consequences of and responses to climate and wildfire change in Alaska’s boreal forest. This year, she received two American Publishers Association’s PROSE Awards and a California Book Award for her book Ecosystems of California (2016). Erika directs the University of California’s Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program, a national effort to train the next generation of diverse conservation leaders. She serves on advisory boards for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Climate Adaptation Fund, the Center for Resilient Landscapes, and the Society for Conservation Biology. In and around Telluride, Erika studies how migratory songbirds and alpine food webs are responding to climate and other environmental changes.