This past year, local nonprofit Friends of the Mad River (FMR) was graced with an AmeriCorps service member – Onome Ofoman, who served as watershed engagement coordinator. This week, Ofoman wrapped up her work at the nonprofit. She will soon head to Vermont’s Upper Valley region to assist in a research project on pollinator species.
Ofoman said she took the AmeriCorps position at FMR because she wanted to learn more about conservation of natural resources, as she was re-routing her career path after working for several years as a software engineer.
She recalled how FMR executive director Ira Shadis encouraged her to experiment with engaging the public on conservation issues, giving her the agency to figure out what that work should even entail. “I got to play around and figure out my interests in more depth,” she said.
FMR is an organization that formed in 1990 in order to protect and conserve local natural resources – especially the Mad River.
Ofoman grew up in Nigeria, studied electrical engineering at Stanford University, then worked as a software engineer in New York City, at Google and Goldman Sachs. In 2019, when she finished a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Oxford University, UK – where she focused on social impact in business – she found herself wanting to return home. She joined Microsoft, who had just opened an office in her hometown of Lagos – Nigeria’s largest city.
But Ofoman longed to spend less time online, found less purpose working for large corporations, and wondered if she could merge her career with her passion for the outdoors. She took a sabbatical from Microsoft and joined a small trail-building crew at Hudson Highlands State Park in Cold Spring, New York.
The park is a mostly undeveloped preserve spanning over 8,000 acres – with deciduous forest, rocky ridges, and towering summits just 50 miles from New York City. It also contains 70 miles of trails.
“I had the best time,” Ofoman said, working through the summer and fall of 2021, rerouting old trails and building stone staircases. She said that work reinforced her notion about how she wanted to live – “the impulse I wanted to exist in.”
Last September, Ofoman found housing in Montpelier and started at FMR, hosting around 24 public events during her term.
In January, she organized an open-mic storytelling session focusing on past flood events and notions of resiliency. She also partnered with local libraries to host a monthly book club in which participants discussed texts on climate and ecology. One of her favorite books was “Fuzz” by Mary Roach – a work of nonfiction that centers stories of human-wildlife interactions across the world.
Throughout the outreach work, she reflected with Shadis about what it means for public engagement efforts to “work,” or how to measure whether they’re successful.
Ofoman is now headed to the Upper Valley to begin an 11-month AmeriCorps position at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. She will assist in research that examines how local pollinators are reacting to plants that, through seed dispersal, have started migrating from the southern United States due to climate change. Specifically, she will be planting seeds and collecting pollinators themselves – which she thinks could be a strange facet of the job.
“When they interviewed me, they asked, ‘are you OK with collecting bees?’” she said, laughing.
In time, Ofoman hopes to do research at Gashaka Gumti National Park in Nigeria – an extremely biodiverse park where she’s spent a lot of time. She wants to study how local communities living in the park are interacting with natural resources, and how those interactions are creating potentially harmful environmental changes. One example, she said, is how communities are engaged in illegal, small-scale logging efforts in order to raise cattle.
“I’ve become really interested in the question of how to balance human needs – especially those that form against a backdrop of economic insecurity, with the need to protect the non-human inhabitants of the forest.”
In the meantime, Ofoman will be collecting bees and living on a horse farm near White River Junction, Vermont. She said she’s excited for what’s to come.
