February 9, 2006

By Lauren Heaton

Nick Boutis, the next executive director of the Glen Helen Ecology Institute.

Antioch College last week hired a Glen former staff member as the next executive director of the Glen Helen Ecology Institute.

The hiring of the next director, Nick Boutis, means that the Glen will be under entirely new leadership this spring when Boutis is expected to arrive in Yellow Springs to serve under Antioch’s new president, Steven Lawry, who began his first term with the college last month.

Boutis will replace Bob Whyte, who resigned as the GHEI executive director last August.

Boutis’s move from Washington, D.C., marks his return to the Glen, where he worked as a naturalist, an EcoCamp counselor and an administrative intern in 1990. Boutis left Yellow Springs a year later to pursue a career in environmental advocacy. But he said in a phone interview from his office last week that he has always dreamed of coming back to Yellow Springs.

“My time at the Glen has shaped my career arc for the last decade and a half, and I’ve longed to come back to the Glen and get a chance to shape its future,” Boutis said.

Boutis said he has always been committed to preserving the environment. After graduating from Oberlin and working at the Glen, Boutis moved to D.C. to advocate for endangered species, population policies and strong environmental laws to guide and protect the public’s choices. He later realized that as an advocate, he would be more influential living somewhere like Ohio, where, he said, if he wanted to meet with a member of Congress, instead of wading through layers of bureaucracy, all he had to do was schedule an appointment.

Currently, Boutis works with Population Connection, an organization that advocates for sustainable world population growth, where he has managed the teacher training program for eight years. Though he likes his job, when the opportunity to settle in Yellow Springs arose last fall, he and his wife, Kathleen, jumped at the chance to raise their three young children in a unique, vibrant “gem of a little community,” he said.

Boutis was selected by a four-member search committee that invited three final candidates in December to visit the Glen and meet the members of the Glen’s staff, the Glen Helen Ecology Institute Advisory Board, the Glen Helen Association and Antioch College. The committee included GHEI board president Dave Goodwin and board member Mark Meister, Rick Jurasek, the college’s executive vice president, and faculty member Tom Haugsby.

Goodwin described Boutis as a “very exciting candidate” who knows a great deal about the field of ecology. The search committee members felt Boutis has a strong background in nonprofit management and “very good people skills,” Goodwin said.

Both Lawry and Jurasek were unavailable for comment last week.

George Bieri, who has served as the Glen’s interim co-director with Ann Shaw since Whyte resigned, said he supports Boutis and the process used to select him. Bieri said he agreed that Boutis had good people skills, and his familiarity with the Glen as well as his “flat management,” or team leadership style, appealed to Bieri.

“We need for the town to pull together and welcome him,” Bieri said.

Most of the work Boutis did in D.C. was what he called “coalition building” between environmental and animal welfare groups, businesses, farmers and other groups that each had overlapping interests to build on and conflicting interests to work out in order to shape policy that best served all their needs, he said.

The similar challenge Boutis perceives in the Glen is to “keep everyone focused on the big picture and working together on behalf of the Glen,” he said.

Boutis said he is excited about coming to Glen Helen and hopes to be “the kind of leader who builds on consensus.”

He said he recognizes that another of his initial challenges will be to work with the Glen’s stakeholders to simplify the organizational structure so that “people feel the energy they put into the Glen actually gets to the Glen.”

His contract specifies he is to start no later than July 1, but Boutis anticipated that he would start in advance of that date.

Antioch College, the Glen Helen Ecology Institute staff and the GHEI board have completed a “refined draft” of the Glen’s strategic plan, which addresses the leadership structure of the Glen, Goodwin said. The Glen’s leaders are “sensitive to community input,” but they are waiting to get that input until the new director has arrived and had a chance to coordinate its completion, Goodwin said.

Boutis said he understands that while the college owns the Glen, the community feels ownership of the nature preserve because of its location in town and because of the volunteer service and support area residents give the Glen.

“So many people feel it’s their backyard, and it’s something they spend their money and energy on, and it’s so important to be respectful of that,” Boutis said. “The Glen has incredible assets, and I view some of my job is to be an evangelist of those assets and build on the strengths that are there.”

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com