The Board of Directors
YWP Board of Directors
Lynne Bond is a longtime professor at UVM who specializes in healthy social & intellectual development in communities & families. She headed UVM’s community service learning project. She has involved students in community-based research both locally and internationally. She has created many associations between the academic world and communities, ranging from Belize, Central America to the Vermont Northeast Kingdom and Burlington North End. From 2000-2005 she conducted a course-based program that brought UVM students to Cuba, and brought Cuban faculty to UVM to share knowledge about community psychology (such programs are no longer permitted by the US government). Her research includes promoting people's ability to foster their own and others' healthy social and intellectual development, especially within communities and families. She focuses on parent-child and women's development and citizen community participation. Bond, former dean of the UVM Graduate College, has been a University Scholar and recipient of the Kroepsch-Maurice excellence in teaching. She is now Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Psychology Dept. She has published extensively.
John Canning is president and founder of Physician's Computer Company, a 40-person service and software company that works with pediatric practices offices across the country. John's board experience includes chairing boards for the Vermont Youth Orchestra and the Gailer School, and co-founding a regional board for the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. John lives across the street from the Burlington Airport with his foster son.
Tom Carlson -- Chairman. Tom and his wife, Nancy, live in the town of St. George, (pop. 700 or so), an oasis of woods and waterfalls in the middle of burgeoning Chitttenden County. Tom has practiced law for 24 years with Langrock Sperry & Wool in Burlington, Vermont, playing roles as trial lawyer, business and estate planner, and now mediator. In between work and hiking and cabin-building missions to the mountains of the Adirondacks, Tom has served on the boards of the Vermont Youth Orchestra and the Greater Burlington Industrial Corporation. He was both capital campaign chair and construction management chair for the Youth Orchestra when it built its new home at St. Michael’s College. He has been a selectman in the Town of St. George since 1992 and moderator of town meeting since 1998. With two sons away in college, he is now a mentor to a fifth grader in the mentoring program Nancy runs in a local school. Young people, music, good books, a steady flow of construction projects, expeditions with Nancy and the occasional turn of phrase make his world go around.
Barbara Ganley has been a Lecturer in the Writing Program and English Department at Middlebury College since 1989, and before that an English teacher at Middlebury Union High School. An active implementer of new media and Web 2.0 technologies into literature and writing classrooms since 2001, her special interests include digital storytelling as a means of academic discourse and blogging as a vehicle for expression, community-building, and student-centered learning. You can find her blogging at bgblogging: http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging. On her blog, she writes: “On bgblogging I reflect on my teaching-with-technology journey and my evolution as a user of New Media in the writing classroom as I try to keep up with developments in the field and entice peers into discussions with me about their experiences with blogs, digital media and all manner of emerging tools and applications. I teach a range of weblog-base writing courses and a contemporary Irish literature and film course.”
Geoffrey Gevalt -- Editor, executive director. Geoff is founder and editor of the Young Writers Project. He was a journalist for 33 years at several daily newspapers in New England and Ohio, a weekly business newspaper in Boston, a financial magazine in New York City and the Associated Press in Baltimore. Most recently he was managing editor of The Burlington Free Press. Geoff has won numerous awards as a writer and editor and served for two years as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes in Beat Reporting. He has been on the executive boards of New England Newspaper Association (Awards Committee), New England Society of Newspaper Editors, New England AP Newspaper Association, Vermont Press Association and Leadership Champlain. Geoff conceived and began YWP in 2003 with the assistance of teachers from the Vermont chapter of the National Writing Project. In 2006 he incorporated YWP as an independent 501(c)3 corporation when it received a two-year grant from the Vermont Business Roundtable, a collection of 125 CEOs from Vermont’s leading businesses and colleges.
Hasse Halley is a long-time educator and administrator; she has been principal of the Cabot School, a leader in the National Writing Project and an English teacher at Woodstock Union High School. She recently won a Fulbright Memorial Fund Fellowship; selected from a pool of more than 2,100 applicants, she spent 3 weeks in Tokyo, participating in a Fulbright Memorial Teacher Program.
Stephen Kiernan is an award-winning journalist who spent 14 years as a reporter, columnist and editor with The Burlington Free Press. He graduated from Middlebury College, and has masters degrees from the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught at the University of Iowa, Middlebury College, and the New England Young Writers' Conference, and worked on the staff of the Breadloaf School of English and the Breadloaf Writers' Conference. He now writes for The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and several national magazines, and in 2006 St. Martin's Press in NY published his book Last Rights -- Rescuing the End of Life from the Medical System. Stephen also plays the guitar, has released three CDs of solo instrumental pieces, and has composed for dance, theater and several television specials broadcast worldwide. He lives in Charlotte with his two sons.
Rick Machanic helped found Tag New Media in 1996 and now heads the company. Tag New Media has been assisting businesses and organizations in finding their way online. From providing end-to-end custom e-commerce solutions to building scaleable database driven online publications, from consulting to design, Tag New Media has made it our mission to craft clarity from confusion while still managing to have some fun. Among its recent clients: Rossignol, Adirondack Museum, Columbia University, Downs Rachlin Martin, Fletcher Allen Healthcare, IDX, Hummel America, Montstream Studios, Museum of the City of New York and many others. Rick graduated from the University of Vermont where he loved to write.
Rachel Morton is the former director of publications at Middlebury College and editor of Middlebury Magazine, a winner of the CASE Gold Award as best college magazine of 2001. She also edited alumni and research magazines at the University of Massachusetts, and Washington University in Saint Louis. For many years she directed the Magazine Editor's Seminar at the CASE Summer Institute in Communications and Marketing at Duke University, where she taught college and university magazine editors how to improve their publications. She now directs Rachel Morton Associates, a communications consulting firm specializing in college magazines and recruitment publications for higher education. Her clients include Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wesleyan, Franklin & Marshall, Saint Michael’s, McDaniel, Binghamton, Marquette, and Northfield Mount Hermon, among others. Rachel is a former trustee of CASE and a member of its Commission on Communications.
Bobbe Pennington was a registered nurse until she became a mother. With the help of her best friend, Scott, (her husband of the past 31 years), Bobbe raised four children and became extremely interested in education during their school years. She did graduate work at St. Michael's College to obtain her teaching license and has been teaching 5th grade at Rick Marcotte Central School in South Burlington for the past seven years. She also teaches 4th and 5th grade Wonderworks at her church every Sunday.
She loves to read, write, kayak, and garden. She loves the outdoors. And she loves kids. Bobbe is a leader of the Vermont chapter of the National Writing Project.
Alysia Perkinson is a Second Vice President of Wealth Management and Financial Planning with over 15 years of investment experience. Prior to joining Smith Barney in 2001, she was a Vice President in the Fixed Income Group at Fleet Bank. She graduated from Union College with a degree in Economics and received her MBA from Boston University. With a focus on the needs of business owners, retirees and women, Alysia takes a strategic approach to helping individuals and corporate clients achieve their goals. In her spare time, she can be found with her husband, Ellery and son, Ethan, enjoying either the Green Mountains or Lake Champlain.
Tom Telling has been practicing public accounting since 1977 after he graduated from the University of Illinois. At Illinois Tom was President of his 80 member fraternity Alpha Kappa Lambda and received a Lloyd Morey scholarship. Tom was hired as a staff accountant by Henning, Strouse, Jordan & Sulaski, CPAs in Bloomington, Illinois. Bloomington is in the heart of farm country. In 1980 Tom moved east to Plattsburgh N.Y. During the 1990s Tom's firm merged with two Vermont firms and he became a partner in Telling-Besaw-Cota PLLC CPA, practicing in Burlington, Newport and Plattsburgh. Ultimately the three offices reversed their merger and in December 2003, Tom opened an office in Middlebury. Tom is an owner of Telling & Conroy CPA, P.C. in Plattsburgh N.Y. He utilizes the Plattsburgh firm for staffing and auditing and he works closely with Gene A. Besaw & Associates in Newport VT. Tom is licensed to practice in the states of Vermont and New York and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the Ubuntu Project and the Middlebury Rotary Club.
Stephen Terry is a veteran observer of political affairs and politics in Vermont, and a former reporter and editor at two of Vermont’s daily papers, the Rutland Herald and the Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus. From 1969 to 1975, he was a Legislative Assistant to U.S. Senator George D. Aiken. He worked for 20 years at Green Mountain Power, retiring as Senior Vice President for corporate and legal affairs; he recently returned to the company on a part-time basis. He has served in a wide range of state and community positions, including Chair of the Snelling Center for Government, a leadership, public policy organization; chair of the Porter Medical Center Board in Middlebury; membership on the Governor of Vermont's Council of Economic Advisers; past Chair of the Vermont Community Foundation, the state's largest public charity; and, past Chair of the Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce; past chair of the Vermont Press Association. He also has served as a director of the Vermont Food Bank, a statewide anti-hunger organization; University of Vermont Center for Vermont Research; and the Greater Burlington Industrial Corporation.
Dr. Marc A. vanderHeyden, President Emeritus of Saint Michael’s College, was inaugurated as the 15th president on October 19, 1996, and retired in the summer of 2007. He was born in Ghent, Belgium, in 1938, and received a diploma in classical studies and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, followed by a certificate of theological studies, from Belgian institutions. He then entered Catholic University of America, where he earned master’s and doctoral degrees in history. Dr. vanderHeyden is fluent in three languages and has a working knowledge of five more. He has been an active member of various professional, government, charitable, business, arts, health care and religious groups at the local, regional and national levels, and currently serves on the boards of the following organizations: the Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Val-Kill (ERVK), Vermont Ballet Theater and Vermont Gas Systems. Dr. vanderHeyden is a naturalized American citizen and is married to Dana Lim vanderHeyden, who has also pursued a career as a faculty member and academic administrator. They reside in New York’s scenic Hudson Valley.
Dana vanderHeyden, a native of Prague, Czech Republic, lived in New Jersey after her family immigrated to the United States. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Rochester (NY), with a B. A. in French literature, as well as a diploma from the Sorbonne (Paris, France). Her M. A. in French is from Rutgers University (NJ) where she was a Teaching Assistant. Dana began her career in higher education at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA, where she spent eighteen years both as Assistant Professor of French as well as Director of Academic Advising and, subsequently, as Director of Admissions. After relocating to the Hudson Valley in New York, she became associated with Duchess Community College for nine years, where she held the position of Assistant Registrar and served as academic adviser to adult students. In 1996, Dana became a resident of Vermont when her husband accepted the presidency at Saint Michael’s College. In addition to her involvement in various committees and programs at the College, she has served on the Board of Directors of Vermont Public Radio, the Northern Vermont Chapter of the American Red Cross, the Alliance Française of Vermont/Cercle Québécois, the University of Vermont Lane Series, the Region I Board of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, and she is also on the Advisory Board of Héritage Winooski. In her spare time she is an avid photographer.
