Our Team

Bio:

Karly joined ONDA in September 2022, as Campaign Manager. She develops and executes conservation campaign initiatives across millions of acres of Oregon’s high desert public lands at the local, regional and national levels and with Tribal Nations, by building relationships with diverse stakeholders and community partners to secure protection for public lands, waters and wildlife. 

Karly grew up in the western Willamette Valley and as a fourth-generation Pacific City, Dory-fisher, her summers were spent fishing with her family in the Pacific Ocean.

She received her bachelor’s in socio-cultural anthropology and Indigenous Nations studies at Portland State University. During undergrad, she attended Tatoosh School in the Tongass National Forest, studying southeast Alaska ecology and policy of place. Karly followed the coastal winds and eventually lived on organic farms in Aotearoa (New Zealand), where her views of what conservation, natural resource management, and Indigenous rights can look like, expanded.

Karly graduated from the McCall Field Campus of the University of Idaho with a master’s degree in environmental science and a certificate in environmental education and science communications in 2022. Her next stop was a research assistantship with a National Science Foundation grant in the Rocky Mountains, which reignited her love for the ponderosa pine forests and sagebrush meadows she’d grown up with while camping in Central Oregon. Karly is excited to grow with ONDA in this beautiful place, learn of all the socio-ecological intricacies of Oregon’s high desert and be a strong advocate for its eternal prosperity. 

In her free time, Karly enjoys roller-skating, being near the water, reading, live music, making weird art, growing things, eating delicious foods, and just generally nerding-out on ecology-related things. She is definitely a dog person.