In September, Dave Durant began a new career and resigned as NIA President, we are happy to say he remains on the Board of Directors and I will be completing his term as President until the elections in December 2020. For this report I decided to take a look back to my previous Board Report in October of 2015 to see what has changed and what we are still striving towards.

Greetings

I would like to convey our best regards, from the NIA Board of Directors to the NOLS Board of Trustees, in these exceptionally trying times. I am looking forward to connecting with all of you on June 5th, although I am sure we would all prefer the previously planned in-person meeting in Washington, rather than yet another virtual interaction. I can’t help but reflect on our last meeting in San Diego in February, where a spirit of mutually shared goals prevailed, and COVID-19 seemed little more than a shadow on the horizon. Terri has assured me that the financial damage to the school and the challenges that lie ahead will be thoroughly catalogued elsewhere in this report. I will use the NIA’s space to provide some anecdotal information about the impact on individual instructors of both the pandemic and NOLS’ response to it, before offering a hopeful vision for the future.

A Long Term Project

As I mentioned to you a year ago in Houston, the NIA Board, in consultation with some very senior NOLS employees, spent 2018-2019 crafting an in-depth Position Paper calling on NOLS to set the long-term strategic goal of a living wage for all employees, and a middle class income for managers. Several trustees greeted this idea with great curiosity, and a request was made for a summary of this document. I’ll present that summary here, and the full paper will be available in San Diego. The full paper includes citations as well as a detailed discussion of how we arrived at our figures.

WELCOME, TERRI WATSON

On behalf of the NIA and all NOLS instructors, and from one President to another, I’d like to warmly welcome Terri to her new role. I’ll stop short of saying “welcome back,” because, of course, Terri never left. She’s been teaching Wilderness Medicine courses each year since 1999, which is long before she worked her last Expedition in 2008, and even before NOLS purchased what was then known as the Wilderness Medicine Institute.

At Terri’s welcome party in Lander we learned from Greg Avis that more than 400 potential candidates were contacted in the search process. No doubt this number included many appealing potential presidents without NOLS experience. We at the NIA applaud the Board of Trustees’ hiring of Terri. We take it to be self evident that the students arethe mission, and that the instructors are the keepers of the student experience, and therefore what serves instructors well ultimately serves our students well. We believe that with her background as an Expedition instructor, Wilderness Medicine instructor, Program Supervisor, and Branch Director, not to mention her recent role as the CEO of a nonprofit unrelated to NOLS, Terri is exceptionally well positioned to approach the real problems confronting our instructor corps with empathy.

Welcome to the Adirondacks. On behalf of the NIA and all NOLS Instructors, I’d like to warmly welcome our Trustees to the Adirondacks.  Having attended a summer camp in Adirondack Park from the age of nine, this place occupies a special space in my heart.  The Adirondacks were the backdrop for all of my formative wilderness experiences.  This is the first place I carried a backpack, set up a tent, caught a fish, and felt awed in the presence of nature, whether that was looking out from the summit of a high peak or tolerating the adversity of a spectacular summer thunderstorm.  It was as a 16 year old camper in the Adirondacks that I first heard about NOLS, and it was to the Adirondacks that I returned after my NOLS student experience in Patagonia, feeling empowered to step forward and run the counselor-in-training program at the camp I had attended.

At the end of 2018 we bid farewell to NIA President Sean Williams, who completed his second term on December 31.  I can confidently state that Sean left the NIA a larger, more professional, and more articulate organization than he found it.  He’ll remain involved as President Emeritus, but his designated leadership will be missed.

Like many others around the school, we on the NIA Board of Directors are wrapping up a busy summer season of working in the field, personal trips, and preparing for more courses in the fall.

The NOLS Summit in May was an exciting time to gather with instructors and hear input across the school. This year’s summit generated discussion about topics that were both stimulating and challenging. At our Annual General Meeting at the summit, we were pleased to welcome more than 35 instructors to a discussion of priorities and goals for the coming year and a number of instructors becoming Lifetime Members. One notable outcome of that meeting was the decision to draft a plank on inclusion to add to the NIA’s platform, which is in progress now. The plank aims to support NOLS’ efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion and

The most important work for us at the NIA during the spring is preparation for the Faculty Summit, which will have already taken place by the time you read this report. We hold our Annual General Meeting, our largest meeting of the year, in Lander, on an evening during the Summit. In recent years this has been a good time to share with faculty members and others in Lander what the NIA has been working on over the past year, what goals we have for the coming year, and most importantly, to solicit input and feedback, both for ourselves, and to pass on to Headquarters as needed. Instructors now seem to expect a major NIA meeting to go along with the Summit, and we coordinate with the Summit organizers to find a time that will not conflict with Summit-related events. This year the meeting will be at the Lander Bake Shop, a convenient and fun location for those staying at the Noble or living in Lander.

As mentioned in the last NIA report, we spent part of 2017 continuing our efforts at data-gathering. Our hope was to build on the 2016 Lifestyle Survey to further improve our statistical picture of today’s NOLS instructor. In the pure spirit of data collection, and without a view to any change or new strategy at this point, we decided to brave the ever-fraught topic of compensation.

It has been another successful summer for the NIA, with high membership, lots of interest from instructors in joining and learning more the NIA’s role at NOLS, and consistent positivity from instructors and members of the administration. Summer is the time when most NOLS faculty are in the field and many branches are busiest. For the NIA this is primarily a time to focus on our members, because this is the time when they are most available and most engaged with NOLS. That means running meetings, having conversations, recruiting new members, and making sure that instructors understand the key role of an independent faculty organization at NOLS. The NIA’s other tasks – long-term strategic planning, working with the NOLS administration to hash out particular solutions, gathering data to better inform NOLS’ strategic thinking, and putting energy into our own administration – can wait until the long NOLS winter. From late August to late May, when the snow is flying in the northern hemisphere mountains and fewer instructors are in the field, we re-focus on the longer term.

Spring, the slowest season for NOLS field instructors, has been humming along as usual at the NIA. We have held branch meetings in Patagonia and the Pacific Northwest and a women’s specific meeting at the Rocky Mountain campus, which included discussion of women’s progression to Course Leader and family planning for field instructors. The Annual General Meeting, scheduled for May 15th at the Faculty Summit, will include a presentation of the Lifestyle Survey results (as did the Pacific Northwest meeting).

This report is devoted entirely to a presentation and very brief analysis of the results of our Field Faculty Lifestyle Survey, conducted from mid January to mid December 2016. As some of you may remember from my report a year ago, we conceived the Lifestyle Survey as a way to gather hard data about the financial, career, and lifestyle choices that NOLS faculty make in order to maintain and build their careers at NOLS. It is often said that working in the field is the best job in the world, in terms of the work itself. Creating the environment for exceptional student experiences, working with passionate, creative, and motivated colleagues, and being part of a truly unique global community makes for an incredible workday, every single day we are on contract. Among the faculty, it is also a truism that working for NOLS is quite difficult in terms of financial realities, job security, and career advancement. Anecdotal evidence and urban legends abound to demonstrate how this is so, and how individual instructors organize their lives with impressive ingenuity, in order to be able to work in the field. Our goal with this survey is to present a statistical picture of these realities. We would like to replace the myths and legends with data, and start to build a picture with numbers of how faculty members support the mission of the school, not just with their work itself, but with their willingness to arrange their lives for what is, by most standards, a very unusual job.