NEW Solutions is grateful for the people who work with the program to make it so effective and worthwhile for many, many reasons.   We celebrate those individuals every day quietly, humbly and with great admiration for them.  The following article is about one of those wonderful people – an ACES Enrollee that works for the NRCS Office in Colorado at the Denver Federal Center – Mary Mondragon!! Mary’s Monitors are greatly appreciative of her work...

H. ANN McKAMEY is a Virginia native, born and raised in the city of Alexandria. As a career civil servant, she worked in the Federal Government for over 45 years – 18 at the Department of Agriculture, and 27 with the General Services Administration. In 1980, she was afforded the opportunity of working at the White House as a Program Assistant during the Carter Administration. While there, she met President Jimmy Carter. Her assignment...

Recently we have had the pleasure of interviewing an ACES-NRCS Enrollee for the purpose of including her as a Spotlight in our ACES Newsletter. Faye’s monitors have highly recommended her for the Spotlight, and we agree completely! Her name is Elizabeth “Faye” Floyd, and she has been with the ACES Program since 2013. Faye plays a great role in the Jackson office as a Program Support Specialist, and she is a very dedicated ACES-NRCS...

FS ACES Enrollee, Larry Blythe, is a Training Instructor (Forestry Practices) at Oconaluftee Job Corps Civilian Conservation Center, Cherokee, NC and is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. As a child, Larry grew up following his grandpa around on a farm and woodland where he and his family grew crops, hunted and fished and enjoyed the outdoors. This background engendered an interest in Forestry through the 4-H program. After...

Here at NEW Solutions we take great pride in our ACES Enrollees, and we love to get feedback from Monitors about their Enrollees. We know how much all the enrollees are appreciated, but when words are used like “We are very fortunate to have ______ as an ACES Enrollee” and “___ is an example of how an ACES enrollee can provide experience and knowledge-based leadership to mentor and train NRCS employees” we are even more...

Since 2014, Narayanan Parthasarathy has been an enrollee with NEW Solutions and works in the Product Science Branch (PSB) of the Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP) at the Environmental Protection Agency. PSB evaluates scientific data on antimicrobial pesticide products, including chemistry, toxicity, and efficacy. For Narayanan’s part, he conducts both product chemistry and acute toxicology reviews for registration of the antimicrobial pesticide products. Specifically, Narayanan analyses and interprets submitted data on pesticide chemical formulations and...

As with many of the talented people that are involved with the ACES-NRCS Program, Rich Casale started as an ACES enrollee shortly after he retired from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. He had served for most of his career (43 years!) as the District Conservationist in Santa Cruz County, CA. Rich had worked with several ACES enrollees while employed by NRCS over the years and always thought that type of work would be...

How did you become interested in working for the Forest Service and when did you start work for the FS? It seems I’ve always had an interest in the outdoors. In the 1960s, Lassie ended up with a Forest Ranger. At that point, at about 10 years of age, I knew what I wanted to do for a living. I originally worked for the Soil Conservation Service as a range conservationist. My first job...

Donald Gipe is an Instructor for EPA’s unique National Air Compliance Training Delivery Project (NACTDP). The Clean Air Act establishes the respective roles of state and federal agencies within the statutory framework mandated by Congress. States, usually in conjunction with their local agencies, have the primary responsibility for the control of air pollution within their respective geographic boundaries. This responsibility entails the development and implementation of air pollution control plans and strategies to meet...

Denise at the Vasco Caves Archaeological District during survey fieldwork for the Concord field office this spring. This is a large complex site in the hills of Contra Costa County containing many pictographs (rock art) and bedrock mortars and seasonal camp sites. The NRCS project was a spring box replacement which required intensive tribal consultation due to the sacred nature of this National Register-listed historic property. Denise De Joseph joined the...