Valerie Damstra

Valerie (Val) Damstra has over 20 years of experience caring for freshwater in the Great Lakes region holding positions in nonprofits, academic institutions, the private sector, and state government related to watershed protection, community outreach, and program management. 

A Michigan native, Val started her environmental career working for organizations such as Clean Water Action and The Nature Conservancy. In 2005, she joined the staff of Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council in Petoskey, Michigan, where she began to hone her skills in facilitating multi-stakeholder watershed advisory groups, implementing watershed plans, conducting outreach programs, and training volunteers to collect macroinvertebrates to monitor stream health.

In 2009 Val moved with her family to the Ashland area and built a career holding several positions in Wisconsin’s Lake Superior basin. For the next four years she worked for the Bad River Watershed Association, now Superior Rivers Watershed Association. There she engaged with local citizens to provide their input into the Marengo River Watershed Action Plan, one of the first EPA-approved watershed plans focused on watershed protection in Wisconsin. Additionally, Val served as a coordinator of the organization’s volunteer water quality monitoring program, where she trained volunteers to collect and identify macroinvertebrates and conduct water chemistry sampling in streams.

Next Val worked as a communications trainer and project manager for Water Words that Work, LLC, a for-profit marketing and communications firm that helps nature protection and pollution control organizations professionalize and modernize their communications. She led virtual environmental communications trainings for dozens of groups and managed a variety of outreach and branding projects for organizations across the United States.  

Val also served as the partnership coordinator for the Chequamegon Bay Area Partnership when based at Northland College (2015-2017), and the Lake Superior Landscape Restoration Partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Extension (2017-2019). While with Extension, Val worked with partners to successfully merge these two partnerships into its current iteration, the Lake Superior Collaborative.

For five years Val then served as the Operations Manager for the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College. There she oversaw the day-to-day operations of the center and supported staff and student researchers with a variety of applied freshwater research, restoration, and environmental communications projects in and around the south shore of Lake Superior, northwest Wisconsin, and beyond. Additionally, she served the role as project lead for the center's participation in the National Park Service Dragonfly Mercury Project.

Most recently Val worked as the Lake Superior Program Coordinator for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ Office of Great Waters. In this role she engaged with the Lake Superior Partnership Working Group, a binational group of agencies that work together to implement the Lake Superior Lakewide Area Management Plan (LAMP). She also supported WDNR staff and partners to develop a number of restoration and protection project proposals that were approved for funding by the EPA through the federal Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. 

She is glad to be back working with her former Burke Center colleagues in her new role as Associate Director-Operations. Val has a bachelor’s degree in fisheries and wildlife management from Lake Superior State University in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.