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Pat Ford, Executive Director
Boise

Pat has lived in Idaho from the age of two, but it was four years in New York City, at college, that made him an Idahoan. He has been a full-time conservationist since 1977, save for six years in the 1980s when he wrote about conservation, mostly for High Country News. He helped found the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition in 1992, and has worked for it since. Pat has served on the boards of seven conservation organizations in Idaho, the Northern Rockies, and Northwest, but has been smart enough recently to reduce that to two. He lives in Boise, near his daughters Leigh and Annie, grandson Max and granddaughter Danica, and the mountains named and unnamed of central Idaho. Pat has made salmon the center of his work for 18 years because the creature and its connections to nature and culture instruct him in oh so many things. As Henri Fabre said a century ago about bees, salmon are a magic well: the more you know, the more there is to know.

Joseph Bogaard, Deputy Director
Seattle

Joseph has worked for Save Our Wild Salmon since 1996. While much of his early work focused on managing the organization's technology infrastructure, he now works on the Columbia & Snake Rivers Campaign, collaborating with the coalition partners to educate the public and build support in Congress for lasting solutions to restore healthy, self-sustaining, harvestable populations of wild salmon and steelhead in the Columbia Basin. Joseph first got hooked on Northwest salmon recovery while in graduate school where he authored a paper in the mid-1990s exploring the then-relatively recent Snake River salmon and steelhead listings under the Endangered Species Act, and how it might impact the region and its federal lands and dams. Before joining the SOS team, Joseph spent many years teaching and working in the forests and mountains of the West. Today, Joseph lives on Vashon Island with his wonderful wife Amy and two children Liesl and Jeremiah.

Gilly Lyons, Policy and Legal Director
Portland

Gilly Lyons began her tenure with SOS as Washington, DC Representative in October 2003. After five years in our nation's capitol, she returned to Portland, OR and served as SOS' Senior Policy Analyst. Prior to joining the SOS staff, Gilly spent six years as grassroots coordinator for the Oregon Natural Desert Association (an SOS Coalition member) in Bend and Portland, OR, and two years as legislative advocate for the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign in Washington, DC. Despite all those years as a terrestrial activist, she has been enchanted by Columbia Basin salmon since working on the Oregon Clean Stream Initiative in 1996. Gilly, who hails from New York City, holds a masters of science in environmental studies from the University of Montana. She's not much of an angler, but keeps intending to take lessons. Gilly lives in Portland with her beau, Alan, and her trusty co-pilot Gracie.

Sam Mace, Inland Northwest Project Director
Spokane

Originally from Coos Bay, Oregon, Sam Mace has worked on behalf of forests, fish and rivers for 15 years. She first moved to Eastern Washington in 1994 and joined efforts to restore the Snake River in 1998 as the Salmon and Steelhead Project Coordinator for Washington and Idaho Wildlife Federations based in Spokane. In 2000 Sam moved back to Oregon where she worked for Trout Unlimited. Homesick for snow, desert, the Palouse and the Snake River, Sam returned to Eastern Washington in 2004 as Save Our Wild Salmon's Inland Northwest Project Director. Sam spends her free time hiking, fishing and floating western rivers and looks forward to doing a trip on a free-flowing lower Snake River some day in the future. She has a B.A. in History from Reed College.

Amy Baird, Communications Director
Portland

Having lived in many parts of the United States over the course of her life, Amy is excited to settle in beautiful Portland, Oregon. Her undergraduate coursework included studying abroad in a small fishing village in Costa Rica where her eyes were opened to serious ecological issues, including sea turtle poaching and illegal shark finning. After graduating cum laude from the University of the Pacific with a BA in Global Economic Relations, she turned her focus to activism and the environment. Before joining SOS, she spent four years doing international marine conservation with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (featured in the hit Animal Planet television series “Whale Wars”) doing media relations, outreach, and publicity. An avid reader, traveler, and cribbage player, Amy believes that it is important to take the issues seriously, but never ourselves.

Bobby Hayden, National Representative
Portland

Bobby hails from the brooks and streams of the Appalachian range in central Pennsylvania and has lived in Oregon since 1998. After receiving his degree in Political Science from the University of Oregon in 2003, he has worked in a variety of industries on behalf of organized labor and the environment. As the National Representative for SOS, Bobby is impassioned by the opportunities of a restored Snake River for working families throughout the Northwest. He joined the campaign in 2006 following work with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU Local 503), and America Coming Together. When he's not working, Bobby can be found with his partner Jenny and their cat Jove, up playing drums in the attic, out and about on his bike, or working in the garden.
    

Kristie Miller, Administrative Manager
Seattle

Following a 20-year career as a Commissioned Office with NOAA, Kristie joined SOS in mid-2007 as Administrative Manager. Most recently posted at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle as the Executive Officer for the Environmental Conservation Division, she previously served as the Associate Director of NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory in Miami, FL. During her tenure at NOAA, Kristie served as the Executive Officer for various research vessels, both while at sea and in port, with responsibility for providing logistical, administrative and budgetary support to NOAA research facilities. She is now pleased to be putting those skills to use on behalf of environmental and conservation causes.