By Kristen Poppleton

Hello MNTU! My name is Kristen Poppleton and I am the new Assistant Director for Minnesota Trout Unlimited. This week I took advantage of the beautiful weather to drive south to Winona and meet Jennifer Biederman, our amazing Habitat Program Director, walk a recent habitat improvement project, and meet many members of the Win-Cres chapter, as well as local partners. The warm in-person community welcome was lovely and I am so excited to head out to all corners of Minnesota to meet you.

Since I can’t be everywhere all at once though, I’d like to introduce myself here. Let me begin by saying I am a Minnesotan and I was lucky to have parents that took us into the woods and onto the water frequently growing up. Whether camping, hiking, canoeing, identifying wildflowers, or fishing- I was always happiest being outside, learning about the world around me. I spent summers during high school canoeing in the Boundary Waters and Canada, and winters, cross-country ski racing, and playing in the snow. I realized in college my love for the outdoors was something I wanted to incorporate into my professional life and pursued a degree in Biology. Post college I spent several years as a Naturalist and environmental educator, much of that time in Ely, Minnesota and received a MEd in Environmental Education at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

I loved getting people outside, educating them about the world around them, but as I grew older and the multiple environmental threats to the natural world became more and more clear, I felt a need to shift gears from purely education to working more in the advocacy realm. I pursued a graduate degree in Conservation Biology, and for the last fourteen years I have been tackling the climate crisis through a Minnesota based organization called Climate Generation. My work has included operations and fundraising support, as well as developing programs to educate, engage, and activate communities and classrooms across Minnesota and North America; supporting legislative campaigns, many high school youth-led; and planning and leading an annual delegation to the international climate conference (COP).

In my home life, I am a Mom to a junior at St. Paul Central High School and freshman at Carleton College. My husband is the Executive Director of YMCA Camp Widjiwagan and we spend much of the summer in Ely, on the shores of Burntside Lake. I love Macro photography and in the spring you can find me wherever the spring wildflowers are blooming behind a lens. My entire family cross country skis, but now I race more against myself than anyone else.

I have a life-long love for Minnesota’s natural ecosystems, especially aquatic, and am so excited about the opportunity incorporate what I have learned from my twenty-five plus years of experience in environmental education and advocacy, with what I will learn from you all. In my parting reflection for Climate Generation I wrote, “I believe an organization matures due to the support, passion, smarts, mistakes, and investment of many people.” My experience thus far with MNTU has introduced me to an amazing network of people passionate about protecting, restoring, and sustaining our cold-water fisheries. I hope to meet many of you across the state of Minnesota soon, to hear how I can support you and expand our efforts to communicate and advocate for cold-water fisheries. Please reach out for a chat anytime or better yet, to invite me out to your local trout stream to show me a thing or two about fly-fishing!