Patricia Baldi Waak, Director of the National Audubon Society's Population and Habitat Campaign, spent 2 years with the U.S. Peace Corps in Brazil
PATRICIA BALDI WAAK
Patricia Baldi Waak is Director of the National Audubon Society's Population and Habitat Campaign. Pat Waak spent over 20 years in the fields of public health, population, family planning and development before coming to National Audubon Society 12 years ago. As such, she was one of the first to bridge these important fields and to build a grassroots network to seek local to global solutions.
Pat came to Audubon from the Center for Population and Family Health at Columbia University where she was Assistant Director for Administration. She has worked in numerous developing countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Her international experience also includes 5 years with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and 2 years with the U.S. Peace Corps in Brazil.
During her USAID tenure, Pat was a Special Assistant to the Assistant Administrator for Population and Humanitarian Assistance and the Bureau for Development Support, and Associate and Deputy Director of the Office of Population. She also served as the Agency's liaison for the Global 2000 Study. She has served as a USAID consultant in Washington DC, Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Nigeria; and Nepal.
Pat worked on political campaigns in between jobs. In fact, she quit her job at Planned Parenthood to become the Deputy Campaign Manager for Sargent Shriver's presidential bid in 1976. That led Pat into government where she stayed until 1982. Pat had just returned from a month in Zimbabwe when Audubon offered her a position in 1985.
Pat was a member of the team which created the World Conservation Union-IUCN's population and environment initiative in 1986. She continues to serve on the Commission on Environmental Strategies and Planning and chairs the Working Group on Population and Environment.
Pat was a member of the official U.S. delegation to the 2nd and 3rd preparatory meetings for the U.N. International Conference on Population and Development. She was a member of the U.S. delegation to the final 1994 meeting in Cairo.
In 1992, Pat received an award from the Population Reference Bureau for her leadership in the field of population and environment. She is also recipient of the National Audubon Society's President's Award for Excellence and the ACE award. Pat was one of six U.S. women to participate in the U.S.-Japan Women's Environmental Leadership Exchange, sponsored by the Japan Society from 1995-96.
Pat currently chairs the editorial board of the magazine, "People and the Planet". She also is an author and the co-editor with her husband, Kenneth Strom, of Sharing the Earth: Cross-Cultural Experiences in Population, Wildlife and the Environment. Pat is the author of Faith, Justice and a Healthy World, a guide on population and environment for people of faith, which is being used at the community level to bring the population, environment, and religious groups together around sustainability. (continued on reverse)
Pat is the executive producer of three video films: "What is the Limit?"; "Human Population and Wildlife", and the award winning, "Finding the Balance".
Pat's family has been in Texas for about 150 years on both sides. Her dad's family is German immigrant and her mom's family is a mix of believe-it-or-not Scotch, Irish, African, and Native American. Pat's mother was visiting Oklahoma when she was born, but she spent most of her young life in Texas. She has fond memories of roaming East Texas pine forests.
Pat graduated from high school in Conroe, Texas, just north of Houston. Her sister still lives there. She went to Louisiana to attend Tulane University and graduated from Mather School of Nursing in New Orleans with a degree in Nursing. She was "The Most Outstanding Graduate" of 1964 and also received a Pediatric Nursing Award. Then she went back to Houston for two years working and attending the University of Houston.
Pat met Joe Baldi in the Peace Corps and married him in Brazil. After they returned, Cinira Baldi was born in Madison, Wisconsin. She will be 28 years old on April 28th. Her sister, Rachel, was born in Washington, D.C. in 1970, so she will be 27 years old this summer. Joe and Pat divorced in 1983.
Ken Strom, former director of National Audubon's Rowe Sanctuary, and Pat fell in love when they were working on the book, Sharing the Earth, in the early 1990s. They married in 1994 and live on 6.4 acres east of Boulder just outside the town of Erie, Colorado. They have a great view of the Rocky Mountains!
Cinira is staying with Pat and Ken temporarily while she gets ready to enter graduate school this fall. Rachel still lives in Arlington, VA with her daughter, Anise. Anise is Pat's pride and joy! Ken is Director of the Audubon Ecology Camp in the Rockies outside Dubois, Wyoming and Anise spends each summer there with Pat and Ken.
Last spring, Pat finished a degree in psychology from St. Joseph's College and is currently in a combined graduate program between the Avalon Institute and Regis University. This program is focused on archetypal psychology and she is focused on values and belief systems and how they help or prevent us from dealing with the issues of population and the environment.
Pat and Ken have three animals in their house: Ken's cat Rosie; Pat's Lhasa Apso, Peko; and their Lhasa Apso, Dolly. Dolly comes from Texas and is wild so she and her mistress are starting obedience school.
Pat's passions are a medicine wheel she is building on the land; her music (she sings, plays the guitar and is learning to play a Native American flute); her painting - currently faces of archetypal images; her genealogical research - the story of her tri-racial line, their origins (possibly the Gambia and Senegal for the African line), and their movement west.
(Thanks to Helen Engle for providing this information)
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