Getting to know our Fellows

This is a guest post from Haley McKey, Next Interior's former Comms Director who is now working on climate and carbon at the Carbon Business Council.

When we launched the Next Interior Fellowship Program, we sought projects that live at the intersection of people, nature, and climate and contribute to the mission of a strong and supported Department of the Interior. Our inaugural Next Interior Fellows, Vanessa Leasi Raymond and Adam Auerbach, have two pretty different projects. One theme that unites them? Communication. They centered their work around conversations as a pathway for imagining new futures; for sharing community knowledge and ideas; and for creating new connections. They shared their respective approaches to their projects and what they’ve learned so far in our December webinar - check it out here. (You can also find Vanessa's and Adam's reports at Figshare, and we have a short post on those reports here.)

So, we thought it was only fitting for Next Interior to have a conversation with them to hear their perspectives on what brought them to the fellowship, their relationship with Interior, and the things they learned during their fellowships that they’re bringing with them into 2026 and beyond.

Learn more about each of their projects and check out our Q&A below.

Vanessa and her project

Leasi Vanessa Lee Raymond is a socio-technologist passionate about data ethics and Indigenous data sovereignty, currently serving as Deputy Director for Strategic Initiatives at Alaska Center for Energy and Power at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. 

Through the U.S. Geological Survey, Interior manages a list of 60 or so minerals deemed critical to the U.S. economy and key industries. For the past several months, Vanessa has been bringing Alaskans into the studio to discuss these critical minerals and the future of technology, society, and energy together on her weekly radio show, Them Thar Hills, on KSUA 91.5 FM (Fairbanks). 

Each episode is centered around  a particular critical mineral - the show’s covered antimony, nickel and copper, among others - and features great music, conversations and guests from many different walks of life - including a baby! The goal is to keep things casual and approachable, even when guests are experts. Vanessa noted in our webinar, “one of the first things I find when I ask someone, ‘hey, do you want to come on my show?’ Without fail - doesn't matter who the person is or what their background is - they say ‘I don't know anything about critical minerals.’ This includes geologists who have worked at gold mines here in the state...what I take away from this is that people don't feel entitled to have an opinion, and they feel that they need to be a specialist and an expert in order to have discourse about this.” 

How do we cut through the feeling of needing to know everything in order to have an opinion? What makes critical minerals critical - and critical to whom? Vanessa explores these topics and much more on the show. 

She’s also crafting an important resource, What We Heard: Critical Minerals, Climate, and Sovereignty from the U.S. Arctic and Pacific, which will synthesize DOI actions, guest & public feedback, and Arctic and Pacific voices from the show to inform future engagement and critical minerals policy decisions. You can read initial learnings here.

Adam and his project

Adam is a public lands and conservation professional based in Colorado, where his experience relevant to Next Interior has included work in interpretation with the National Park Service, managing partnerships and workforce programs for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and grassroots public lands advocacy. Currently, Adam serves as Founder & Principal at Colorado Public Lands Advocacy & Conservation Expertise (CO-PLACE).

In the spring of 2025, DOI’s former Deputy Infrastructure Coordinator Kat Currie launched the Institutional Knowledge Project to identify and document the experience and expertise leaving Interior in the form of early retirements, buyouts and RIFs by holding conversations, focus groups and surveys with departing DOI staff. Learnings from this project will inform the development of recommendations on how and where to best rebuild an effective future DOI. Adam is complementing and contributing to this important work by connecting with partner organizations, academics, stakeholders, and rightsholders from outside of Interior. As Adam put it during our December webinar, “the role of my project is to field truth some of the ideas that Kat is getting from departing feds, and to complement those ideas with those of folks who have perspectives from living out in public lands communities, predominantly in the West.”

Adam has identified several priorities from these conversations - including the need for a future DOI to overcome existing barriers to working effectively with local people in public lands communities and the need to address the siloing of agencies and more effectively coordinate across government. Further, conversations surfaced a widespread interest in insulating Interior’s systems from the dramatic pendulum swings of different political administrations. “Folks are really interested in seeing an investment now in the next generation of civil servants, and a return to science-based decision-making, public involvement and engagement in decision-making such that we can have some restored trust in agencies.”

The findings from these interviews will pair with Kat’s and other recommendations being developed to collectively inform Next Interior’s recommendations for how and where to most effectively rebuild DOI in the future.

Q&A with Adam and Vanessa

What drew you to Next Interior and your interest in getting involved with the Fellowship?

Vanessa: Next Interior’s LinkedIn presence - [it gave me a] feeling that there was action we could take in a moment that was pretty trying and challenging. It wasn’t just about problem identification, but about movement, a positive way forward. I’ve been thinking about critical minerals for a long time, and I was getting serious about doing a PhD on critical minerals and sovereignty. I loved the public engagement aspect of the call for projects- I work in academia, and there are so few [projects] that have that component. As someone who’s done radio for over 20 years, I thought ‘wow, I could do radio!’ 

So, one, I was feeling a little lost, and the Fellowship felt like this beacon that said, ‘hey, there is a future, and we can come together and imagine that future’. And two, it gave me an opportunity to test out this idea and see whether I want to commit to it, and bring in my community.

Adam: I care a lot about Interior as a former employee of the National Park Service, and I’ve done  a lot of partnership work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Next Interior was interesting to me because of its forward-looking perspective of both being able to see clearly the moment of crisis that we’re in, and wanting to alchemize that moment of crisis into a better future.

What was your relationship to or understanding of the Department of the Interior like prior to the Fellowship?

Vanessa: Pretty limited! I didn’t have a full understanding of the breadth of the Dept of the Interior. A lot of my work has been in engagement and sovereignty spaces, and I had heard it [discussed] in a very acrimonious way. What I liked about Next Interior was that it was clear that [it] saw Tribal relations and consultation as an area for vast improvement, and Jacob made it clear all the way through that that was his value, and he saw that as the function of Interior. We don’t have to be complacent and just accept what has been.

Adam: Being an interpretive ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park was a really fulfilling part of my career, and developing internship and fellowship programs for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was also rewarding - cultivating the next generation of stewards who want to support that agency and its mission. That work was personal to me, as my very first job in conservation was through a similar AmeriCorps program with the Nevada Conservation Corps on a chainsaw crew. We worked on a lot of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands - that was really the genesis of my own origin story in conservation and public lands.

Next Interior envisions a strong and supported U.S. Department of the Interior that is able to realize its full potential in serving the Nation. What comes to mind for you when you think of this vision for the future?

Vanessa: My personal interests are about Tribal sovereignty and governance; certainly more environmental protections…and participatory governance: I’m active at the local level, and in Alaska, things can come down to one vote. It does matter. That seems core to Next Interior’s values. And I’d like to see more of my peers and my friends engaged at that level.

Adam: Restoring pride in service. I think about how I felt during my first season at Rocky Mountain National Park: the pride I felt putting up the American flag at my visitors’ center, one of the busiest in the country, and going in to serve the public. This administration seems to be working so hard to crush that sense of pride. I really hope to see a future in which all the young people I helped facilitate careers for not only get to serve, but experience an appreciative American public. And a future strong Interior that not only delivers on its mission, but repairs that relationship between the American people and its civil servants. 

There are significant opportunities for improvement with how we staff for public lands [inside and outside of Interior]. There are great youth workforce programs like the ones I’ve managed that bring in people from all over the country, but if we’re not sourcing our staff by capacity-building locally, and that really doesn’t facilitate trust-building with communities. There’s such a strong incentive structure in the federal government for people to move to get promoted or go on detail, which is a huge relationship infrastructure problem. So much of public lands work is working effectively with local communities and building partnerships. It takes years to build trust, and if you’re only in a particular role for a year and a half, the people who got to know you feel like it’s a waste of their time.

What has changed for you as a result of your Fellowship work?

Vanessa: A lot changed - it was a transformative period for me, and the Fellowship was a part of that. It sounds so cheesy, but [I gained more hope]: the hope that we can be the change we want to see in the world. It feels like we can do that, and it just takes a little bit of hope and faith and good, well-intentioned people, and I’m grateful to have brushed shoulders with the folks at Next Interior. Same thing with my cohosts - I know all of them, but we don’t talk about these things, and that type of connection has been transformative.

Adam: There were some issues that I had intuition for, but which came into starker relief through this project - for example, challenges with siloing and coordination [between agencies]. I also have a better understanding of the interplay between the various parts of Interior’s mission - I had a strong background, but now I understand more deeply how [for example] science and Tribal relations is interrelated with public lands - I see the web more clearly after this project, the connection between the various agencies and bureaus; [for example], how U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service programs are essential to the National Park Service delivering on their mission.

What is something you will take from the work you are doing as part of the Fellowship into your career or your life?

Vanessa: The application was the wild pitch. [In my application] I wrote about narrative sovereignty - empowering people to be part of the discussion as non-experts, as citizens. I feel like I was really able to solidify that concept, why that’s important, how it’s powerful and how needed it is. Doing the Fellowship really was me working on that concept and practicing it every week. So I think that’s something that I’ll bring with me forever. 

I think the show really has legs. There’s a lot of interest in listening to and being on the show and it feels really timely in Alaska right now. I think it will probably continue for the rest of the year, if not throughout my PhD.

Adam: As I’ve been having these conversations with people, it’s empowering to realize that there are all these agency structures that inform our daily life if you work in this field - historical constructs that made sense in the past - but are they really serving us today? It’s helped me see how some of these things that are so ever-present might change for the better. Let’s not assume them to be inherent if they’re not actually working for us.