Tanya Blanchard – President & Founder
Tanya is a researcher, analyst, organizer of information, and advocate for people and communities whose voices are often overlooked. In addition to serving as the president of Preserve Rural Maine, she also writes at Landowners’ Voice about energy, infrastructure, land use, and the decisions shaping rural Maine.
Approaching her work with a careful, questioning mind, Tanya is interested in how things work, how decisions are made, and whether the information being presented tells the whole story. She spends considerable time reading public records, regulatory filings, legislation, and energy proposals, following the details and connecting the pieces. Her goal is not simply to understand what is being proposed, but to understand what it means for the people and places affected by it.
Tanya’s early career was in corporate banking and insurance, including work as a data analyst and in database and project management, which gave her a strong foundation in organizing information, recognizing patterns, and working through complicated problems. She brings those same skills to her work in rural Maine, along with a commitment to truth, integrity, and careful consideration of the people who are too often left out of important decisions.
Leaving the corporate world to raise her family, Tanya and her husband are proud parents of seven children, most of whom are now adults. With 27 years of homeschooling behind her, Tanya is enjoying these last few homeschooling years with her two school-age teens. She has spent much of her adult life building a family and a life in rural Maine, and she understands the value of the quiet, beauty, and independence that draw people to rural communities.
Outside of her research and advocacy work, Tanya works as a seamstress, and she is an amateur oil painter, and a lifelong vegetable and flower gardener, though she is still trying to figure out how to grow enough food for her family without nearby wildlife eating it first. She also enjoys the simple, beautiful, and ordinary work of making a home.
Tanya believes that rural Maine deserves thoughtful consideration, that people deserve access to the truth, and that those who are most affected by decisions should have the opportunity to understand them and be heard.
Joshua Kercsmar – Vice President
After majoring in Theology (B.A. Wheaton College), Josh worked on a farm in New Hampshire, then took gigs as a commercial fisherman on a rusty trawler off the coast of Massachusetts, a carpenter, a lawn care professional, and a dissatisfied office worker who learned to revile doing anything under fluorescent lights or in cubicles.
Humbled, he found his way to graduate school. While his seminary education (M.Div., Gordon-Conwell) persuaded him against going into ministry, it showed him that studying history could help explain why the world is the way it is. Curiosity piqued, he went on to study American religious history (Th.M., Harvard Divinity School) and the history of slavery in early America (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame).
Josh is now an associate professor of Environmental Humanities at Unity Environmental University, where he teaches courses in history, writing, and environmental ethics. His research lives at the intersection of the history of slavery and animal husbandry in the British Atlantic World, ca. 1600 – 1834, and dips into the history of capitalism. It asks a big, perhaps unanswerable, question: How do the ways people treat nature shape how they treat each other?
Josh lives in Unity, Maine, with his wife and two kids. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, walking through woods and fields, and taking down opponents in ping-pong.
Eric Rolfson – Treasurer
Eric spent more than 40 years securing financial support for various educational institutions and held leadership staff positions in $10 million, $35 million, and $150 million comprehensive fundraising campaigns. In 2015, he founded The Rolfson Group, a nine-member institutional advancement consulting firm, and over the following seven years helped more than three dozen nonprofit organizations fund their missions in sectors including health services, arts and culture, social services, and education.
Prior to his career in fundraising, Eric taught English, French, and American Studies at the secondary and college levels, both in the United States and abroad. Additionally, Eric was co-founder and President of Toast Technologies Inc., a Massachusetts-based information technology company with expertise in network infrastructure consulting.
An avid musician, Eric toured with Old Grey Goose International and Project Troubador, the missions of which were to promote multi-cultural appreciation and understanding through the performance and exchange of traditional song and dance. Tours over the past 20 years included collaborations with local musicians in Niger, Benin, Mauritania, Algeria, Poland, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Cuba, Mongolia, Ukraine, Israel, and Jordan. He currently performs closer to home with The Oystermen and Belfast Bay Fiddlers.
For the past 47 years, Eric and his wife, Becky, have operated a family maple syrup business, managed their woodlot, maintained trails, and have lived sustainably on their land in Albion, Maine.
Steve Ingalls – Secretary
Steve is a lifetime resident of New England and fortunate to call the Sebasticook Valley area of Maine his home with his wife Terry and cat Patches. The father of an adult son and daughter, he is a commercial lender, having a banking career that spans 37 years. He is passionate about helping his local community, enjoying the unspoiled beauty and solitude of nature and supporting the rural way of life that Maine offers.
Brook DeLorme
Brook is a thirteenth generation Mainer, from a lineage of lobstermen and French-Canadian factory workers. Her work has been in the creative details of numerous small businesses. She is an artist, writer, and amateur violinist. She loves the forests and fields of rural Maine, and lives in the tiny town of Palermo, with husband Daniel, and their dog.