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| Brook McDonald: The go-to guy for selling open-space campaigns | |
| Aug 13, 2007 | |
| Jack Komperda jkomperda@dailyherald.com | |
| Daily Herald | |
| Pertains to Winfield Creek, IPP - Elgin Branch, Naperville, Wheaton, Oswego | |
| Brook McDonald doesn’t fit the stereotypical mold of a conservationist, and he knows it. Look at his youthful pursuits and you’d think he’d have become a gym teacher or coach rather than head of DuPage County’s most influential conservation group. Now president of The Conservation Foundation, McDonald was a popular jock who played Division III college football, lifted weights and partied with friends. Yet, as a teen, he’d also be up before the sun at a cemetery near his Ohio hometown peering through the lenses of his binoculars spotting birds. “I met some really strange people who were into looking at birds,” he said. “But I sure didn’t let anybody know about it. That just wouldn’t have been cool.” As he grew older, McDonald, who now lives near Oswego, found himself letting his athletic interests slide while cultivating his secret passion. In the decade since he took the reins of the Naperville-based not-for-profit organization, The Conservation Foundation has worked behind the scenes for open-space referendums in DuPage, Will, Kane, Kendall and DeKalb counties. The agency likes to boast it has yet to back a losing campaign, and its efforts have netted those counties and their forest preserve districts nearly $700 million for public land acquisition and conservation programs. “He’s taken this place and he’s grown it so well and kept everything so positive and productive,” said Kaaren Oldfield, a volunteer from Glen Ellyn who has worked on all 10 referendum campaigns with McDonald. “He’s just very good at getting people together.” That ability to define his message and get others to buy into it has earned McDonald a spot among the most influential environmentalists in the area. The foundation Since he was hired in 1996, McDonald has quadrupled The Conservation Foundation’s professional staff — originally just three people who worked in a cramped second-floor office in Wheaton — and similarly expanded its team of volunteers from 700 to more than 4,000. Shortly after the group helped run the first successful campaign for the DuPage County Forest Preserve District in 1997, other counties started calling. With the blessing of the agency’s board, the 46-year-old McDonald has spent the past decade expanding the foundation’s services to four other collar counties. The group conducts cleanups on the DuPage and Fox rivers, presents outreach programs for community groups and local governments, and regularly plays host to special projects to fund its annual $1 million budget. The agency has organized an environmental forum in each of the past four years that has featured seminars on topics ranging from how Chicago’s bio-diversity affects home values to persuading municipal governments to plant more trees to reduce greenhouse gases. But the core of the foundation’s mission remains open-space preservation. It often purchases land from owners, reselling it to area forest preserve districts, or talks landowners into placing conservation easements on their property. To find the means to do that, the bulk of McDonald’s efforts come through helping county forest preserve districts run successful referendum campaigns. “They’re the big guys and they have the money,” McDonald said. “If we help a forest preserve get $85 million in tax dollars and they preserve several thousand acres, that is obviously moving our mission forward.” Thanks to those efforts, McDonald said his group already has ensured 35,000 acres in five counties will stay free of development. Birds and football McDonald credits his own interest in nature to his parents and a high school teacher who showed him the wonders of the outdoors. A creek near his home in suburban Columbus, Ohio, was a favorite playground. Although his parents encouraged his love of the outdoors, he pushed his luck at times, using bed sheets as nets to catch fish in the creek. As a senior at Grove City High School, where he was captain of the football team, McDonald enrolled in a class on the natural history of Ohio. He was hooked. As a class project, McDonald catalogued all the birds found on school grounds, coming up with more than 100 species. “I thought it was pretty cool and started wondering if I could get paid for doing something like this,” he said. McDonald graduated in 1983 from Otterbein College, a small liberal arts school in Westerville, Ohio. He pursued a degree in life sciences while playing quarterback. While studying for his master’s degree at Ohio State University, McDonald worked part-time as a naturalist for the Columbus and Franklin County Metro Parks, an agency similar to a forest preserve district. He met his future wife, Adona, at the nature center he ran. He also was in charge of efforts to monitor the water quality of 10 rivers for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. The experience proved invaluable years later when McDonald joined a handful of volunteers to clean up sections of the DuPage River, a venture that grew into the DuPage River Coalition. Arriving in DuPage In 1987, an opening with Wheaton Park District led McDonald to DuPage County. He was put in charge of creating the marketing and programming of what is now the Lincoln Marsh Natural Area. “Had we not had somebody with the vision to develop the site, Lincoln Marsh would still be foundering,” said Ray Morrill, a Wheaton Park District commissioner who was responsible for hiring McDonald. By 1992, McDonald was working as a public relations and marketing specialist for the county’s forest preserve district. Among his biggest challenges was putting a positive spin on the district’s controversial policy of killing deer to stem overpopulation. It didn’t help that some of the agency’s officials weren’t exactly cooperative — or even friendly — with the media. “The forest preserve never attempted to tell its side of the story,” McDonald said. “All they saw was all the negative press about the forest preserve and nothing positive. But if you’re going to have that kind of attitude, that’s what you’re going to get.” Despite the obstacles, McDonald was able to spread the district’s message and eventually won over most critics of the deer-killing program. Getting the call As a volunteer for The Conservation Foundation, McDonald said, the agency made several attempts to lure him away from the forest preserve district. He finally relented in 1996, with only a faint vision of expanding the group by hiring more paid staffers. Within a year, Robert Schillerstrom, chairman of the DuPage County Board and then a member of The Conservation Foundation’s board, talked McDonald into running the referendum campaign for the forest preserve district. The effort was a success, fueled in part by direct-mail fliers sent to targeted residents who indicated in a prior survey that they’d be sympathetic to the forest preserve. McDonald and his volunteers were able to get nearly 60 percent of voters to agree to the agency’s request to borrow $75 million for land acquisition. “He was the sales force,” said Bill Weidner, director of public affairs for the forest preserve district. “He hired the survey company, developed the talking points and helped frame those talking points to help people understand why preserving open space is important.” He since has taken that campaign model of targeting sympathetic voters and repeated it several times over. Spreading the word Soon after the DuPage County referendum push, other public agencies started asking McDonald for assistance. In 1999, McDonald and The Conservation Foundation helped plan open-space referendum campaigns in Kane and Will counties. The forest preserve districts in each county asked residents for $70 million. They each got it. Then came a successful 2002 open-space campaign in Kendall County, which netted the local forest preserve district $5 million. In 2005, the forest preserve districts in Kane and Will counties asked the foundation yet again for help in separate referendums. The agencies received a combined $200 million in public dollars, which is being spent to preserve 10,000 acres. And just last fall, McDonald’s agency was behind another successful $68 million request from the DuPage Forest Preserve District. “We’re becoming the go-to agency right now,” McDonald said. “Other agencies are fading away and we’re growing fast. People know that if they want to preserve open space, they call us.” |
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