SRC Regional Representative — Region V

Abby Kirkbride

abby.kirkbride@colorado.edu

University of Colorado at Denver, Masters in Urban and Regional Planning
University of Colorado at Boulder, Law School

• Second-year graduate student, expected graduation in May 2013

Please list and describe briefly relevant leadership positions held at the local, regional, state, or national level.

• During my first year of law school at the University of Colorado, I chaired a committee of students reviewing the University’s Carbon Neutrality Plan. The project culminated in submitting our recommendations to the plan’s author and discussing our suggestions with school administrators. This process required me to coordinate between students and university staff members, lead brainstorming meetings, and draft the group’s comments.
• As a senior in college, I was selected as Editor in Chief for John Brown University’s weekly newspaper. I managed a staff of 15 writers, oversaw the written and visual content throughout the publication, and managed an annual budget of $15,000. 

Please list and describe briefly any relevant planning-related volunteer positions held at the local, regional, state, or national level.

• As a volunteer law clerk for the Powder River Basin Resource Council in the summer of 2010, I saw firsthand how oil and gas mining shapes rural landscapes in the American West. Specifically, I wrote a report on the Wyoming Split Estate Act entitled “State of the Split Estate: A Landowner’s Perspective,” which may result in new statewide legislation governing oil and gas extraction. This project involved weeks of legal research and interviews with several dozen subjects.
• In October 2009, I served as a volunteer coordinator for the University of Colorado’s annual Energy Justice Conference. The event brought together activists against pollutants’ disproportionate impact on the poor, with the goal of sharing potential solutions that ranged from improved cooking stove technology to community building methodology.

Please describe your involvement in planning-related activities (community, nonprofit, planning student organizations, etc.):

• As only a first-year planning student, I anticipate being involved in many more planning-related activities in the future. My current involvement is primarily through the University of Colorado’s APA student chapter. This year I attended Colorado’s annual state APA meeting, and have been involved in monthly chapter meetings and social events.

About APA and Planning  

Describe how you have benefited from APA student membership to date.

To date, the two greatest benefits of being an APA student member are connections to my peers and connections to planning professionals. As a new planning student, a forum introducing me to other motivated planning students has been invaluable. Our APA chapter also does an excellent job connecting students to planning professionals. By meeting professionals at conferences and at chapter-sponsored mixer events, I have come to understand more about the planning field and made connections that may eventually lead to a job placement.

Describe your qualifications for the SRC Regional Representative.

A SRC Regional Representative must apply excellent organizational and communication skills to bridge gaps between students and professionals, between student planning organizations at separate universities, and between APA student chapters and the national organization. In my academic and professional work, I consistently demonstrate these proficiencies. For example, I am a joint degree student between planning and law. It takes a high degree of foresight and organization to manage my schedule and extracurricular activities in a way that accommodates both programs. These same skills will help me effectively coordinate between groups as a SRC Regional Representative. In addition, my strong communications background as a journalism major, freelance writer and editor, and media coordinator for an international nonprofit will help me efficiently and clearly share information within my region.

How can APA and its student leaders assist planning students’ transition into planning careers?

APA serves as a crucial interface between planning students and professionals, and the most important thing it can do to help transition students into planning careers is consistently facilitate interactions between these groups. Purposefully including students in APA activities creates opportunities for networking, which leads to internship prospects, which ultimately leads to professional competence and job placement. Also, providing students with timely information about developments in the planning field through forums like The New Planner and APA Interact helps build professional awareness, another important factor in securing a first job.

Why did you choose planning as a career path?

Since my childhood on a cattle ranch in Wyoming, I have been interested in how the use of natural resources today impacts their abundance and health tomorrow. If my family did not appropriately care for our pastures, the land would not sustain next year’s herds. Eventually, I came to realize how pertinent this issue is to both rural and urban residents, and that as a planner, I would have a direct impact on the way entire communities use natural resources. Further, the more I learned about planning, the more I saw that my particular interests in communication, legal regulations, and architecture were all important components of the profession.

What have you learned from previous leadership experience?

My previous leadership experiences have taught me the value of organization and the importance of availability. Elected leaders should be helpful and knowledgeable, which requires an initial effort to learn the relevant material, and then an investment of time to organize information in a way that is useful to others. Further, being aware of pertinent information and being personally organized enables availability, which is one of my key leadership values. Organizations produce great work by virtue of input from many members, but this dynamic only occurs if leaders are available for these conversations.