Class Letter
April 20, 2004
Dear Classmates:
For 13 years I worked for a national conservation foundation, the
National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, as a grants manager. I really loved my work - helping private and public conservation organizations restore, enhance or protect critical resources. My area of focus was New England, so I was able to work with folks from coastal CT to upstate NY (along the St. Lawrence River) and downeast Maine - and everywhere in between. I met and was able to work with many educated people, both public employees and volunteers. Leaving the Foundation last August was a difficult decision for me, particularly because of the incredible satisfaction I had had over the years. But, it was also time for me to try another different direction...
My husband, Jim, is a software engineer. For most of his professional life he had focused on network management, particularly the sustaining side of large networks (when a system crashed, administering "triage" to get it up and running again and then trying to correct the software problem that had caused the failure). He had had some exposure to GIS many years ago, doing some volunteer work for the local Conservation Commission and Conservation Trust creating a map of town conservation lands using assessor's information. An idea he had had for some time was to develop software for network management combining conventional spreadsheet data and analysis with GIS spatial analysis. About 2-1/2 years ago, he started writing the software.
Last summer, he asked me to leave the Foundation and help him start a
business around this software. So I did and we have - Datanostics Company, Inc. We've submitted a patent application for the software and have one beta test site using it. It's all pretty exciting, and I'm working on getting at least one other beta test site with a conservation organization (I see it as having incredible application for resource management). Right now I handle the organizational details: incorporating, domain name, getting a logo and website, etc...still quite part-time for me, except that I live with my business partner!!
As my job at the Foundation was, and now my work with Datanostics is essentially part-time, I have been able to continue my non-paying
"career" in local government. One of the reasons we moved to a small town 25 years ago was because we (and I guess more me than my husband) wanted to be involved in our community. I started on the local Conservation Commission in the early 1980s and from there got involved in chairing an update of the town's master plan in the mid-80s, followed by serving for eight years on the Planning Board (and assorted subcommittees). After a brief hiatus, I ran for the Board of Selectmen, which I still serve on (just got re-elected).
Aside from the usual challenges facing a small (5,700) town on the outer edge of I-495 (the outer development ring for Boston) struggling to maintain its sense of community, landscape of agriculture and open space, and fiscal sanity, we have been coping with the closure of Ft. Devens in 1994. The base represented 1/5 of Harvard's land area and Harvard represented 60% of the base. With the other two towns whose lands were in the base (Ayer and Shirley) we have worked to assure redevelopment in keeping with our towns (all quite different, I might add) while providing economic opportunity to this part of the state.
To further complicate matters, when the Army announced closure of the base, the state stepped in as the local redevelopment agency, and, as such, suspended the towns' jurisdictional control over these lands and responsibility to provide municipal services. The state assumed both roles. With families now moving into restored housing on Devens, the issue of governance has become increasingly problematic (they can't elect the state agency overseeing this area). Is it going to revert to the three towns? Will it become its own town? A thorny political, social and economic issue to say the least!
Our two kids are settled in the Boston area. Our oldest, Ben, will be getting married in July and will be living in Waltham (just bought his first house!). Katherine is living and working in Cambridge. We feel very fortunate to have them so nearby. We take advantage of their city living to go out for meals with them, to the museums or occasional theater together. We enjoy being a part of their lives, but we also enjoy this time in our life - especially trying this new venture together. There is a fullness that I hadn't expected because of all the talk of the "empty nest" syndrome. I would be interested to hear how others in our class feel about this stage of life: the children grown and "now what?"
I'm sorry I won't be able to attend reunion because of a day-long planning program (Charrett) I'll be involved in here. Can't wait to read our class's "story"!
Lucy Browning Wallace
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