Proud Person Award

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The Appalachian Trail Conservancy’s (ATC) Proud Person Award — the ATC’s highest recognition for outstanding performance by a staff member — was established in 2015 to recognize the profound and enduring contributions of Bob Proudman who served the A.T. for 50 years in a variety of roles, including 35 years of employment with the ATC. The award criteria are based on demonstrated excellence in each of the ATC’s five core values: Cooperation, Integrity, Inclusion, Dedication, and Empowerment. The recipient is chosen by fellow ATC employees through a nomination and committee deliberation process.

ATC was pleased to present the 2019 Proud Person Award to Matt Drury, ATC’s resource management coordinator in the southern region. Natural resource managers are some of the unsung heroes of the Appalachian Trail. Their work to protect sensitive ecological areas and restore habitat often goes unnoticed by hikers, but it is critical to the long-term viability of A.T. plants, animals, and the A.T. experience.

Matt at work treating ash trees in the Southern Appalachians

Matt’s personal commitment and enthusiasm for his work is a catalyst for motivating volunteers to participate in his fieldwork. “Getting volunteers to do the hard, hot work of pulling invasive plants at Fontana Dam is a tough sell,” says Kristin Cozza, the ATC’s southern regional office administrator. “Matt turned the work event into a party (Kill the Dam Invasive Plants!) with music, beer, sponsors, and T-shirts. Everyone has fun and the native species have a chance to survive.”

Two recent projects exemplify Matt’s cooperative management skills. He became aware that emerald ash borers were moving into the Southern Appalachians, then led the charge to accelerate compliance work by our national forest partners, and secured funding, so that treatment could begin before the narrow window to treat trees had closed. He worked with multiple partners to identify, inject, and save over 800 ash trees along the A.T. in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. Matt’s passion for A.T. appropriate forestry was displayed at a recent ATC southern Regional Partnership Committee meeting — a presentation about Spruce Forest Regeneration at Roan and Unaka mountains. By the end, the many A.T. partners in the room were excited about helping restore this ecosystem.

Matt makes everyone at ATC feel part of the team. He mentors young staff — from conservation corps members to interns to recent college graduates working for ATC part-or-full-time, offering wisdom and encouragement. Matt has a good sense of how to make people feel valuable, involved, and celebrated. “Matt went out of his way to make me feel welcome and help me,” says Trail facilities manager Stephen Eren. “Its wasn’t his job to onboard me but he was always there to help and get the job done.”

From Kentucky, Matt attended Warren Wilson College near Asheville, North Carolina. Afterwards, he joined the Peace Corps and lived on the South Pacific island, Vanuatu for three-and-a-half years where he coordinated establishment of Mount Tabwemasana Conservation Area and built friendships on the island, who he stays in touch with via their native tongue. After the Peace Corps, he was a crew leader searching for ivory-billed woodpeckers in the swamps of South Carolina, and just prior to coming to the ATC, was the Yancey County Ranger for the North Carolina Forest Service.

With wide experience, Matt’s work for ATC is a path to the bigger role his work provides, stewarding the natural resources he cares so deeply about. He can name all the plants (the good, the bad, and the extremely rare), navigate the fruiting bodies of fungi, celebrate the special qualities of animal species (like the golden winged warbler), and identify trees with ease. His knowledge of and enthusiasm for the natural world is inspiring, as he rattles off reasons to care and ways to appreciate this vast responsibility we have for the A.T.

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