For Audrey Rust, former president of the Palo Alto-based nonprofit land trust Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST), a deep connection to nature and a desire to protect it goes back to childhood. As a teenager in Connecticut, she convinced developers building a road through the woods near her home to transplant some of the lady slipper orchids she loved, which have since been listed as a species of special concern, onto her mother’s property.
“They only lasted a few years, but it gave me a little boost,” she said.
Rust went on to a successful career in national fundraising for Yale University, Stanford University and eventually the Sierra Club. While Rust was honing her fundraising skills, Midpen’s first general manager, Herb Grench, proposed forming a private land trust that could work more nimbly with sellers, and raise money to supplement public funding for land conservation. This resulted in the creation of POST in 1977.
“Working at Stanford, and later Yale and the Sierra Club, helped me connect with many people on the Peninsula,” Rust said.
While working for the Sierra Club, Rust also got to know POST by serving on their citizens advisory committee, helping to plan for what is now Midpen’s Skyline Ridge Open Space Preserve. POST’s first executive director, Bob Augsburger, approached Rust twice over the course of nearly a decade suggesting she consider taking the lead at POST.
“I thought I would be there three or four years and I was there 24. It was the absolute best fit for me. We were accomplishing great things with really lasting benefits for the greater community and world.”
During Rust’s tenure as president, she led POST in raising millions of dollars and preserving 53,000 acres of open space land in the Bay Area, much of which has since been transferred to Midpen and POST’s other public agency partners to steward in perpetuity.
“We prioritized protecting land that connected to other open spaces for wildlife and trail corridors, not just because it was beautiful. If we’re asking people to contribute, it has to have a direct public benefit.”
Today, Rust is very concerned about the effects of climate change on people and the natural ecosystems that she and others have worked so hard to protect. She continues enjoying open space, along with her lifelong love of native plants, as part of a weekly hiking group she formed just before retiring from POST. Her favorite local trails to explore depend on the time of year.
“If you get to know the seasonality of places, you can get the best of them. It’s all about the weather in conjunction with nature. For example, when you walk out in the Monte Bello Open Space Preserve, that vista down the valley is breathtaking, especially when it’s slightly misty.”