Margery Feldberg is a co-owner of De Hoek Farm in New Milford, Connecticut, a breeder and purveyor of Angus beef. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia Business School, Margery spent three decades in commercial real estate development prior to taking up farming. She was a founding partner of National Development, the largest commercial real estate developer in Massachusetts, and was a director of the privately held firm for 19 years. In 2007, Margery partnered with her neighbor and Weantinoge Heritage Land Trust to protect 400 vulnerable acres next to De Hoek farm, sparking a sustained interest in conservation. She has served 10 years as a director and officer of Crested Butte Land Trust, another accredited land trust, which is active in Colorado’s Gunnison Valley.

Jim Millstein is the co-chairman of Guggenheim Securities, the investment banking and capital markets business of Guggenheim Partners, a global investment and advisory firm.  Prior to joining Guggenheim in 2018, Jim was the founder and chief executive officer at Millstein & Co., a financial advisory and public policy firm with offices in New York and Washington, D.C. Before founding Millstein & Co., Jim was the chief restructuring officer at the U.S. Department of the Treasury from 2009 to 2011. Prior to joining the Treasury, he served as managing director and global co-head of corporate restructuring at Lazard from 2000 to 2008. Before joining Lazard, Jim was partner and head of the corporate restructuring practice at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. Jim splits his time between Washington, D.C. and South Kent, Connecticut with his family.

Jim is a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School, where he teaches a course on private capital, and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University, where he has taught a course on the federal regulation of financial institutions; he is also a fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy and served as a commissioner on the American Bankruptcy Institute’s Commission to Study Reform of Chapter 11 and is a member of the board of the Land Trust Alliance.  Jim received a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. He holds an M.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in politics from Princeton University.

“I grew up next to the Marshlands Conservancy in Rye, New York, a several hundred acre preserve of open fields, forest and marshes that allowed me to wander in the woods with my childhood friends year-round. So, having chosen to live in Litchfield County later in life, I joined the board of NCLC out of a desire to ensure that my kids and generations of kids to come would have the same opportunity.”

Charlie, and his wife Susan, moved to Washington, Connecticut, in 2013 after having lived in Los Angeles, California for the prior 30 years. Susan’s family has lived in Washington for five generations. Her grandfather, Hamilton Gibson, was headmaster of The Gunnery and a founding member of both the Washington Art Association and Steep Rock Association. Their son, Dana Jackson, publishes The Edible Nutmeg magazine.

Until recently, Charlie was the president of SunPac, LLC, an investment group that was in the process of purchasing a community bank in Southern California. He spent his career in commercial banking and wealth management, both overseas and in the U.S. He started his career at Citibank and was posted to the Middle East. He has also held executive management positions, both overseas and domestically, at Continental Illinois, Chase Manhattan, and Mellon Bank. Over the past twenty years he has focused on community banking in California. Most recently he was the West Coast CEO for Boston Private Bank and Trust Company. He has been the CEO of four community banks on the West Coast, and has served on the boards of six community banks and one trust company.

Charlie has served on the board of trustees of Woodbury University in Burbank, California, as well as on the board of advisors of the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Business, and the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Until recently, he was also a board member of Legacy Connections, a public benefit corporation which assists in the preservation, renovation, restoration, and enhancement of the Rose Bowl. Additionally, he was a general partner of the Athenaeum Fund, a venture capital limited partnership providing seed funding to start-up companies originating at Caltech.

Charlie graduated from The School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and obtained an M.B.A. in international business from The George Washington University.

Christine Flynn is a lawyer and a consultant in real estate matters. She has spent her career involved in housing and urban development, both for the State of New York and for private and nonprofit entities. She divides her time between Manhattan and Bridgewater. Christine is particularly interested in raising awareness about local land planning and development decisions that have an impact on our increasingly limited open spaces. She serves as the board’s recording secretary.

“NCLC‘s large land holdings in Litchfield County create the opportunity to educate its residents to the pleasures and beauties of natural areas and the increasing and compelling need to preserve them.”

Karen has been involved in philanthropy through her adult life, serving as a trustee on the Kettering Family Foundation and working with various non-profit and for-profit entities affiliated with the Kettering Family.

Karen served on the Sherman Library Board of Trustees from 2008-2015, notably as President for the final two years, overseeing the long-awaited construction and renovation project. She was also a member of the project’s building committee and the capital campaign chair. Additionally, Karen was named a trustee for the Naromi Land Trust board in 2020, served on several different fundraising committees for Regional Hospice of Danbury, and volunteered for the Sherman Historical Society.

After graduating from Saint Lawrence University in 1983 and working in the alpine ski industry, Karen and her husband Doug settled down in their home state of Connecticut. They raised two sons, Doug and Connor, who are now adults. Avid sports enthusiasts, Karen and Doug love spending time outdoors in both their hometown of Sherman, Connecticut on Candlewood Lake, and  Steamboat Springs, Colorado. When at home in Sherman, they find great reward in community activism, both environmental and philanthropic.

David De Luca is senior managing director and global head of equities at Raymond James. He holds a B.A. from Brown University, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. He is a former aide to U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. David serves as vice chairman of the board of the Winterthur Museum. He and his family have lived in Northwest Connecticut for over 20 years.

Michele Shapiro Deshpande was the Head of Public Relations for McLaren Automotive North America, where she helped to launch the company in the United States. Prior to McLaren, she was the Head of Communications for the Center on International Cooperation, a think tank based at New York University. Michele also worked at Conde Nast (Vanity Fair and Glamour). She holds a BA in Philosophy and a Master’s in International Affairs from New York University.

Michele recently produced an award-winning documentary, Six Locked Doors, about the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston, which has appeared in film festivals and on PBS. She is an avid car enthusiast and has raced cars on four continents. Michele lives in Roxbury with her husband and daughter.

Andrew Gordon divides his time between Manhattan and New Milford. He recently retired after a long career in international finance, with the last fifteen years as a managing director and global bond portfolio manager at BlackRock. Previously he worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Credit Suisse First Boston. He served on the board of the Trevor Day School for many years, acting as treasurer. He has a BA in economics and political science and an MBA in finance, both from the University of Pennsylvania.

Mark Duvall Gude is from Washington, DC, and has deep roots in the Maryland and DC region.  After the University of Maryland, Mark worked in residential real estate in Washington DC.  He now splits his time between New York City, where he is involved in the arts scene, and Sharon, Connecticut where he loves frequenting local farmer’s markets.  Mark also serves as vice chair of the Tectonic Theater Project in New York City, a theater that develops innovative works that explore the social, political, and human issues that affect us all.

Philip B. Korsant is currently a private investor and founding member of Long Light Capital. He spent most of his professional life at Ziff-Davis Publishing Company and Ziff Communications Company, where he served in various capacities including President and Chairman of the Board. He retired from the company when it was sold in 1994. Mr. Korsant graduated from the University of Miami with a degree in economics and was a captain in the United States Air Force. He has been an active conservationist for the past 40 years including 20 years on the board of NRDC and is Director Emeritus of Naromi Land Trust. He and his wife Catherine reside in Florida and share a farm in Sherman Connecticut with their two sons.

Peter W. May is president and a founding partner of Trian Fund Management, an investment firm that invests in under-performing and under-valued companies and works with them to create lasting shareholder value.

Peter serves as vice chairman of The Wendy’s Company and is also a director of Mondelez International, Inc. He recently retired from the board of Tiffany & Co. From 1993 through 2007 he served as president, chief operating officer, and a director of Triarc Companies. Which, during that period, owned Arby’s Restaurant Group, The Snapple Beverage Group, and several consumer and industrial businesses.

Peter is chairman of the Board of Trustees of The Mount Sinai Health System, New York City’s largest academic health system. He is vice chairman of the New York Philharmonic, a trustee of the University of Chicago and the New York Historical Society, a director of Lincoln Center, and a partner of the Partnership for New York City. He has served on numerous other not-for-profit boards.

Peter received A.B. and M.B.A. degrees from the University of Chicago and is a certified public accountant. He also holds an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Hiram Williams has more than three decades of experience as a real estate advisor and investor.

Hiram served as the founding partner of Albrizzi-Williams LLC, an investment banking firm specializing in private placements of both equity and debt, property sales, and financing and advisory work with clients accessing the capital markets for real estate acquisition and development. Hiram also served as a partner at Millstein & Co.

Hiram has led real estate investment transactions totaling more than $5 billion.  Selected engagements include advising the management of Hines on, the structuring and creation of a publicly registered, non-traded REIT that initially raised $1 billion; working with the Lincoln Property Company on its sale of certain assets to Equity Residential Trust for $485 million; guiding the $475 million merger of Grove Property Trust with Equity Residential Trust’s public company; and, advising on $150 million of capital raising on behalf of Akridge, a leading commercial property development firm.  Hiram has been a board member for numerous real estate-related companies and is currently a director of Scorpion Holdings and Commercial Cleaning Services.

Hiram previously served as a vice president at Goldman Sachs with responsibility for the formation of the Real Estate Investment Banking Services group.  He was also a vice president at Morgan Stanley, where he was charged with investing the firm’s capital in real estate as part of its joint venture with Mitsubishi Estate, Japan’s most eminent real estate developer.  Hiram began his career at Lazard.

Hiram holds an M.B.A. from the Harvard School of Business.  As an undergraduate, he studied industrial management, with an emphasis on mathematics, at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Hiram sits on the Board of Directors of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, in addition to serving as the President of the Board of Directors of Northwest Connecticut Land Conservancy for 18 years.

“I grew up on a farm, and until I was eight or nine years old, I spent the entire day outdoors. This was a daily event for me, almost as much a part of my life as going to school. I always took it for granted that other people lived that way, that they took comfort in the woods, in wildlife, and knowledge of the woods. It was much later in life that I realized that many people knew much less about being out on the land. Since joining NCLC, I’ve worked to rebuild the Board and secure the Trust’s finances and set up the path for future development work. I’ve guided us through the process of hiring Catherine Rawson, our Executive Director, along with our hiring of two new stewards. Restructuring and re-crafting the way NCLC operates has been very important to me because I, along with our board and staff, realize that our land protection work must last forever.”