Mt. Adams Institute to dissolve

Columbia Gorge News

TROUT LAKE — The Mt. Adams Institute (MAI), a nonprofit that helps further land management and conservation efforts, facilitates summer camps and founded the beloved Sense of Place lecture series, plans to dissolve after a 15-year run.

Sense of Place will continue independently. But come 2027, aspiring environmentalists and veterans making a career transition will be left without MAI’s assistance in securing high-level entry positions at the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Eagle Creek National Fish Hatchery, Mt. Hood National Forest and other offices across the country.

In 2024, MAI’s interns raised more than 1.5 million hatchery fish, maintained 2,308 miles of trail, and treated more than 47,000 acres of forest for invasive species in 11 states.

“We’ve created a lot of goodwill, strong relationships — changed lives. We’ve impacted the natural world and our public lands,” said Executive Director Aaron Stanton. “It’s been a remarkable part of my career.”

Two weeks ago, Columbia Gorge News revisited unfinished stories from 2025, including how two school districts and local libraries in Oregon successfully navigated budget shortfalls or reneged grants. It was a mixture of consolidation, persistence and court action. For part two of our series on follow-ups, we’ll explain why MAI wasn’t as fortunate.

‘Would have survived’

Reliant on partnerships with federal entities like the United States Forest Service, MAI was thrown into chaos when the Trump administration ordered government-wide terminations of probationary employees, or those generally in their first year or two of service, last February. Suddenly, agencies no longer had the capacity to support interns participating in MAI’s Land Stewards and VetsWork programs.

Around the same time, AmeriCorps rejected MAI’s application for a three-year grant that partially covered the cost of hiring an intern for partners, which made them more attractive. MAI had successfully received the grant in four prior cycles and AmeriCorps offered no explanation for its decision, so the nonprofit pulled those still in the field and let 60% of its staff go in March, as Columbia Gorge News   previously reported.

At that point, MAI had enough contingency dollars to pay the four remaining staff part-time for nine months.

The nonprofit usually places about 60 interns in the field annually, and despite the disruption, MAI still found positions for roughly half that number last summer. Ironically enough, because there were so many holes at the Forest Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Fish and Wildlife and National Park Service, partners were willing to pay full price and could accommodate them once workforce shifts had settled.

“They just had to do it,” Stanton said. “They just had to fill gaps.”

With state budgets similarly strained, Stanton and the board of directors focused on becoming more self-sustaining, outlined in a new strategic plan that stuck with the fee-for-service model. They were to add revenue streams by renting out the Trout Lake campus for other learning experiences, build a robust giving process and invest in grant writing.

For a period, MAI was stable; then the obstacles changed from institutional to personal.

“My wife and I made the decision that it’s time for us to go ahead and retire,” Stanton said. “We wanted to make sure we have time to do the things we love, with the people we love doing them with, regardless of how much we love our jobs.”

Stanton shared his decision in November. MAI initially resolved to hire a new executive director and potentially combine with another organization, but another staff member’s life took a critical turn, and the chain reaction continued. With so much organizational knowledge soon to leave, the board approved Stanton’s plan of dissolution during a Jan. 28 emergency session.

Though certainly a confluence of factors, Stanton remains adamant that MAI would have weathered the turnover, if not for the Trump administration’s actions.

“We were put in this precarious position because of his decisions,” Stanton said. “If none of that had happened and I decided to retire, things would have been fine. We had such an amazing team in January of last year, and that team would have survived.”

Looking back, and ahead

“It’s one less avenue for veterans specifically to get their foot in the federal agency door,” Zach Teel said about the pending loss of MAI. “My whole career stems from them giving me an opportunity to interview for an internship position that they built. If not for that, then I don’t know — I literally don’t know where I would be.”

Back in 2009, Teel was growing jaded at Western Oregon University and wanted out of school. Despite that classic childhood urge to tread down a different path, Teel took after his father, joining the Army rather than returning home. Stationed in Germany and then North Carolina, he served two tours in southern Afghanistan as a Human Intelligence Collector.

Upon his return in 2014, Teel had to assimilate back into civilian life. Although he felt like the same person prior to enlisting, his wife noticed subtle changes, but Teel fixated on the call he felt to work outdoors. He found nature soothing and MAI by chance. After a successful interview, Teel began a volunteer coordinator and community engagement internship with the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in early 2015.

That led to permanent position after permanent position. In fact, Teel recalls five other VetsWork interns from his 2015 class who are still employed at Forest Service offices in the Pacific Northwest today. Despite finding professional stability, though, he continued to struggle with the psychological impacts of service.

“I thought I was totally fine after I got out. That’s just because it was hard for me to see what was different in myself,” Teel said. “When I got out of the military, I just wanted to be done with the military … I just wanted that separation.”

A decade after returning to the United States, Teel was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Since 2020, he’s served as the Gifford Pinchot’s occupational health and safety manager, joining MAI’s board last year and feeling fortunate that he got a chance to return. Based on his time in the Army, Teel offered a message to his colleagues:

“There’s a lesson that you learn, whether consciously or unconsciously, that you don’t always have control over your own life. When you’re told to wake up at this time, you’re doing this at this time, now we’re going to send you into a warzone, you develop such resilience,” he said. “It’s not permanent. You can move through this. The next day is going to come.”

Beyond the careers altered and forests improved, Stanton sees MAI’s efforts to diversify the federal hiring process as a fundamental part of the nonprofit’s legacy. He looks back on MAI’s existence with gratitude and firmly believes that work will continue, just under another banner.

“We’ve got so many nonprofits in this country that are doing great work, but a lot of times, we’re trying to all do the same thing with just little differences, and we’re fighting for the same scraps,” he said. “Larger ones that had more capacity to kind of endure these types of struggles will carry on.”

And so will Sense of Place. If you’d like to support the transition process, Stanton encouraged folks to contact Host Sarah Fox directly at sop@mtadamsinstitute.org.