Meet Our Board

Dianne Ersk­ine Hell­rigel, Pres­i­dent of the Board

Dianne is the Pres­i­dent of SCV Green as well as the Exec­u­tive Director/​President of the Com­mu­nity Hik­ing Club of Santa Clarita, Cal­i­for­nia. She has worked in the ani­mal cor­ri­dor to help pro­tect the Cal­i­for­nia Con­dors, and devel­oped an edu­ca­tional pro­gram called, Plight of the Con­dors. She believes we must pro­tect the ani­mal cor­ri­dors now, or risk the loss of the ani­mals that use the link­ages. She has devoted the last 10 years of her life pro­tect­ing these ani­mals and mak­ing a dif­fer­ence within the habi­tats sur­round­ing the Santa Clarita Valley.

Dianne has hiked Mt. Ever­est, Mt. Fuji, Mt. Yufuin, Cho Oyo, the Inca Trail and is hik­ing Kil­i­man­jaro in 2010. She is bilin­gual with her best lan­guages being Man­darin Chi­nese and Span­ish. She loves to travel and has spent time in 75 coun­tries. She attended USC major­ing in Biol­ogy, and the Uni­ver­si­dad de Sala­manca in Spain. She stud­ied the ecol­ogy of the Ama­zon in Ecuador and the Gala­pa­gos at the Dar­win Center.

In addi­tion to her cor­po­rate respon­si­bil­i­ties, Dianne is cur­rently writ­ing a com­pre­hen­sive iden­ti­fi­ca­tion book for hik­ers encom­pass­ing all of California’s Wildflowers.

She con­sid­ers one of her great­est achieve­ments the role she played in map­ping, lob­by­ing, and gath­er­ing sup­port for a recent wilder­ness bill that added 470,000 acres of wilder­ness to California’s pro­tected lands.

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Kris­teen Pen­rod, Vice-​President of the Board

Kris­teen Pen­rod is the founder and Con­ser­va­tion Direc­tor of Sci­ence & Col­lab­o­ra­tion for Con­nected Wild­lands (SC Wild­lands). SC Wild­lands’ mis­sion is to pro­tect and restore sys­tems of con­nected wild­lands that sup­port native wildlife and the sys­tems upon which they rely. SC Wild­lands works with con­ser­va­tion biol­o­gists, ecol­o­gists, wildlife and trans­porta­tion agen­cies, land man­agers and plan­ners, con­ser­va­tion orga­ni­za­tions, and oth­ers to develop and imple­ment regional con­ser­va­tion strategies.

SC Wild­lands is deeply com­mit­ted to col­lab­o­ra­tion and coör­di­na­tion to achieve the vision of pro­tected and restored sys­tems of con­nected wild­lands. SC Wild­lands has suc­cess­fully col­lab­o­rated on sev­eral projects over the last decade, includ­ing the Cal­i­for­nia Miss­ing Link­ages (Pen­rod et al. 2001), South Coast Miss­ing Link­ages Project (Pen­rod et al. 2008; www​.scwild​lands​.org), and the Cal­i­for­nia Essen­tial Habi­tat Con­nec­tiv­ity Project (Spencer et al. 2010). With 10 years of expe­ri­ence in science-​based design of wildlife link­ages, SC Wild­lands is widely rec­og­nized as one of the lead­ing providers of such services.

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EJ Rem­son, Board Mem­ber

Senior Pro­gram Man­ager in the South Coast and Deserts Region, super­vises both the L.A. – Ventura Project and the Tehachapi Project. He joined The Nature Con­ser­vancy in 2000 as direc­tor of the L.A. – Ventura Project after work­ing in the fields of urban plan­ning and com­mer­cial real estate devel­op­ment for 24 years. Mr. Remson’s plan­ning career spanned 12 years, much of it as plan­ning admin­is­tra­tor for the City of Pasadena. He began his career in com­mer­cial real estate devel­op­ment, work­ing on retail, indus­trial, office, and hotel projects through­out south­ern California.

His inter­est in the preser­va­tion of nat­ural lands led him to spe­cial­ize in plan­ning for grow­ing com­mu­ni­ties with­out con­tribut­ing to urban sprawl. He has a bachelor’s degree in urban plan­ning from Cal­i­for­nia State Poly­tech­nic Uni­ver­sity, Pomona, and a master’s degree in real estate devel­op­ment from the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. He holds a Cal­i­for­nia Broker’s License and has served as an offi­cer on the boards of sev­eral non­profit organizations.

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Chris­tine Kudija, Trea­surer and Sec­re­tary

Chris­tine is a self-​described gen­er­al­ist who enjoys wear­ing mul­ti­ple hats – some at the same time. As an attor­ney, she rep­re­sents small non-​profits with an outdoor-​recreation focus; as an envi­ron­men­tal plan­ner, she writes envi­ron­men­tal impact doc­u­ments for Will­dan, an engi­neer­ing and plan­ning com­pany that con­tracts with Cal­i­for­nia agen­cies. Chris­tine earned a bachelor’s degree in botany from U.C. Santa Bar­bara, a master’s in land­scape archi­tec­ture from Cal Poly Pomona, and a law degree from Lewis and Clark Law School in Port­land, Ore­gon. She was admit­ted to the Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Cer­ti­fied Plan­ners in 1997 and the Cal­i­for­nia State Bar in 2002.

Chris­tine has lived in the Santa Clarita Val­ley for 32 years. She worked with the City For­ma­tion Com­mit­tee to achieve Santa Clarita’s city­hood, and later joined Santa Clarita as a plan­ner. She believes strongly in bal­anced land use, and that the nat­ural envi­ron­ment can coex­ist with the built environment.

Hik­ing and climb­ing com­pete for Christine’s atten­tion: she has climbed nearly 150 peaks in the Sierra Nevada, all the 14,000’ peaks in Cal­i­for­nia and peaks in Col­orado, Ari­zona and New Mex­ico. She has attempted Mts. Chimb­o­razo and Cotopaxi in Ecuador. She has hiked 1,800 miles of the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail and parts of the Teton Crest Trail, the Appalachian Trail, and the Inca Trail. In 2008, she hiked the Ever­est region in Nepal, where she sum­mit­ted Kala Pat­tar, an 18,200’ peak dwarfed by the 29,035’ Everest.

Between moun­taineer­ing and hik­ing trips, Chris­tine main­tains trails for the Moun­tains Recre­ation and Con­ser­va­tion Author­ity, vol­un­teers with the Pacific Crest Trail Asso­ci­a­tion (she served on its Board for four years), leads hikes for the Com­mu­nity Hik­ing Club, is an orga­nizer with the Annual Day Zero Pacific Crest Trail Kick­off (ADZPCTKO), and sings in a church choir. She has been work­ing with SCV Green for two years.

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Elise Kel­ley, Ph.D., Exec­u­tive Director