Staff Spotlight: Megan Dreger
Megan Dreger is the Open Space Authority’s Conservation and Strategic Partnerships Manager. Over the years, her career path took many twists and turns before getting to her current role, but it led her to a place where she has certainly made a positive impact.
Although she’s originally from Oregon, Megan also called Guam, North Carolina, Japan and San Diego home prior to setting down roots in the Bay Area. As a child, her father’s job required her family to move around to a variety of places, including a small fishing village in Alaska, which sparked her love for adventure. In her youth, Megan spent many years traveling, backpacking and cross-country skiing in beautiful and inspiring places. Her adventurous spirit has continued to be a constant thread in her life – from hiking the John Muir Trail to snorkeling at Dry Tortugas National Park. As Megan developed a sense of wonder for the world around her, she also started to home in on her future career path.
With a passion for research, Megan spent her early career as an academic librarian, a role through which she helped students and professors at U.C. San Diego with research related to government information, urban planning, social science data and spatial data. While she enjoyed this role, Megan was eager to do something that allowed her to have a hands-on approach to the topics she researched. “I felt removed from what I was helping people with,” Megan shared. “So, I decided to go back to school and get a master’s degree in landscape architecture.”
Megan attended Cal Poly Pomona where she dove right into her studies. “The program was unique in that it wasn’t focused on site-scale design – it was largely at the watershed scale and was a mix of landscape architecture, environmental planning and policy,” Megan said. “It was a combination of creativity and technical detail, and I liked how broad it was.” Once she graduated, Megan moved to the Bay Area and began working for different nonprofit organizations.
She began as Associate Director of GreenInfo Network, a Bay Area nonprofit that provides information technology support to public interest organizations and agencies to meet their environmental, conservation, public health and social justice missions. Coincidentally, the Open Space Authority was one of the organization’s clients so, through her role, Megan had the opportunity to learn more about the agency and the conservation work being done in Santa Clara Valley. A few years later, Megan applied for a Grants Administrator position at the Open Space Authority and successfully landed the job.
Now, as the Conservation and Strategic Partnerships Manager, Megan integrates her passions and her work into one and helps the Open Space Authority take steps to reach its mission. “Our department is involved in a lot of exciting things,” Megan said. On a daily basis, Megan helps her teams make progress in areas such as land acquisitions, policy work and governmental affairs, external funding and grantmaking. “Much of the work of our department is foundational to the conservation mission and sets the stage for the Authority to protect land, restore habitat and provide public access,” she added.
Since she first began her career at the Open Space Authority eight and a half years ago, Megan has seen the agency go through multiple changes and lots of growth. However, one point of consistency is the amount of progress being made by a group of passionate individuals. “We’re a small public agency, but we’re mighty!” Megan said. In the future, Megan looks forward to the Open Space Authority continuing to protect important landscapes and wildlife habitats as well as securing additional funding streams for the agency’s other critical conservation work. She also looks forward to planning her next big road trip and exploring even more of the world.