Crane Beach has had a special place in Katie Theoharides’s heart since shortly after she graduated from college, when she visited Ipswich with a friend on a warm October afternoon.
“I’d never seen anything so beautiful,” she says. “The air was hazy, the dunes were magnificent, and there were horses on the beach—Crane was simply magical.”
She could not have known at the time that nearly two decades later her job would be to protect and share that treasured place and others like it as the president and CEO of land preservation nonprofit The Trustees of Reservations. Today, she leads the organization’s efforts to preserve and promote more than 100 farms, woodlands, museums, beaches, and other special places statewide—including some of the North Shore’s favorite outdoor destinations.
During her childhood in rural western Massachusetts, Theoharides played in the streams and woodlands surrounding her home. She took this love of nature to Dartmouth College, where she studied biology, and then to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Boston. There, she took her first class in environmental policy, which shifted her plan for the future.
“I discovered that what I loved was translating the science into better policy and management,” Theoharides says.
After finishing her master’s degree, she worked a series of environmental policy jobs and consulting gigs before landing in the position of Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs for the state of Massachusetts in 2019. She is particularly proud of her role there in helping cities and towns create plans to deal with the coming impacts of climate change.
Next, she worked in the offshore wind industry for a year before the Trustees position became available and she leapt at the chance to pursue the job.
“To me this was the perfect fit,” she says.
And she does seem very much at home during a stroll through the gardens at Trustees’ property Long Hill in Beverly. Spotting an injured butterfly on the grass, she pauses a conversation to gently scoop up the insect and deposit him in the shelter of a flower bed, then ducks through a tunnel in a hedge, following the lead of a visiting eight-year-old.
“What fills my cup is to get out and see our special places and the people who take care of them and the people who love them,” she says.