Born and raised in California’s San Fernando Valley, Deb was fortunate to spend every
summer at the family cabins in the historic gold-mining town of Eldora, west of Boulder, Colorado. During the 1990s, she became involved in efforts by the Eldora Civic
Association, a local property-owners organization, to work with the county to have a
locally defined environmental, historical, and cultural preservation plan incorporated into the county’s land use plan. Deb was living year-round in Eldora at the time and stepped forward to raise funding, retain experts to conduct the necessary research and document their findings, and produce the Eldora Environmental Preservation Plan,
which was adopted officially by the County Commissioners in 1995.
After earning a BA from the University of Colorado in 1973, Deb lived and worked in Boulder, Colorado and Santa Cruz, California before living for five years in New York
City, where she did administrative work in the nonprofit sector and earned an MA in
cultural anthropology from the New School for Social Research. Moving back to
Colorado in 1987, Deb spent the next 35 years working in scholarly publishing sales,
teaching composition at the University of Colorado, serving as staff associate at the
Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, operating her own independent
bookstore, and serving as operations manager for TriWest Group, a Boulder-based
consulting company specializing in human services research and evaluation. Deb semi-retired in 2015 and has worked part time for TriWest since then, helping out with editing and special projects.
Since moving back to the Monterey Bay area in 2011, Deb has spent many happy hours volunteering in the archives of the Steinbeck Center and in the California History Room at the Monterey Public Library. She’s lived in Carmel Valley Village with her rescued greyhounds since 2020. She is most interested in supporting the Carmel Valley Association’s priorities in the areas of civic engagement and cultural/historical
preservation.
