The Campus Compact for New Hampshire (CCNH) Presidents’ Good Steward Award goes to a faculty, administration or staff member who is dedicated to campus-community engagement. Those selected have contributed professional expertise in service to the wider community and have significantly advanced public service on their campus.
Among the 2023 recipients of the Presidents’ Good Steward Award is Malin Clyde, associate state specialist and community volunteer state specialist for UNH Extension.
Clyde’s work centers around volunteers, land and water stewardship, citizen science and other efforts that create meaningful connections between communities and the natural world - through partnerships, volunteering, technology and more.
She has worked tirelessly to connect UNH students to New Hampshire communities for almost 10 years, most recently championing the hiring of an Extension internship coordinator for the first time. Eight years ago, she started an innovative internship program for natural resource students called the Nature Groupie Internship, which bridged the gap between local conservation organizations’ need to hire seasonal work and the thousands of students at UNH. Clyde created a highly successful internship that connects students with real-world community organizations so they can build skills and apply knowledge learned in the classroom to field work. Alumni from this program have gone on to very successful careers in New Hampshire and beyond.
Clyde also helped found Nature Groupie, a program of UNH Extension that makes it easier to volunteer outside. Almost 10 years ago, Malin had been hearing repeatedly from community organizations that they needed more volunteers to help care for conservation land in the state. Through creative thinking and innovative technology, she led the creation of a new online platform to recruit new, younger volunteers and support the needs of these conservation organizations.
As an alumna of the UNH Innovations I-Corps Training Program, she has continued to bring incredible creativity to Nature Groupie and UNH Extension. In 2020, she founded a start-up enterprise, Nature Groupie Shop, a nonprofit brand that sells Nature Groupie merchandise to support work with outdoor volunteers.
Since 2017, she has led a team of Extension staff interested in the emerging field of citizen science, helping to increase the connection between local volunteers, scientific research and community decision-making in New Hampshire. Clyde is also teaching a graduate level course called “Fundamentals of Citizen & Community Science” through which she is teaching the next generation how to engage the community in science research. The course focuses on best practices for effective projects and teams and includes topics such as volunteer engagement, methods for data sharing and issues of social justice in citizen science.
