Kim Trotter
Executive Director
For nearly three decades, Kim Trotter has dedicated her career to conserving agricultural lands, fish and wildlife habitat, and sustainable communities in the Northern Rockies. Her extensive background includes biodiversity conservation, environmental policy, wildlife and large landscape ecology, land and water transactions, and ecological connectivity and restoration.
Kim’s passion for protecting the area’s natural and agricultural resources dates back to her early career experience negotiating many of eastern Idaho’s early conservation easements as a Land Protection Specialist with Teton Regional Land Trust. This included safeguarding miles of habitat along the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River and procuring Idaho’s first Farm and Ranchland Protection Program grant to work with private landowners in the Sand Creek wildlife corridor.
Trotter’s recent experience includes serving as U.S. Program Director for the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y), where she led collaborative efforts to reconnect wildlife habitat through large landscape conservation. These projects included building wildlife-friendly roads and fences, increasing access to human-wildlife conflict reduction tools and programs, safeguarding key private lands, and ensuring the long-term protection of public lands.
Previously, Kim was Executive Director of the Community Foundation of Teton Valley, providing financial and strategic support to more than 50 local nonprofit organizations. She has also served as the Director of Trout Unlimited’s Idaho Water Project, working with landowners, water users, and state and federal agencies to promote protection and restoration of Idaho’s native and wild fisheries. During her tenure, she was appointed by Governor Otter to represent fish and wildlife interests on a committee tasked to resolve water shortages associated with the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer in southern Idaho.
Trotter has presented regionally and internationally on wildlife and large landscape conservation, endangered species protection and recovery, and conservation partnerships. In 2019, she co-authored a chapter on the environmental politics and policy of Western public lands. Through her work to restore bull trout in central Idaho, she received the Forest Service’s most prestigious acknowledgement for partnership, the “Rise to the Future” award. For the last nine years, she served as a volunteer board member with the Idaho Conservation League. And in August, she and her family completed a year-long journey around the US and western Canada.
Kim received her Master of Environmental Management in resource ecology from Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Puget Sound.
