My name is Irmgard Hunt and I was the first US Project Director of the Virtual Foundation (1997 - 1998). My job was to manage and promote the Virtual Foundation and to realize its potential as a new fundraising tool.
I've been part of the environmental movement since Earth
Day One (1970) when I joined a group of women who launched Consumer Action
Now (CAN), an environmental consumer group in New York City. I directed CAN for seven years. When friends ask me why I'm so deeply committed to environmental protection I tell them that I grew up in Germany during and after W.W.II. After the war I was
a teenager and kept asking my mother (my father was killed in the war) "what did you and Dad do when there was still time to fight Hitler's rise to power?" I got no answers.
Some
day in the future my children or grandchildren may ask me what I did when
there was still time to save our environment. I want to be able to say to them that I did my best.
Jobs before joining the Virtual Foundation in early 1997: Executive Director of CAN, Inc. New York; Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs, INFORM (Research for Environmental Solutions)in New York City; Deputy Director of Communications
and Field Services, The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA; US Project Director of the Environmental Partnership for Central Europe (EPCE), a project of the German Marshall Fund with co-funding from the C.S. Mott Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund,
Pew Charitable Trusts and other funders. In five years EPCE made more than 850 small grants to local environmental groups in Central Europe and established four indigenous foundations that continue support for small scale environmental projects and NGOs.
My US NGO experience, directing EPCE and being on the Board of ISAR - an Initiative for Social Action and Renewal in Eurasia-have shown me how crucial and effective small scale support for grassroots organizations is.
Education: B.A. from Columbia University, New York (Magna Cum Laude); and an MPA from the J.F.Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
My hobbies are down-hill skiing, mountain climbing and hiking, reading novels and listening to classical music while I work.