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Protecting Land to Improve Communities

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New ED Hired

John V. Murphy Elected to Board

NeighborSpace Wins Hollmann Grant Award

NeighborSpace has received $5,000 in competitive grant funding from the Maryland Environmental Trust through the Janice Hollmann Grant Program. Jan Hollmann exemplified citizen leadership of local land trusts in Maryland. She co-founded the Severn River Land Trust and the Arundel Conservation Trust, and served on the Severn River Commission. She was Izaac Walton League’s Conservationist of the Year in 1989 and the Capital newspaper’s Person of the Year for 1990. Jan died of cancer in April 1990. NeighborSpace will use the funding to improve its communications and outreach efforts.

Last fall, NeighborSpace hired Barbara Hopkins as its first Executive Director. Barbara has spent much of her career working in the government, education and nonprofit sectors. After earning a Master’s Degree in Public Management and a Law Degree from the University of Maryland in 1990, she clerked for Judge William O. Carr in the Harford County Circuit Court and went on to spend two years as a Governor’s Policy Fellow in the administration of Governor William Donald Schaefer. She spent many years in various positions at Baltimore City Community College, including Vice President for Institutional Advancement. In 2004, organizations and went back to school to pursue a lifelong interest in landscape architecture. As a student in Morgan’s Graduate Program in Landscape

Architecture, she developed an interest in land conservation, choosing as her thesis project a review of the controversial Terrapin Run development proposal in Allegany County. Upon graduation in 2008, she set her sights on finding a position in the conservation community, a quest that eventually led her to NeighborSpace. Barbara has lived in Parkville in the Villa Cresta community for 16 yrs.

At its March meeting, the Board of Directors elected John V. Murphy, Esquire to membership as a director. John has had a long and distinguished career as an attorney and public servant, having served as a County Councilman from the 1st District from 1974 to 1978, a member of the Baltimore County Board of Appeals from 1980 to 1982, a member of the Planning Board from 1997 to 1998, Chairman of the

County Council’s Commission to Review the Redistricting Process in 2002, and a hearing officer and Deputy Zoning Commissioner for the county from 2003 to 2007. John earned his law degree from the University of Maryland School of Law and has practiced law with his daughter, Maureen Murphy, in the firm of Murphy and Murphy since 1980. He focuses primarily on family law and land use and has been a regular presenter on the effects of divorce on children at the National Family Resiliency Center in Columbia, Maryland for many years.. Before embarking on his legal career, John spent 22 years as an electrical engineer at Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Baltimore. John and his wife Judy live in Catonsville.