For love of nature

Angela Nomellini ’71

Several years ago, when Angela Nomellini’s husband, Ken Olivier, was about to retire, one of his colleagues sought Angela’s advice regarding a retirement gift. Olivier was stepping down from his role as chairman and chief executive officer at Dodge & Cox, an investment management firm, and the company wanted to give him a fishing trip in thanks for his years of service.

When the colleague asked Angela where her husband might want to go, one place she suggested was Mongolia. When Olivier, an experienced fly fisherman, learned about the trip, he told Angela she’d have to practice fishing in waders before they journeyed to Mongolia together. So the couple headed to Alaska, and Angela discovered that she, too, enjoyed fly fishing. Now she jokes that she “took up fly fishing in self-defense,” as a means of spending more time with her now-retired husband. But one glance at her résumé of philanthropic work proves there’s more to her passion than just supporting her husband’s interests.

In 2020, Angela stepped down after nine years on the California board of trustees of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), a global environmental organization that has protected more than 119 million acres of land and thousands of miles of rivers worldwide since its founding in 1951. She still serves on the conservancy’s North America Cabinet in an advisory role, giving feedback on conservation programs. After more than two decades of work in environmental philanthropy, she is well versed in the coordination and dedication it takes to protect and restore nature.

Working on such causes was never Angela’s career plan, though. After graduating from Santa Catalina in 1971, she earned an English degree at Stanford and a law degree at the University of California, Berkeley. She accepted a job at a financial planning firm, but after giving birth to her son, Andrew, in 1988, she left the business world and began a decades-long involvement in educational philanthropy, which came about almost by accident after Angela noticed how taxed her son’s teachers were in the classroom. “A lot of [their] time was spent directing airplanes, just classroom management,” she recalls. When Andrew’s class swelled from 19 students in kindergarten to 28 in first grade, the problem intensified, and Angela began to work with the school’s principal to find ways to institute smaller class sizes. Then, while on the Hillsborough City School District board, Angela helped streamline reading, science, and math curricula across the district’s elementary schools.

Today, Angela is still actively involved in educational philanthropy. She serves on the board of East Palo Alto Academy, a charter school, where she and her husband established two college scholarships for graduates. “We have to provide more services to the kids than they would get normally from the school district,” she says. And though she’s been pleased with graduation and matriculation rates at East Palo Alto, she realized that starting college is just the beginning of the process she hopes the scholarship and its support will foster. “Our current project is working on … providing services to help [students] persevere, because there’s a huge dropout rate for kids who are first-generation [college students],” she adds. “They don’t understand that everybody struggles their freshman year in college.”

Long established in the world of education, Angela turned her efforts to the environment after her husband returned from a fishing trip more than two decades ago. On the trip, Olivier learned about TNC, and the couple made a small donation. They wound up on the organization’s mailing list, and a minimal involvement ballooned. Eventually, Angela joined TNC’s board, and now, after years in the environmental sphere, she speaks as if she has a degree in policy or conservation science, not English and law. She is animated as she explains the challenges the United States faces as it combats global warming, adjusts to climate change, and strives to protect vulnerable species.

In addition, Angela often waxes poetic about fish. During her time on its board, TNC worked with ground fisheries in Morro Bay, near San Luis Obispo, and Monterey Bay. In Morro Bay, the population of groundfish—fish that live mainly on the ocean floor—had dropped precipitously in the 1990s, and TNC worked to rehabilitate populations by a variety of measures, including buying trawl fishing permits and eventually redistributing them to fishing professionals who would agree to embrace practices less harmful to the environment. In Monterey Bay, TNC worked to reduce bycatch—marine life that is caught and killed unintentionally in the process of fishing—of overfished species. “It's just been a wonderful, wonderful success story,” Angela says.

Many of the projects Angela had a hand in employed principles of business adapted to conservation work. In the bycatch reduction project, TNC convinced fishing professionals to enter into a kind of cooperative to share resources and information. In a project designed to support wetland habitats, TNC created a marketplace it likens to “Airbnb for birds,” where landowners can bid for contracts to flood specific land to create bird habitats. TNC relied on big data to create its marketplace, going so far as to determine how much water specific species of birds would need, and for how long, and directing landowners to meet those exact requirements.

Angela has lived in Arizona for the past five years, so she decided in 2020 that it was time to relinquish her role on the California board. In her continued role on the North America Cabinet at TNC, she has expanded her territory to evaluate and aid projects across the United States, and she and her fellow cabinet members are especially concerned with linking dollars with projects throughout the country. “One of the things we’re working on right now is that the matchup between environmental opportunity and dollars does not [line] up well,” she explains. “There's a huge, huge opportunity for a lot of environmental conservation in the Appalachians. And it's not like an innately wealthy area. So it's not like trying to get a program launched in California, where we are blessed with a lot of wealth.”

Angela hopes to incentivize potential donors to look toward projects in greater need of funding, to connect the country at a time where connectivity is key to environmental work. Angela and her husband have invested in the Science for Nature and People Partnership (SNAPP), a program they find attractive due to the way it links resources. SNAPP personnel “accept requests for proposals from various groups who are working together on different projects, all sorts of different things,” Angela says. “A successful project usually involves not only environmentalists, but sociologists and economists and other groups of people. … You need more than one angle on it.”

With her background in law, business, and education, Angela herself brings several angles to the table. She has enjoyed her foray into environmentalism, which helps her appreciate and value the nature she visits each year. After that pre-Mongolia trip to Alaska, she and her husband have headed north each August to Enchanted Lake Lodge in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve to fish for trout. This September, they flew to Iceland, spending a day at Deplar Farm on the island’s Troll Peninsula. She didn’t get many bites, and the highlight of the day was when she hooked a fish for about 45 seconds before it broke free. Still, she says, she couldn’t help but enjoy the day and the breathtaking country around her. She also had the opportunity to take a helicopter flight over an erupting volcano and lava field, called Fagradalshraun, which in English means “beautiful valley of lava.” Angela was struck by the sight of magma oozing and flowing out of the rocky landscape, the natural beauty she feels so strongly about preserving. She declares giddily: “Oh my god. That was so totally cool.”