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The CSU Spur of the Moment Podcast tackles the issues of food, water, health, and sustainability by talking with people making a difference in these fields and exploring the unique pathways that have led them to their current roles. Hosted by the Colorado State University System's new Spur campus in Denver, this podcast builds on its mission of addressing global challenges through research collaboration, experiential education, and a shared vision of inspiring the next generation.
Leslie Harroun:
That's what this world is about. It's about solving problems, whether they're conservation problems or any kind of social problem, you need to be able to think outside the box and ask a lot of questions.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Welcome to Spur of the Moment, the podcast of Colorado State University Spur Campus in Denver, Colorado.
Leslie Harroun:
Just a mindset in how we view our relationship to nature. Is it a resource for us to do what we will with it or is it something that we need to manage more carefully and think about as being the foundation of our economic
Leslie Harroun:
System?
Jocelyn Hittle:
On this podcast, we talk with experts in food, water, health and sustainability and learn about their current work and their career journeys. I'm Jocelyn Hile, associate Vice Chancellor of the CSUs Burg campus. I'm joined today by Leslie Harroun, the executive director of the Salazar Center for North American Conservation at CSU based here at CSU Spur. The Salazar Center works to build conservation, leadership, thinking and practice across North America to restore and sustain our natural world for future generations. Before joining the Salazar Center, Leslie led the next system project at the Democracy Collaborative where she worked to design and articulate a common sense next economic system that is equitable, democratic and ecological. Previously, Leslie was a founding director of the Partners for a New Economy and International Donor Collaborative focused on conservation in the economy and senior program officer at the Oak Foundation. Leslie holds a law degree from Northeastern University and a bachelor's degree from Mount Holyoke College. Leslie also has a number of awards and sat on a variety of boards, and we'll talk more about that. Welcome, Leslie.
Leslie Harroun:
Thank you very much, Jocelyn. I'm very excited to be here.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Thanks for being here, Leslie. So let's talk first about your work now. Tell us a little bit more about the Salazar Center for North American Conservation and its focus.
Leslie Harroun:
Okay. The Salazar Center is an externally facing center of Colorado State University, which means that we don't have an academic program and we basically work outside of CSU Often we work with faculty from CSU, but really we partner with a lot of nonprofit organizations and foundations across North America to conserve nature across North America.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Great. So say more about what conserving nature means.
Leslie Harroun:
That's a really good question because conserving nature means a lot of things in different contexts. So if you think about conservation, I think probably most people think about it in terms of setting aside a forest or protecting a watershed or something like that. But there are lots and lots of different environments around North America, many of which have people, for example, cities. So conservation in a city might be focused around climate resilience, building climate resilience, so it could be focused around water conservation or it could be focused around making sure that there's enough pollinator habitat in a city so people have access to agricultural resources and other plants like trees and flowers and wildlife can continue to survive in that city. Conservation can mean something different in an agricultural setting and it can mean something different in a setting where you don't have a lot of human impact.
Jocelyn Hittle:
So the Salazar Center works in all of those different contexts and say more about what that looks like. You have to wear a lot of different hats if you're working on conservation in a variety of different contexts like that.
Leslie Harroun:
We do wear a lot of different hats. So we do focus in cities around climate resilience and building that resilience through nature and not necessarily energy conservation or transportation or anything around that, but specifically around making sure that nature has a strong role to play in cities in order to, for example, ensure that cities have enough water or to ensure that communities within cities have enough tree shade to cool them during the hot summer months. We also work on large landscape conservation where specifically a transboundary organization, which means that we work across national boundaries, and those include Canada, the United States and Mexico, and they also include the 23 indigenous nations who have sovereignty throughout North America. So we work around national boundaries for large landscape conservation. We also work across disciplinary boundaries, so we like to bring a lot of people from across sectors together and see where they align so we can come up with shared conservation solutions. We haven't worked as much on agriculture, but maybe we will do that in the future.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Well, certainly lots of opportunities for continued work, given your point about all of the different contexts where conservation might have a role to play.
Leslie Harroun:
Yeah, there's certainly no lack of opportunity when it comes to conservation.
Jocelyn Hittle:
So say a little bit more about the North American part of your name and your geographic focus. Why North America?
Leslie Harroun:
North America, because it's a sort of discreet geographical entity, but also because you have a lot of different countries who tend to work on conservation in isolation from each other. They don't tend to even across boundaries between Canada and they don't tend to work together jurisdictionally, but nature doesn't recognize those boundaries. So a river may run from Canada through Mexico, or there may be buffalo habitat that is shared from Canada into the United States. So we want to make sure that our primary focus is nature and not be cut off by those natural boundaries. So we are actually, I think doing more effective conservation by working across those boundaries.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Can you give us an example of some cross boundary or trans boundary work you're currently doing?
Leslie Harroun:
Well, I can give you an example from the past and tell you what we're planning for the future. So we recently had a program in 20 22, 20 23 called the Peregrine Accelerator for Conservation Impact, and the focus of the accelerator was in the Rio Grande, Rio Bravo River Basin. So we identified a cohort of organizations and partnerships within that region and gave them some financial support and then worked with them intensively over a period of six months to help them build and share their capacity among each other to help preserve the Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, and whether that was through watershed management, it could have been anything related to conservation of that full watershed. And so that Peregrine accelerator is done. Our next Peregrine accelerator, which we actually haven't publicly announced yet, but I will announce it right now, will be focused in what we're calling the North Atlantic transboundary landscape. So that's eastern Canadian provinces and the states in all the way from Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and I know it ends, the boundary ends at the southern tip of Massachusetts. So that whole area, we'll be focusing on conservation in that area.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Alright, so let's talk a little bit about what your role looks like in doing all of that conservation work. And as the executive director of the Salazar Center, what's a typical day or a typical week?
Leslie Harroun:
They really vary. I have a lot of meetings. I just came out of a staff meeting. We have a staff meeting every week. Also, I end up talking to a lot of our partners, our NGO partners. I talk to a lot of donors, so people who are interested in supporting us financially. I work a lot with my board of directors and Jocelyn is on my board just FYI. And I do a lot of writing. I do a lot of reading and research. I like to keep myself up to speed on conservation and what's happening with our partners. And I spend probably not enough time as I should on social media,
Jocelyn Hittle:
Not as much time as you should because there's a lot of good communication that happens
Leslie Harroun:
There because there's a lot of good communication that happens there. And because I should probably be communicating more on social media,
Jocelyn Hittle:
It's how a lot of people get information and is a wonderful tool when used correctly, just like everything. Exactly. So you mentioned that you spent some time sort of staying up to date on what is happening in the conservation world. Tell us a little bit about what is happening. What are some of the trends in conservation that you're excited about? What changes have you been seeing?
Leslie Harroun:
That is a great question. I've been working in conservation for a little over 30 years and it has always been in a state of evolution. When I first started in conservation, we thought that conserving areas by removing the people in those areas was a good idea and it didn't take us long to figure out that wasn't the case. People are really important to conserving landscapes and ecosystems. I think conservation has recently gone through another evolution. People recognize that Some people say, well, we need to conserve 30 to 50% of nature in order for the health of our natural environment globally to survive and function effectively so that it can support us, our species over the long term. And that doesn't mean we need to set it aside, but we need to protect it, whether it's in a city, a rural area, or an untouched area.
So that's a big evolution in conservation. I think another evolution that when I was in Europe was happening a little bit faster than it has been in North America, is trying to understand the relationship between nature or conservation and our economic system. So not trying to do conservation in a silo, but looking outside of the practice of conservation to other sectors like energy or our economic system or just our mindset and how we view our relationship to nature. Is nature separate from our economic system? Is it a resource for us to do what we will with it or is it something that we need to manage more carefully and think about as being the foundation of our economic system?
Jocelyn Hittle:
That's really interesting to think about. I don't know that it comes to mind first for a lot of people when they think about conservation, to think immediately about the connections to the economic system. But it brings to mind something that I've spoken about some other guests, which is things like ecosystem services and how important it is that we have natural areas that do things like essentially provide us with water. Right. You mentioned the term watershed before, which is entire is the area that feeds into one specific river. So it can be all the rainfall that lands in a specific river eventually. And if we think about those watersheds as providing us with water and helping to clean and cool that water and to keep it where it can do good for the economy, that's one ecosystem service that I know is really important. What are some of the other ways that we can think about nature as being the basis of our economic system that might be something that would surprise a listener?
Leslie Harroun:
Oh, I don't know how much would surprise people. Well, maybe there are some things that would surprise people, but another example is that nature provides us with clean air. Nature provides our agricultural system with pollinators so that we can eat, we can continue to eat. It provides us with shade. I think something that's underlooked, but hugely important is that nature provides us with mental health and physical health. People of access to nature tend to be more calm and I think emotionally healthy. There've been studies that have shown that just a walk through a park in your city can actually lower your blood pressure. It can actually help replenish your immune system. So there are a lot of benefits to nature.
Jocelyn Hittle:
I think that is interesting to think about, right? That it's not only about the economic system, but it's also just about our general wellbeing and that connection to nature has been proven over and over again through various scientific studies to be really important for physical and mental health. So let's talk a little bit about your typical workday. So you already outlined some of what you do, meetings and conversations work with partners and donors. What's a task that you do in your current day-to-day that you dislike? And what is one that you're surprised you like?
Leslie Harroun:
The one that I dislike, this is an easy one, and I've been surprised at this with this job, is that I feel like I'm always creating agendas. So for every meeting that I go to, because I want my meetings to be productive for everybody, I create a lot of agendas.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Well, thank you. Because that does help keep meetings productive and everyone's in a lot of hours of meetings a day.
Leslie Harroun:
Everybody's in a lot of meetings. One thing, there isn't anything that's a real surprise to me that I like, but something that I've always liked and that I particularly like in this job is working with the people who I work with. So our partners, I have to say almost every phone call I have with a partner or a donor, I come away a little bit energized and inspired to hear about their work and what they want to accomplish and why they're doing what they're doing. I also really like, I have an amazing staff. The Salazar Center has an amazing staff. They're just extraordinary human beings. They're really thoughtful, generous, and kind people, so they're a joy to work with, and I also really love working with my board. Feel like I've landed in a great place.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Great. So let's talk a little bit more about your team. What are some of the skill sets that they have? How have you constructed that team or how has it come to be that you have this team that has a certain set of skills and how do those advance your work?
Leslie Harroun:
I have four team members, so we're not a big team. One of our team members who runs our programs is a scientist. She's very much a scientist, so she thinks like a scientist, which is really helpful when you're working on conservation issues. And she is very organized. She's a very good writer and she thinks conservation all the time, and she gets it. She stays on top of the issue. She values relationships very highly both internally and externally. So she is constantly pulling people into the Salazar Center, which I find, which is very useful. I have another staff member who's the director of our operations who can do just about anything. She's amazing and unfortunately that means she ends up doing a lot, probably more than she should, but she's very detail oriented. She excels at operations and managing relationships with all kinds of people and vendors around the Salazar Center.
We have a communications director who I think she was born a communications director. She's just really great at social media and thinking about how we can present our best foot forward at the Salazar Center. And I have a staff member who just joined us last year who provides support for everyone on the team, but she is, this is going to sound strange, but she's a very well balanced person. She has a very solid core and she's very analytical and thoughtful. And so the feedback that she provides everyone and she a much younger member of the team is really amazing. She's just an amazing person to bounce things off of, and she's a great synthesizer of information.
Jocelyn Hittle:
That's great. That does sound like a really wonderful team and a nice mix of different strengths. So a lot of what you described are one of your team members is a conservationist, one has training in communications, they're organized, they get things done, but a lot of what you described is really sort of soft skills and about relationship building and about having a functional team. Can you say a little bit more about that? If I were say, a young person thinking about developing skills that will help me get hired to do work in conservation, what skillset would you encourage those young people to build?
Leslie Harroun:
So there are two buckets really that come to mind for me, and it might surprise you, but I would prioritize those interpersonal skills. And when I first graduated from law school and went to DC and worked in the conservation field, I thought I was going to be intimidated and just overwhelmed by people who had a lot more experience than me and were in much higher positions. What I found that really surprised me was that the people who were in leadership positions had really, really good interpersonal skills. They may have great scientific skills, they may have great communication skills and other skills, but those people in leadership positions had really good interpersonal skills. So I would focus on that as one thing that is very important if you want to advance in your career. The other skill I would focus on would be analytical thinking. So learn how to be curious, learn how to ask questions and then seek out the answers. It's really important to be able to think critically in order to solve problems. If you are somebody who wants to enter the nonprofit world, that's what this world is about. It's about solving problems, whether they're conservation problems or any kind of social problem. You need to be able to think outside the box and ask a lot of questions
Jocelyn Hittle:
And then asking a lot of questions. Part of what you just said, I think sometimes can be harder for younger people as they're entering into the workforce, but so critical for helping understand how things get done, what the current status of a particular problem is. And I think to your point about one of your team being younger and being a good person to bounce ideas off of. I think often young people coming into the workplace feel that they shouldn't be asking questions, but the questions they might ask could be different from the other questions that others are asking because they're coming at it from a different perspective. So I think that being curious and asking a lot of questions is great advice for anyone who's entering the workforce
Leslie Harroun:
And don't be afraid to ask for help.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Absolutely, absolutely. Asking for help is no one is going to say no,
Leslie Harroun:
Nobody's going to say no. People are going to be flattered.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Absolutely. Okay. Thanks for that information about your team and those skill sets. I think as we're at Spur, one of our mission areas is to inspire people to think about careers that are not considering particularly young people. And I think it's nice to have a chance to just think about what are some of the skill sets that anyone could be developing for any career. I think the point that you make about analytical thinking I don't think is unique to conservation. So the interpersonal skills and analytical thinking and understanding what the right questions are to ask. Very, very important skillset. Okay. So my next question for you is about what you do when you come up against a challenge. Is there somebody that you call? Who do you go to for advice?
Leslie Harroun:
It really depends on what the challenge is. I've learned to not be afraid to ask questions and to reach out for help. I've never had a mentor the way that some people have official mentors. So one thing that I've learned to do is identify people who I admire for one reason or another, study them, ask them questions, learn about them, and then mimic them. I've done a lot of mimicking in my life and I've asked a lot of questions. I also at the moment have a stable of people who I look to, for example, for helping me figure out how to be an executive director, helping me learn how to manage and motivate my staff and my board helping me to understand the issues that conservation is throwing at us at the moment, or helping me to understand the political context in which we're working at the moment. So it really does depend on the context, but I have no fear. I've gotten over my fear of just calling people up and saying, Hey, I need a little bit of help. Would you give me some advice?
Jocelyn Hittle:
That's great. I think that that tracks with what you have said before, but it's great to think about how you can have a stable of people that you call on for different things. That's so valuable. And for those of us, like myself who are external processors of ideas and information and thoughts, I really need that someone I can think out loud with and whole reflect back what they're hearing and what they see from their perspective. Really, really helpful. So my last question for you about your work now, I hope that you have moments in your day where you think I was just good at my job. I just helped to achieve the mission of the organization. In those moments, what has just happened for you?
Leslie Harroun:
Well, it could be a conversation with a staff member in which A gets resolved or somebody has a sense that they're on the right track or they're doing a good job. So positive feedback from people and helping people solve their problems is really important to me. Other things that have made me feel like I'm doing good at my job, or for example, when we're successful at getting a policy passed, and that's been more of my previous career than at the moment, but something tangible in the outside world has happened as a result of our work.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Great, thank you. Are there moments where you think, Ooh, I'm still learning?
Leslie Harroun:
Oh yeah. There are a lot of those moments, and sometimes I do feel really anxious that I'm not like I just don't know enough about how to do something to get it done. But I also, I love learning and I've made it a lifelong pursuit. And so when I do have those moments, I don't tend to, and I did this when I was younger, but I've trained myself out of this. I don't tend to stew in my anxiety. I have learned to go pick, go buy a book and start reading it if there's something that you want to know about or call somebody, but just do one thing, put one foot in front of the other and walk yourself out of it.
Jocelyn Hittle:
That's great advice. And I think it is, well, I'll just speak for myself that when I was younger, I looked at people in their careers further along in their careers, and I assumed that they knew how to handle every situation that came their way already. And as I have progressed through my career, what I am realizing is that everyone is piecing together parts of past experience and knowledge to take an educated guess at what to do in almost every circumstance because it's very uncommon for you to have the exact same thing happen to you twice. That's
Leslie Harroun:
Right. And you're typically dealing with other humans too, and that makes everything very complex. So you need to manage what you think is right for the situation, but also for the humans that you're working with. And if you get it wrong, that's okay.
Jocelyn Hittle:
That's a great point. We're all constantly learning from our mistakes, and as long as there's good communication with the people who are part of that context, as you say that there are people involved, there's almost nothing you can't come back from if maybe there's been a little bit of a misstep in how you manage something. And I would love for young people to be able to absorb what you and I just said and believe it. Yeah. Okay. So my first spur of the moment question for you, and this is a question that I have not prepared you for in the slightest,
Leslie Harroun:
Okay.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Is what is your favorite pair of shoes and why?
Leslie Harroun:
Oh my gosh. Well, I'm actually wearing my favorite pair of shoes right now.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Are you just saying that because an easy answer?
Leslie Harroun:
No, I am not. And I kind of wish they weren't my favorite pair of shoes. So I'm wearing this pair of these black doc Martens, which are just the most comfortable shoes ever. I hardly take them off. I've had them probably maybe nine months, and I'm going to have to take them off pretty soon because we're coming up against summer and they're going to be too hot. But they're not fancy. They're just really, really comfortable.
Jocelyn Hittle:
There you go. They are a very cute pair of Doc Martin's black doc, Martin Boots. Thank you. And I don't know why you would wish they weren't your favorite. I mean, doc Martin's are classic.
Leslie Harroun:
I do have lots of fancy shoes, but I hardly ever wear them.
Jocelyn Hittle:
You and me both. Okay, so let's move on to how you got to where you are. I mentioned a few things in our introduction about your bio and background, but maybe just give us the basics of the sort of big moves that got you to where you are now.
Leslie Harroun:
My first big move was probably going to law school without having a clear idea of exactly what I wanted to do when I finished law school. I thought it would be a great education, and I knew that it would always allow me to support myself. And while I was in law school, I became involved in the Environment Club, so that kind of set me on the path of environmental law or thinking that's what I wanted to do.
Jocelyn Hittle:
You hadn't been an environmentalist prior to that?
Leslie Harroun:
Not knowingly. I grew up in an environmentalist family, and so it was normal for me. My father was a pretty radical environmentalist now that I look back and I understand who was involved with the Sierra Club and he went to school with Paul Eli who wrote the population bomb. And so he was very much an environmentalist and some of that I appreciated growing up and some of that I did not appreciate recycling everything. I was not into that as a child.
Jocelyn Hittle:
There are always things that are part of our early home life that especially as teens.
Leslie Harroun:
So I think finally realizing that that was not something that everybody grew up with. And understanding that nature was really important to me. I grew up in rural Vermont and spent all my time outside and just bonded with my little swampy ecosystem. And I realized after I left Vermont and started doing other things, how important nature was to me and that I wanted my career to be in nature somehow. So after law school, I got a conservation fellowship and went to World Wildlife Fund, and that opened my world to policy and how decisions get made within society. And I hadn't realized until that point how important the legal system and the policy system are to protecting nature and basically getting things done. And so that was really inspiring. And my next big move was actually, this is kind of a funny story. I was at World Wildlife Fund and there was this woman there who I just thought the world of.
Her name was Tunde Aarti, and she was a marine researcher and an extraordinary human being. And I went to one of her brown bag lunches one day about her trip to Papua New Guinea, which is the second largest island in the world. And it's half independent just north of Australia. And Papua New Guinea is one. It is the only one or one of the only places on the planet that recognizes indigenous land tenure in its constitution. So it has very, very little private property. All property is publicly owned in Papua New Guinea. And basically if you use land, you have ownership over that land. You don't own it like we do here, but you have ownership over the use of that land. And I was absolutely fascinated by that. And so I decided that I wanted to work in Papua New Guinea, and I went to the person who ran the Asia Pacific program.
His name was Don Henry, amazing guy Australian. And I asked him if I could work with him, and he gave me a one week consulting job. And then he gave me another job and he gave me another job, but they would not send me to Papua New Guinea because it was too dangerous for a single woman. And so I ended up deciding, okay, the only way I'm going to get there is some other way. And so I decided to apply for a Fulbright scholarship, and there was a handful of Fulbrights that are, they're called professional Fulbrights as opposed to academically focused Fulbright. So I did that. One of the people on the board of World Wildlife Fund was this woman named Meg Taylor who was from Papua New Guinea, and she was the Papua New Guinea ambassador to the United States. So I had a conversation with her and I asked her if she would sponsor me, and she said yes.
So I got it. I ended up there and my job there, my proposal was to help the country implement the convention on biodiversity. When I started working at World Wildlife Fund in 1992, that was year that I believe that was the year, that was the first meeting of the convention on Biodiversity. And all of these countries, not the United States, signed on. And if you're going to sign a big treaty like this, it means that each individual country has to develop their own implementing legislation for that treaty. So that was my job to help the country develop implementing legislation and specifically how they were going to regulate foreigners who would come into the country and use Papua New Guinea's indigenous knowledge and unique biodiversity for pharmaceutical purposes.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Wow. Wow. There's so much there in that story, the nuances of how treaties work and having to develop your own laws and rules internally to meet the treaty obligations. And then this piece about pharmaceuticals and native knowledge. That's really interesting. So how was your experience? What happened? It
Leslie Harroun:
Was great. And my original focus on helping the country regulate people who were interested in the biodiversity expanded to include music and art and other things because Papua New Guinea as a small, not wealthy country, was having a very difficult time policing foreigners who often were basically extracting resources from their country. So we needed to figure out how we were going to manage this, whether it was through new legislation or could we tack it on to existing legislation, for example, the forestry legislation, which governed all interactions with the forests in the country. And that's in fact what we ended up doing. But we also, one of the other things I did when I was there was help Papua New Guinea think about whether or not it wanted to adopt intellectual property rights. And so I recommended that they adopt some, but not all of them. And I think they just had so much pressure from the world Intellectual Property organization to adopt everything, even though as a poor country, they regulate everything so they can't police it themselves. They just don't have enough money to do that. So a lot of it is just on paper, but it's not actually enforced.
Jocelyn Hittle:
So that's a really fascinating chapter of your career. And so when your Fulbright was then over and you had done this work and you came back to the states, presumably that sort of set you more on the path that has led you to where you are.
Leslie Harroun:
That definitely set me on the path to where I am now. So I came and I was hired by an international family foundation called the Oak Foundation. I was the first staff person that they hired. And so I helped one of the trustees develop their environment program, which ended up focusing around climate change issues and marine conservation, and to some extent environmental, toxins, environmental health. And it was such a privilege seed to be in being the first employee because I got to see this brand new foundation. I was there for 17 years. I got to see them become a one staff member organization to having over a hundred staff and offices all over the world focused on a variety of different issues.
Jocelyn Hittle:
That's great. And then the next step after the Oak Foundation was more with that intersection of the economy and conservation.
Leslie Harroun:
So while I was at Oak, there were several other foundations that we worked with a lot. And we recognized at some point that while many of the grants that we were making to other organizations to work on conservation issues, most of them were successful. The organizations accomplished what they set out to accomplish, but at the same time, we were losing the planet. So climate change was increasing, biodiversity loss was increasing. We are in the world's sixth great extinctions, and our entire biosphere is unraveling. And so our question to ourselves was, how do we figure out why this is happening and how do we do something about it? And so it took us a couple of years to really decide to focus on the economy as sort of the driver of environmental harm, but also as the hope that we could do something differently. So we started Partners for a New Economy.
There were four foundations originally. They put in a million dollars each for the first three years, actually one of them put in 500,000, but kind of the same thing. And we started, and nobody was really working on this issue yet. And so it was kind of a slog to find organizations who were starting to think about this and actually do things, creating activities that were focused on this or doing writing that was focused on this to help other people understand this issue. But we did over time and then we started developing a community within our grantees, and then we started working with other foundations to put it on the map for them so that we would bring more money into this space. And it was really exciting.
Jocelyn Hittle:
So you've mentioned a number of chapters here. Can you talk a little bit about the transition between these different positions? Any one of those that was particularly difficult or easy? Were there mentors or others who helped with those transitions? I
Leslie Harroun:
Think my hardest transition was when I was at World Wildlife Fund, and I had my first year as a conservation fellow, but they had a policy against hiring fellows. And so they wouldn't hire me as a staff member. They would only hire me as a consultant, which meant that I'm in my twenties, I'm hardly making enough to pay my rent. And it was very, I had a lot of anxiety. And then applying for the Fulbright and waiting for the visa to come through and having to move home and live with my parents and then moving in with my grandmother. And it was just, that was really hard. There was a lot of soul searching and wondering, am I good enough and am I ever going to be able to do what I want to do? And so what I learned from that, what I would tell people is just stick to your guns. If you really want to do it, just figure it out.
Jocelyn Hittle:
That's great advice. And I think everyone at some point in their career, whether it's early on, like you were at big transition moments, or there are folks who end up being laid off from a company they've worked at for a very long time through no fault of their own right that are then doing that soul searching. So I think there is sticking with it, understanding yourself, really important to do in those moments. To wrap us up then, I'm going to ask you for some advice for young people. So if you were going to give a 15-year-old some advice, what would it be? And what about a 25-year-old? And what about yourself at 25?
Leslie Harroun:
I guess my advice would be to trust yourself, find out and hold fast to your core self, figure out what it is and protect it. Explore what you want to do. Some of us are born knowing what we want to do. Like my father and others of us, like myself, need a lot of exploration. You need to go out there and find out what floats your boat, what makes your heart beat faster? And so I would say both of those things. And I would also say be really kind to yourself and also be kind to other people. Kindness is probably underrated. It's really important.
Jocelyn Hittle:
It's certainly true. And advice for yourself at 25, if it's different than what you just said.
Leslie Harroun:
Oh, I wish that my 25-year-old self could see my 60-year-old self and know where she was going to end up. Oh, the twenties are such a trying time. Yeah, I guess it would be the same. Just trust yourself. Trust your instincts. Trust who you are and take good care of yourself.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Great. Excellent advice for people at any age, really. But I hear in your advice there, the sort of wistfulness of wishing that your 25-year-old self could have known it was all going to be okay. Yeah,
Leslie Harroun:
It's all going to be okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Okay. And my second spur of the moment, question for you is one that I ask a lot of people actually, because I guess I'm food obsessed. Do you cook and what is one of your specialties? Oh, I
Leslie Harroun:
Love cooking. I love cooking. I love cooking everything. And I just moved and I realized I have like a thousand cookbooks and I can't have a thousand cookbooks. I think my favorite thing to make is a tej. I love tej and I love all the spices that go into it. I love that you have to cook it all day. I love making it with a whole variety of different vegetables or different meats, and I just love
Jocelyn Hittle:
It. What is a taji for those who are not familiar?
Leslie Harroun:
I believe it's Moroccan, and there's a special taji dish that you make it in that looks like a big pointy hat. And it has, traditionally, it's probably made with lamb, but it's also made with, you normally have it with couscous, but it has any kind of legume in it. Usually I think chickpeas and a whole variety of Middle Eastern spices like turmeric and curcumin.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Well, that sounds delicious.
Leslie Harroun:
It's really good. I'll make it for you sometime.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Wonderful. This is my ulterior motive around asking this question also, especially when we're meeting here in person like we are today. So I just want to say thank you so much, Leslie. We are wrapping up on time, but I just want to say thank you so much for your time today. It's been, thank you. Wonderful to hear a little bit about your history and what a fascinating set of chapters you've had, where you have learned so much that has taken you to where you are today. We're thrilled to have you here at Colorado State University as the director of the Salazar
Leslie Harroun:
Center. Thank you very much. This has been fun, and it's been an enjoyable reminiscing of my past.
Jocelyn Hittle:
Yep. Well, thank you so much again for your time. And if anyone would like to learn more about the CSU Salazar Center, you can just Google or look for Salazar Center for North American Conservation, which is part of Colorado State University. Thank you again, Leslie.
Leslie Harroun:
Thank you.
Jocelyn Hittle:
The CSU Spur of the Moment podcast is produced by Kevin Samuelson, and our theme music is by kea. Please visit the show notes for links mentioned in this episode. We hope you'll join us in two weeks for the next episode. Until then, be well.