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Brooke Rose

Master of Environmental Management, 2025 

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ConcentrationS:

Community ���Ĵ�ýment and Environmental Justice; Terrestrial and Freshwater Environments

Employer:

The Wildfire Solutions Coalition

Role:

Project Coordinator

 

 

When Brooke Rose joined the as its only full-time employee in July 2025, the California-based organization was just a month old.

Led by three nonprofit partners, including The Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Business Council and the Northern Sierra Partnership, the Coalition’s aim is to fully fund California’s through state, federal, private, philanthropic and private sectors.

“We’ve now grown to over 75 members of our coalition that represent all facets of California — our geographic diversity, different interest groups — ranging from business to conservation to water to recreation,” Rose says.

As the Coalition’s project coordinator, Rose wears multiple hats. A typical day includes liaising between strategists, policymaker engagement teams, and marketing and communications professionals, as well as relaying updates to Coalition members. Additionally, she serves as point of contact for the Coalition’s executive committee.

Since she was a kid growing up in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Rose has been drawn to understanding how people and their environments shape each other, and to solving the social and ecological imbalances that can result.

“When I think about, how do we advance environmental goals, I can’t envision a world that is more sustainable that is not also more just,” Rose says.

After graduating from Santa Clara University with undergraduate degrees in environmental sciences and sociology, Rose joined AmeriCorps for a year. Stationed in Anchorage, Alaska, she worked with the state’s largest food pantry to improve access to healthy and culturally appropriate food, particularly among the state’s large refugee population.

During that time, she began researching graduate schools with interdisciplinary programming — a nonnegotiable factor, she says. The Nicholas School’s MEM program caught her attention.

“Looking at the other programs I’ve applied to, I would have had to really focus on either just the science or just the people aspect. So that was one reason that the Nicholas School really stood out to me,” says Rose, who chose concentrations in Community ���Ĵ�ýment and Environmental Justice and Terrestrial and Freshwater Environments.

Her coursework allowed flexibility to take classes in Duke Law’s , and to pursue an from the Sanford School of Public Policy.

The summer after her first year, Rose moved to Eugene, Oregon, as part of a through the Environmental Defense Fund. There, she collaborated with the county health department to design a network of rural climate resilience hubs.

“[The experience] really was all about meeting people where they’re at and understanding what are the biggest threats to their resilience, and how can we support them,” Rose says.

Conversations with community members were also central to Rose’s , which took her to Oaxaca, Mexico, to learn how forest-based carbon offsetting programs affect climate resilience among Indigenous communities.

Experiences like these were foundational to the relationship-building that her job now demands, Rose says.

“I feel like without the MEM degree, I probably would not be where I am right now.” 

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This article is part of a Nicholas Narratives series called “Earth Ambassadors,” which profiles alums from the Master of Environmental Management and Master of Forestry programs at the Nicholas School of the Environment. Find more profiles here.