With extensive experience working for and directing nonprofit, politically motivated organizations, Samuel P. Schuchat has served as Coastal Conservancy executive officer for more than a decade.

Schuchat received an undergraduate degree in political science in 1983 from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and a master’s degree in public administration from San Francisco State in 1989, before going to work for a year as deputy director of the Sacramento AIDS Foundation.

Afterward, Schuchat signed on with the California League of Conservation Voters, the nation’s largest and oldest state environmental PAC with 25,000 members, where he served as executive director from 1992 to 1998. From 1998 to 2001, he served in the same capacity for the Federation of State Conservation Voter Leagues. He concurrently served on the California Fish and Game Commission from 1999-2004, including two years as vice-president.

Schuchat was appointed executive officer by the conservancy’s governing board in May 2001 and in 2005 also took on duties as secretary to the Ocean Protection Council. He sits on the boards of the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority, the Baldwin Hills Conservancy and the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission, and earns $114,000 annually.

Schuchat is an avid cyclist, backpacker and birdwatcher, and serves on the Board of Temple Sinai. He lives in Oakland with his wife, Illana DeBare, an author and  former reporter who spent two decades at the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Chronicle, and is cofounder of the Julia Morgan School for Girls. She blogs at Midlife Bat Mitzvah, where she poses the question: “Can a nice Jewish atheist feminist find fulfillment as a Bat Mitzvah in her fifties?” They have a teenage daughter.

Schuchat Profile (Coastal Conservancy website)

Sam Schuchat (LinkedIn)

OPC Staff (Ocean Protection Council)