This story is part of a series highlighting the contributions women have made to the Forest Service. If you’d like to nominate someone to be featured in a HerStory piece, please contact Patricia Burel.

NEW MEXICO—Meet Juana Rosas, a national partnership coordinator in the Washington office. She first encountered the Forest Service through the Generation Green program and Camp Smokey, teaching leave no trace and fire safety as a summer job.

After college, Rosas began her career with the Forest Service, first serving an internship with the Civil Rights staff in the Washington Office, and then taking a position as the rural coordinator for the same Generation Green program that had introduced her to the agency. Rosas spent 10 years in that position, a role she found intensely rewarding. “It was gratifying, it was inspiring, and also, it was really exciting to give back to my community,” she remembers.

In 2016, Rosas took what she regards the opportunity of a lifetime—the chance to reach out to underserved communities through working at El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico. While she was in Puerto Rico, two hurricanes struck the island, devastating its infrastructure, the forest and people’s homes. The experience was traumatic, but Rosas, whose life’s work has focused on partnerships and serving the underserved, found great value in the role the forest was able to play in the recovery efforts.

“It was amazing to provide them the information, but also give them hope,” she recalls. Rosas later moved to the Carson National Forest in New Mexico, where she serves as a partnership coordinator and recently worked to employ underserved youth on the Acequia Inventory Project. She has also increasingly been involved with the same part of the Forest Service she interned with after college—the Office of Civil Rights, recently coordinating and developing material for Hispanic Heritage Month.

Throughout her career, Rosas has centered her work on helping other people, whether through employment, connecting with nature or escaping bad circumstances. In working as a rural coordinator for Generation Green she was able to relate to hardworking parents the value, the sense of a better life, that might come from pursuing a career with the Forest Service.

“That job made me feel like there was a great potential to make a difference in people’s lives,” says Rosas. Looking back on her career, she is grateful for mentors and supporters who made a difference in her life, too. Jim Oftedal and Trinidad Juarez in the Forest Service not only showed her the ropes but also helped build “that confidence in me that I could do it, even though I wasn’t from this country and I didn’t speak English at the time. And they saw the potential in me when I didn’t even see it.” And she credits her parents, small farmers with a love for the land, with giving her the inspiration she needed to make a career working with the land in a different way while maintaining their ethic of hard work.

“Seeing the way they live inspired me a great deal,” says Rosas. “And that’s the inspiration every day to make them proud.”

Follow the link to listen to Juana Rosas’ oral history.