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.

WASHINGTON, DC—Michelle Reugebrink is a Resiliency And Personal Effectiveness program manager at the Work Environment and Performance Office. She began working for the Forest Service at 15 years old, through the Golden Sierra program. Her first formal position with the agency was as a firefighter, while she pursued a fire science degree. Reugebrink has had a varied career, including working on timber, recreation, wildlife crews, building fences and, especially, fighting fire. She spent much of her early career in fire, including service on the Redding Interagency Hotshot Crew.

The tragic 1994 South Canyon Fire “was a moment of shifting for me,” Reugebrink said. “It became a huge moment on how we take care of each other?” Not long after, Reugebrink took a position as an occupational safety officer—her first step on the road to agency-wide prominence in occupational health and mindfulness. She later served as the Forest Service’s occupational health and safety manager for the Pacific Southwest Region, at the time the only woman in that role at that level. Michelle’s work in occupational health and safety led her to research, attempting to step beyond “the physical outside of our beings.” With Becky Livingston, in 2012 she developed the Comprehensive Wellbeing and Resiliency initiative. Simultaneously, Reugebrink pursued more formal education in occupational health and mindfulness, taking credentials from Duke University and the University of Massachusetts.

From occupational health, Reugebrink stepped into Civil Rights and then into the Work Environment and Performance Office, a decision she felt was the natural progression of her own journey. She first began offering Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction while in Civil Rights. Today, as director of the Resiliency and Personal Effectiveness program, Reugebrink is able to proudly claim having personally “held the space” with 18,000 USDA Forest Service employees and secured participation from 37 other federal agencies. She finds deep personal satisfaction in her work and is grateful for the opportunity to coach, to lead national programs, to “touch the landscape,” as she puts it.

Looking back, Reugebrink considers her place as a woman in an evolving agency. “When I first stepped in, I thought, Oh, my goodness, I need to work really hard to get noticed, and to do three times more work to get noticed,” she said. But over more than 35 years, she has seen the agency increasingly focus on inclusivity and acceptance. She considers herself blessed to have worked with a series of excellent supervisors and mentors, among them Eric Alonzo, Ed Hollinshead and Jim Saveland. “It makes you a beautiful person, when you take all of these great things from all of the people you get to work with and for,” she says.