In May 2019, the Department of City and Regional Planning awarded alumna Natalia Sanchez MRP ’19 with the Robert P. Liversidge III Memorial Book Award in recognition of her academic achievements during her time in the MRP program. As a student, she was involved in several initiatives both within the department and throughout the university. Sanchez served as the external liaison for the Organization of Cornell Planners where she was instrumental in working with faculty and staff to host the department’s first Park(ing) Day event.
During her first year as a graduate student, Sanchez enrolled in an immersion course offered by the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise (SGE), where she worked in a team with MBA students to plan and establish a commercialization strategy for a crowdsourcing application for the livestock market in Nairobi, Kenya. She returned to SGE the following spring semester to serve as the teaching assistant for the Sustainable Global Enterprise Practicum course.
Following graduation, Natalia made a brief return to her home state of Florida to work for the National Park Service (NPS). After several months, she was offered the opportunity to transfer to the Washington, D.C. office to work on the Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance (RTCA) program where she travels to other satellite NPS offices to offer technical services to communities across the country.
Q: What is your current role at the National Parks Service?
Sanchez: I’m an outdoor recreation planner with the National Park Service in the Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance (RTCA) program. RTCA offers technical assistance to communities across the country looking to develop trail and river access, protect and conserve special places, and increase outdoor recreation opportunities. We work alongside communities, nonprofits, tribes, and state and local governments to get conservation and outdoor recreation ideas off the ground.
Q: What other kinds of projects are you involved with at the National Parks Service?
Sanchez: Based in Washington, DC, I’m involved in a host of projects across the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. My projects include transforming disused railway tracks into multi-use trails for walking and biking; expanding existing community trails to provide more users with river access and other outdoor recreation opportunities; and developing concept plans, funding and marketing strategies, and community engagement guides for various local communities.
Q: What courses do you think have been relevant to the projects you’re working on right now?
Sanchez: Most, if not all, courses have been relevant to the projects I’m working on at the moment. For example, I’m able to provide GIS capacity in my projects because of the GIS courses I took. I can offer new perspectives on the relationship between health and the outdoors thanks to courses focused on human-environment relations. And I’m comfortable working with various partners from diverse backgrounds every day, in part because of the opportunity to do project work in courses such as Planning History & Theory and Residential & Commercial Development while at CRP.
Q: Were there any other experiences at Cornell that informed your work as a planner?
Sanchez: As a planner interested in engaging new and diverse audiences with the great outdoors, I relished the opportunity that Cornell offers to take classes in any program, join in student clubs and organizations, and attend cross-departmental talks. To engage with other students from different graduate programs was a valuable experience that prepared me well in using concise and relevant language to get buy-in from groups that may not yet understand the important role planning plays in any development process, be it engaging underserved communities or developing a commercialization strategy for a mobile application.
Q: What do you miss the most about Cornell?
Sanchez: Definitely TGIF at BRB! Kidding…what I miss the most about my time at Cornell are the friendships that are still going strong with my fellow graduates. Despite going our different ways, it’s great to know that each of us is just a phone call, text, or email away!