Photo of Francis Grant-Suttie by Mike Mitchell
The C&O Canal Trust is thrilled to announce that long-time Board Member, Francis Grant-Suttie is our newest Board Chair. We sat down with Francis this fall to talk about the future of the C&O Canal Trust and his vision for the organization during his tenure.
C&O Canal Trust: Can you talk a little bit about your background and how you became involved with the C&O Canal Trust?
Francis: I was born and raised in Africa, in Zimbabwe. I just have in my DNA, a sense of wilderness and wildness, which I guess is more of an attitude in seeing life that has stayed with me, which led me to work for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) for 25 years. I worked a lot with indigenous cultures and tribes all over the world.
From there, I migrated from WWF to become head of the Atlantic Flyway for National Audubon Society where I worked up and down the East Coast, from the Eastern states and internationally into Canada and to the tip of South America. I’ve always worked within large ecosystems, and when I stopped doing all that, I really just wanted to be local. Since I arrived in this country years ago, I’ve always been a hiker and adventurer. Back in the mid-60s, I would go hiking on the canal, on the towpath. And it was just one of those places that became our special place as a family. I live right adjacent to the towpath. I’m just up from Marsden Bridge, so I’m there literally every day with Lakota, my white retriever up in the trails above Wide Water. And it turns out, and that was one of the reasons I signed up to be a canal steward.
C&O Canal Trust: What inspired you to step into the role of Board Chair, and what does it mean to you personally?
Francis: I joined the board over eight years ago. Mike Mitchell, who was the former chair and now a current Board member, also a neighbor back then asked me to join the board. Everything about The Trust, even back then, just delighted me. For most of my life, I’ve always been in some sort of leadership role, be it at WWF or Audubon or other entities that I’ve been associated with. Shortly after joining the board, I became the Program Chair.
Several years after that, the previous Board Chair reached out and asked me to be Vice Chair. I feel very fortunate. It is an honor to be asked to be a Board Chair of the C&O Canal Trust. I think we have a strong future ahead of us.
C&O Canal Trust: What has been your proudest moment with the Trust so far?
Francis: That’s a hard question to answer because there’s probably about a thousand of them. I mean, really! I’m not sure I can identify one particular moment I was proudest of. I have felt real pride – and that’s the right word – just listening to the Trust staff and all the work that we are doing with the communities we’re serving. All kinds of nonprofits and community organizations want to partner with us, which just tells you that our mission resonates with those groups and local communities.
The Trust also never rests on our laurels. We never go, “ain’t we grand?” It’s always, okay, we had a very good year, but what’s next? How many more Canal For All groups do we want to engage? How many more volunteers do we want to connect with? Our youth programs are of particular importance to me, because I love the kids and students. They are our future National Park stewards! It’s their national park, and some of them don’t even know it. We need to get them out there, get them into a lockhouse and really understand what a national park is all about and experience nature at her fullest.
C&O Canal Trust: You’ve mentioned a couple times now about being a quartermaster and a canal steward. Can you talk a little bit more about those experiences?
Francis: Yes, when I first got to this country in 1970 permanently, I would go down to Swains, and I would rent a canoe. There was a little snack bar there back in the 70s, and this was – as far as I was concerned – just like going to boating in Paris on the Seine. I really just fell in love with the lockhouses. These are incredible structures. We have more historical structures than any other national park, outside of the Smokies. I wasn’t necessarily a historic preservation person, but as soon as I joined the board, I asked to be a quartermaster. I started with Pennyfield, which I love. It’s a rustic. Once Swains was renovated, I became a quartermaster there as well. I used to go out there and mow the lawn and clean up every week. The lockhouses are incredible; it’s like stepping back in time, into another era, into history. There’s a lot of history to be learned and absorbed visiting them.
C&O Canal Trust: As the new board chair, what is your vision for The Trust in the next few years?
Francis: I really think that we have a very, very solid foundation. I believe we will continue to expand and increase our impact – impact in the field with volunteers and visitors. There’s a lot of work to be done. We’re going to continue to deliver more funding and programming to the Park.
C&O Canal Trust: What do you see as the biggest opportunities for growth or impact for the Trust, especially within the lens of fundraising and preservation opportunities?
Francis: Well, let me start with the preservation. It’s not just the canal quarters, the lock houses that need preserving. There are a lot of structures: locks, culverts, historic structures. We, like every park in this country, are suffering from over a century of deferred maintenance. We need to get more funding into The Park and our Superintendent Tina Cappetta is doing a tremendous job accessing federal funding for much needed infrastructure projects.
COVID taught us a lot about our donors: that they like us and have remained loyal supporting the Trust through a very difficult time in human history, the pandemic. We do a really good job of stewarding those donors. But in order to accomplish what we want to accomplish over the next four years, that donor pool has to expand. Support doesn’t come just because it’s a one-off thing. You have to build out the relationships. I like to quote from Field Of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come.” Every single nonprofit in the world is in D.C. However, they don’t have a towpath and a canal and all the structures to attend to. And they don’t have a river. We have a unique proposition.
C&O Canal Trust: The C&O Canal Trust, has a strong partnership with the National Park Service. How do you envision strengthening this partnership during your tenure?
Francis: I think we have a great relationship with the National Park Service, with the superintendent and all her staff. I think that relationship is only going to continue to grow. Our relationship is mission driven. We, as their partner, want to deliver the kind of impact that makes us an essential partner to the National Park Service. It is a priority of mine and the Trust to ensure that we continue to strengthen that relationship.
C&O Canal Trust: What role do you believe our community partners, volunteers, and donors play in helping us achieve our mission?
Francis: They are essential. They are critical. They are the folks that we think about every day, because without them, we don’t exist.
The hundreds and up to thousands of people who come into our orbit, whether we invite them in or they come in on their own accord, are doing unbelievably good work. If you go to these Canal Community Days, you will see it. They work hard, and as the event photographer, I see them in action and enjoy meeting them. They’re painting. They are varnishing. They’re picking up trash. They remove invasive plants like English Ivy. They are absolutely critical to our mission and at the core of what we do on behalf of the park.
C&O Canal Trust: If you could accomplish just one thing during your tenure as board chair, what would it be?
Francis: Diversify the board. I think we’re going to do all the things I just talked about, but we need to diversify the board so that it reflects who are our visitors in our park. We have an incredibly diverse community of folks out there. And we must reflect that in our leadership because that reflection rebounds back to them. They’ll go, okay, they see us. They recognize us. It’s going to take some time, but I am very excited that we can accomplish this goal.
C&O Canal Trust: What would you say is your favorite section of the park?
Francis: Mike Mitchell and I hiked from Georgetown to Cumberland, 184.5 miles during COVID with sponsorship dollars, so I know the park pretty well. If I had to choose one or two or three sections, I think that the Billy Goat Trail A is a really cool trail. It’s probably one of the most rugged places to climb on the towpath. There are a few sections where you scramble a lot. There is also a place called the Purple Horse Beach. As you are making the trek to see it, you get a firsthand view of the Mather Gorge. It’s an incredible place. I also really like the Overlook Trail that goes along the ridges from Lock 17 to Lock 20. If you go up north to the western part of Maryland up into the Wilds, it becomes a spectacular wilderness, just the river, the woods, away from it all.
C&O Canal Trust: So you have taken a lot of photos in the past for the organization at volunteer events, programs, and for your own recreation. Could you talk a little bit about your photography process and what you most like to photograph while you’re visiting the park?
Francis: In traveling around the world, I’m used to take a camera with me. So I’ve been taking a lot of photos of some of the most gorgeous landscapes you have ever seen and the people living there. I love landscape photography. However, I do take a lot of pictures of people. When I was in Cuba five years ago, I really enjoyed street photography, capturing the beauty of the Cuban people. Somebody once asked me, well, what’s your special thing that you do with photography? My answer was, I take photography of life, whatever is in front of me at that time.
If you come on a hike with me, you will see me doing circles because I’m a 360 person. You always want to look behind you, look over your shoulder and behind you because you never know what you might see. So I’m always looking for a variety of different angles, maybe on the same topic, but usually I take four to six to eight pictures, maybe of the same thing, but from a whole different angle. I’m just amazed how even people’s faces can change in a nanosecond.
C&O Canal Trust: Do you have a favorite book, quote, or personal motto that you live by?
Francis: I’m going to give you a couple of my favorite books. One is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It was a bestseller, has been for many, many years, and the author is a MacArthur Genius Awardee. It’s about Native American folklore and nature, storytelling and history bumping up against Western science and culture. The author is a professor of botany. And it is just an amazing saga of the history of American indigenous peoples. It’s just one of those books that had a profound impact on me.
Recently, I read, American Ramble, by Neil King, Jr. He was a Wall Street Journalist Pulitzer Prize winner for 9-11. The story is not just a travelogue. It’s about our history, our culture. It’s about philosophy and religion. People and their way of life. I took incredible notes reading the book; I can’t even lend my copy of the book to anybody because there’s so many notes, they would get so distracted from all the stuff I wrote in there. But well worth the read.
One of my favorite quotes is from the late poet Mary Oliver, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
Photos by Mike Mitchell
