Meet the Team

  • Melissa Calhoon

    Managing Director

    Melissa has been working with the nonprofit sector for over 20 years and completed her Masters in Nonprofit Management and Philanthropy from Bay Path University. She has extensive program management experience and over 10 years of experience and involvement with AmeriCorps program management in addition to her being a two time AmeriCorps Alumni. Melissa served in leadership roles at Colorado Mesa University for 11 years, including as Director of Student Success and Engagement. She actively serves as a governor-appointment Colorado Commissioner of Community Service. Through her time working within the education and nonprofit sectors, she has designed and implemented several training/onboarding programs and helped connect and foster connectivity within multiple community organizations to streamline and maximize program outcomes.

    Her volunteer leadership roles include serving as a Board Member for Mesa County Partners for four years and being selected as Colorado Governor's Fellow. Melissa is based in Grand Junction.

  • Colin Lacy

    Founder & CEO

    Colin has led entrepreneurial efforts at the intersection of education and workforce development for over 15 years. He is also the CEO & Co-Founder of MakerUSA, a national nonprofit that partners with communities to build stronger career pathways into “maker industries.” He served as the Executive Director of Makers + Mentors Network and had a founding leadership role in the initiative’s launch in partnership with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. During this time, he led a 30+ member team in the implementation of new models that more than doubled the scale of the initiative to support over 20 regional STEM and maker ecosystems, serving over 200,000 underrepresented youth. This time also included leading the design and implementation of AmeriCorps Maker Fellows. Maker Fellows successfully deployed 25+ service members in 10+ states, while implementing a robust professional development experience, and continues to drive impact today.

    His volunteer leadership roles have included serving as a three-term president of the Ridgway Area Chamber of Commerce and an elected school-board official. Colin graduated from Ridgway High School, completed his undergraduate at the University of Colorado at Boulder and received a Master in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He was recognized as one of 2022’s “Top 100 Entrepreneurs and Innovators” by Top 100 Magazine. Colin lives with his family in Ridgway, CO, where he grew up.

  • Taylor Poynor

    Director of Operations and Communications

    A graduate of Colorado School of Mines, Taylor began her career in water and wastewater engineering. Her education and initial workforce exposure were in this field, but her true passion lies in the skilled trades. She has experience as a certified Colorado Class A Water and Wastewater Operator and nearly a decade in project design and management. Before joining Homegrown Pathways, Taylor managed five critical community infrastructure facilities, overseeing the contract renewal process for each. During this time, she also conducted education and outreach programs to expose local youth to careers in STEM, including the skilled trades and engineering. Taylor served as the Program Manager for MakerUSA, in partnership with the Western Slope Schools Career Collaborative, during the initial design stage of the Homegrown Pathways model. Taylor brings her industry experience and enthusiasm for workforce development to Homegrown Pathways. She is dedicated to guiding young people towards opportunities for fulfilling careers that allow them to stay in their home region and pursue their passions.

    Taylor volunteers as Secretary on the Board of Directors of the Uncompahgre Watershed Partnership (UWP). She is a contributing scientist in UWP's River Watch program and assists in clean-up and education/outreach events. Taylor is based in Ridgway, CO.

Youth Voice Consultants

In their own words:

Neva Hines

My name is Neva Hines and I am a senior at Ridgway Secondary School. I currently work at Ridgway Adventure Sports in retail, and have an internship with Homegrown Pathways, a nonprofit, as a youth consultant. After my internship with an attorney, and my pre-college summer program with Colorado College for Journalism, I plan on going to college and following a pre-law path and getting a degree in communications. I'd love to be a journalist with a law degree. And while I may know what I would like to do in the future, after communicating with other young people going through the post-high school planning phase, not everyone does. I would like to be able to help give the greater population of high school students tools to make this transition into adulthood more clear, and give them better opportunities to aid them in their future.

Madeline Miller

My name is Madeleine Miller and I’m a senior at Ridgway High School, and I work part-time while interning with Homegrown Pathways as a youth program consultant. In this job, I work to help build programs through this non-profit that will help young people think about and make decisions on what they want to do post-secondary education. In the next year, I plan to attend college and study in the liberal arts field. I want to explore career options involving social sciences or international relations. I’m interested in helping people while also pursuing my own interests in languages and literature.

Consulting and Partner Team Leads 

  • Jessica Morrison

    Jessica Morrison is the former founding executive director for the Southwest ColoradoEducation Collaborative, a regional rural collaborative focused on building career and college pathways through connecting three main sectors: K-12, higher education, and industry. With a career and college preparation background and a focus on equitable education, Jessica brings over twenty years of educational experience focused on building and implementing successful career and college programming with school districts and communities. Her leadership with the Southwest Colorado Education Collaborative provided successful outcomes for students across the Southwest region and the model was used as a promising practice that has been replicated across the state of Colorado. Before her work with the Southwest Colorado Education Collaborative, Jessica was an AmeriCorps NCCC volunteer, taught philosophy in Honduras, led prevention programs for youth with Full Circle of Lake County, was an Academic Advisor for TRiO Talent Search, and held the Director of Career and College Counseling role at Animas High School.

    Jessica graduated from Bloomsburg University in 2004 with a B.S. in Secondary Education, and in 2015 from Fort Lewis College with an M.A. in Education, Teacher Leadership. She is an alumna of Semester at Sea, Class of 2003, and is a Leadership La Plata graduate with the Class of 2019.

    Currently, Jessica supports school districts, nonprofits, and communities through her organization JMorrison Education to build partnerships and equitable access for students. Jessica utilizes her skills in design thinking, project-based learning, career & college advising, and equitable education as key pillars for facilitation and implementation when engaged in pathways work.

    When Jessica is not working to help build a strong community focused on career and college education, she can be found traveling to new places, skiing, backpacking, canning, gardening, and hiking with her husband, Casey, and their dogs Olive & Hobbes

  • Nicole Greene

    As the owner and lead designer at Sprout Design Studio, Nicole's commitment to the field of strategic marketing and design has come from the harvest of her experiences working at the executive level in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors of the outdoor industry for nearly two decades. She is passionate about serving her clients with enthusiasm for and commitment to their projects. There is nothing she enjoys more than engaging in a collective creative process with entities that want to grow and thrive. 

    With a degree from Middlebury College in Vermont, Nicole returned to her native Colorado in 1996 to work for the Colorado Outward Bound School, the San Miguel Watershed Education Project and Lizard Head Mountain Guides. In 2000, enamored with the idea of blending successful business strategies with my love of the outdoors, she founded Telluride, Colorado's premier source for mountain adventures, the San Juan Outdoor School and started the affiliated non-profit San Juan Field School. As the CEO of the Outdoor School, she worked extensively in business organization and promotion, graphic design and print media and website management. In serving as the Executive Director of the Field School, she refined her technical and grant writing skills and came to understand how community support is needed to run non-profit organizations. In the interest of taking these skills to the next level, she sold the San Juan Outdoor School in 2006 and started Sprout Design Studio. Since that time, she has worked with a variety of regional and international entities to create brand identities, craft logos, develop infrastructure and launch strategic marketing campaigns.

    She has loved working with Homegrown Pathways to create their brand and this website.