Office Manager

Bridget has years of experience working in churches. Her background includes:  growing up in a military family and moving many times, as often as three times a year. Her two oldest children were born in Hawaii, another daughter in Florida; and with two adopted children, she has a full family. Her husband has a long heritage within a Lutheran family in Minnesota. They have lived in Vermont five years.

Bridget has worked as parish administrator for an Episcopal church in Georgia and in a Congregational church in Connecticut and presently is part-time financial administrator at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Colchester, VT.

She has also worked for other organizations including as  Dir. of Employee benefits focused on work related injuries for LTI, Inc (an industrial labor temp. agency in the Chicago area). She has also managed a restaurant.

Bridget’s ecumenical understanding is deep, varied, and she is very appreciative of the role of the church for families and communities.

Bridget and her husband have been trained as therapeutic parents in CT and have fostered more than seventy children over the years. Her husband, Steve, is a Congregational Minister and psychotherapist.

Communications Coordinator

Kelli officially joined the Ascension staff at the beginning of 2014, though she had been a figure around the office in various volunteer capacities since joining as a member in 2003. She “married into” the Ascension family, but grew up attending school and church at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Fort Worth, TX.

In addition to her role as Ascension’s Communication Director, where she primarily maintains the website, social media accounts, and offers technical support, Kelli works full-time as a project manager remotely for a company in California.

In her spare time, she serves as Barn Manager for a Morgan horse farm in Colchester, VT, and navigates the twists and turns of parenting teenagers (currently ages 20, 17, and 15 year old twins) with her partner, Matt, who is in Cyber Security with the Vermont Air National Guard. 

Organist

Ann grew up on a farm established in the 1850s by her great-great grandfather, a German immigrant. Because their faith was important, he founded a German Reformed church which was built a mile away and constructed with bricks made on his farm. Music was an essential part of worship, so the family bought a pipe organ that arrived by horse-drawn cart over the Allegheny mountains. The instrument was played by her great-aunts and father and eventually Ann contributed as a young girl to the music, first by playing for Sunday School and later for choir and main services.

Ann left the farm as a teenager, lived with relatives in a small city where she had more musical opportunities (professional orchestra, etc.) and finished high school. However, love for the farm, strong community ties, and reverence for the land remained a strong influence.

She majored in music but changed to biology, later completing Ph.D. and post-doctoral work in molecular biology. After 30 years of research and teaching in various places (Kenya, Australia, Case Western Reserve, UVM, Vermont Technical College), she is semi-retired and largely focused on living sustainably with her husband near Jericho Center where they have maintained a home since 1990 after moving from Australia with three young sons. She also teaches music privately to violin and piano students ranging in age from 5 to adult. The family concentrates on methods to grow and provide food year-round and to harvest wood sustainably for fuel and building materials, while maintaining biodiversity on their 65-acre wooded farm. They also run a small maple syrup operation and recently began collaboration with UVM faculty to host environmental students interested in learning current techniques for living more harmoniously with God’s creation.