Above: Beth Sturgeon and Nate Fowle of Pownal. Photo provided / Bennington Banner
The following profile is part of the “New Faces, New Opportunities” series for April Career Month highlighting area professionals who have recently moved to Bennington County and was written by members of the Bennington County Workforce and Education working group.
POWNAL — Beth Sturgeon and Nate Fowle are a team in life and work. Their complimentary work interests have contributed to the fulfilling lives they lead in Pownal.
Nate grew up in southern Vermont, left to study music in college and then moved to California to follow his dream of being a professional musician. Finding that he needed a day job to make ends meet, Nate worked as a barista, and then as an e-store manager where he became proficient at product photography and editing, which he still does today. After a short time as a real estate agent in St. Louis, Nate now owns and manages rental properties in St. Louis and Pownal.
Beth grew up in southern California, Hong Kong, St. Louis and Chicago, where she majored in biology with a focus on conservation. She had the opportunity to do field work after college studying raptors in the Marin Headlands, monkeys in Costa Rica and owls in Yosemite. After much perseverance, she landed a job on the Sustainability Team at Google in 2011. The team was responsible for developing evaluation processes to ensure that office buildings built by Google were healthy, environmentally friendly spaces to work in. Beth served on the technical guidance group for the Healthy Product Declaration standards and eventually turned her attention to energy efficiency in operations at Google where she built a system to track energy use.