Day 6: Alumni Doing Good
December 6, 2025
December 6, 2025
Our alumni are doing incredible work across the country and around the world. If you know a fellow alum whose impact stands out, through their career, leadership, or service, we want to hear about them. Explore the alumni stories below for inspiration and then use the form to nominate an outstanding alumnus for one of our three awards!
Lauren Halterman ’87, Owen Bailey ’07 M’09, Larisa Prezioso ’19
Lauren Halterman ’87, Owen Bailey ’07 M’09, Larisa Prezioso ’19
The Eastern Shore Land Conservancy is home to three Washington College alumni from three generations: Lauren Halterman ’87, Owen Bailey ’07 M’09, and Larisa Prezioso ’19. Their mission is to conserve, steward, and advocate for the unique rural landscape of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the home of our beloved college. “In essence, land has a certain value,” Bailey said. “In rural areas, that value comes from agriculture, natural spaces, outdoor recreation, natural resource economies, and so on.”
That value has been measured through a Delmarva-wide study conducted by an organization out of Baltimore. “This is one of the last bastions of agricultural landscape on the East Coast, almost all of the remaining land is developed” Bailey added. “As the ESLC CEO Steve Kline has said, there’s nowhere else to go, you can’t move your agricultural business to another part of the state”. And so, ESLC works to protect that value and integrity.
Prezioso works as the Enhanced Stewardship Manager. Her main responsibility is overseeing conservation easements. These are legal agreements with landowners that ensure their property is up to certain environmental standards and ensures that they are executing any required conservation practices. “As a stewardship person, I go to those easements once every year and make sure those conservation values are being upheld,” Prezioso said. “Enhancement includes things like habitat restoration or living shoreline projects. Anything that takes a conservation value and makes it a bit better.”
Bailey is the Director of Land Use and Policy; he works on several levels of government. “I’m the offence to Larisa’s defense” he said. On the local level, he works with towns and counties on zoning updates, parks, and any sustainable land use. At the regional level, he helps to bring together our towns and counties to collaborate on larger projects, like a current initiative to develop a regional trail network. In essence, he feels that it’s his job to connect people to the land they inhabit. “If people feel more connected to the landscape, they’ll have more of a passion for protecting it, both at the local and state level.”
Halterman works as the Director of Finance and Operations. She oversees everything from building management to HR to finance. “If Larisa is defense and Owen is offense, I guess I’m the coach” she added. “I’m trying to make sure we’re following the rules and I’m building everybody up. It’s a great group of very different people, and it’s something different every day.”
“Land doesn’t grow on trees,” Halterman joked. “Just because you don’t see houses and buildings on certain parts of the eastern shore doesn’t mean that land is empty. We want to protect what we have and be smart about it”. ESLC thinks it’s important for developers and landowners to think about where and how they’ll grow, and make sure they’re not taking away anything that’s integral to the environment. They’re not anti-development, but they are pro-smart development. “In this area, we do a lot of agricultural land preservation, but we’re not the ‘Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation’ or anything,” Prezioso added. “We’re for open space of any kind: that can be forests, parks, meadows, wetlands.” Each of these three alumni play a distinct but interconnected role in the charge of their organization and keeping our home beautiful.
Margie Delao ’17
Margie Delao ’17 began her career outside of the world of public policy, initially working in the private sector as a project manager for a translation company. However, she primarily did work with government accounts, such as the Maryland Department of Education, and bigger federal contracts such as the Securities and Exchange Commission. This was a great marriage of her Hispanic Studies and Political Science majors, as a lot of things they were translating were things that helped the community or were related to policy and law. “I’ve always been someone who wanted to help people. I wanted to help communities in need, and I’m a big believer in equal justice and upholding the rights of all people. This was something I really wanted to pursue in my work.”
This charge drew her towards the nonprofit sector, where she began working as a Social Justice and Policy Assistant. This career shift led her to the National Women’s Law Center where she began as an associate. She started out doing generalist policy work, helping to uphold things such as voting rights, reproductive rights, and anti-discrimination policy. As she began to discover her niche, she landed in the area of gender justice and upholding the rights of women and girls. “That’s something that’s always been very important to me.” Today, she’s moved her way up to the role of Federal Policy Manager for Strategy and Policy at the National Women’s Law Center. Looking back on her time as a student, Delao says the small school environment of Washington College helped her discover and develop her skills. “As a student, I was involved in maybe too many things. But those were the experiences I’d bring into interviews and those are the experiences I use to help the communities I serve today.”
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