Board of Directors

Cathy – PFLAG Board Co-Chair

Cathy moved to Bellingham in 1995 and has served on the PFLAG Board since 2023. In her new role on the board, she helped found the popular Generations of Pride monthly dinner in collaboration with the Bellingham Queer Collective and Western WA University.

Cathy worked for most of her career for the Department of Ecology – specifically, the Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. She now has her own business where she trains scientists and government officials around the country how to give technical presentations that people can easily understand. Some of the skills that Cathy brings include leadership, implementing effective systems, group development, and presentation design. Her mother helped found the PFLAG chapter in Columbia, Missouri, in the 1990’s and worked tirelessly for social justice. Cathy feels like she is helping honor her mother’s memory to serve in this way. She is very excited about the positive impact that PFLAG is making in the lives of allies and their loved ones and looks forward to helping to create a stronger, more powerful presence in Whatcom County.

Cathy is also very active with the Center for Spiritual Living in Bellingham, with a long history of serving on the board, music team, strategic planning committee, and other groups. She and her wife love all the outdoor opportunities that this area has to offer, such as biking, kayaking, camping, and hiking. They adore their two feline fur babies, Sierra Rose and Lucy Violet.

Deborah – PFLAG Board Member

Deborah joined the PFLAG Board in 2023. Her background is in environmental biology and music, and for the last ten years, art. She loves being outdoors, playing with her dog, making music, and making and teaching art.

Deborah and her husband have 2 children. During middle school, their oldest child went into a deep depressive and anxious period. They later learned that their child was feeling like their body did not match their sense of self. This was a number of years ago, before the language and discussion around being trans was as open and available as it is today. As a family, they struggled to support their child, though they didn’t understand what the experience was. There were no role models in their or their child’s world. They spent many years walking the pathway with their eldest as they figured out that they were nonbinary transgender and made medical decisions around this understanding.

For them, it was a very steep learning curve and a very scary pathway as they watched their child having a really difficult time. Since that time, the language and understanding around being transgender has become more common and available. As Deborah became aware, she became more interested in helping to educate other families, starting with their extended family, many of whom have a lot of judgment. When the opportunity came up to join the PFLAG Board, she jumped at the chance.

Being on the Board gives Deborah a chance to be in the community and to help make a difference. Her general responsibilities on the Board have been developing the monthly newsletter and helping to facilitate the monthly support meetings. She also helps with tabling and educating at various events in the area. It is a privilege for her to work with the Board and in the community. It is important work to help more people in the community understand the varying experiences of the LGBTQ+ community and their families. It is critical that everyone learns to see the diversity of the human experience.

Catherine – PFLAG Board Member

Catherine moved to Bellingham over 10 years ago and loves living in this area. She worked for most of her career teaching science and conducting research as a university professor. She was looking to continue to give back to the community after prior service as a board member with some other local organizations. She has a family member who came out as a transgender woman and started transitioning a few years ago. Catherine found PFLAG to be a very helpful resource for her to figure out how to best support her family member on this journey to be her authentic self. She feels that being a PFLAG board member is one important way she can help aid and advocate for the transgender community and honor and support her family member. She believes strongly in PFLAG’s mission of supporting, educating and advocating for LGBTQ+ people and those who love them.

Áine – PFLAG Board Member

Áine (pronounced On-Ya) is excited to join the Whatcom county PFLAG Board as Co-Volunteer coordinator. She recently moved to the Pacific Northwest from the east coast after 8 years of serving in the US Navy. She has always had a passion for supporting and providing education about the LGBTQ+ community, including vocally advocating for equal trans rights while serving in the Navy. Aine realized her own queer journey later in life and wants to continue providing information and education for allies and anyone who just wants to learn more about the LGBTQ+ community. She believes that through education we can bring people together and reduce hate and fear. In her free time, Aine and her Husband love to mountain bike and read books with their 5 pets.

Parker – PFLAG Board Member

Parker is an attorney working at the Whatcom County Public Defender’s office. They went to law school in the Kansas and worked as a state and federal public defender in Missouri and Iowa before moving out to the West Coast. Matt has tried cases to juries, argued cases on appeal, and brought civil actions against agencies and officials for violating the constitutional rights of others. Matt believes that everyone deserves to live their lives authentically.

Ash – PFLAG Board Member

Ash is very passionate about LGBTQ+ issues and rights. After the 2024 election, he began to look for ways to advocate for and help Bellingham’s queer community, and he now serves on the PFLAG Board. 

Ash is very knowledgeable about LGBTQ+ history. He completed a research project on queer history in the United States and, as a result, created a series of educational videos on the topic. Ash believes that teaching queer history is incredibly important, for everyone. It allows us to know that there have always been people like us, and lets us learn from the past and those who came before us. Learning LGBTQ+ history also allows non-queer people to understand our stories, why queer rights are important, and inspires them to support queer people in their communities. 

Alicia – PFLAG Board Secretary

Alicia moved to Bellingham from San Jose in 2019. It was quite a culture shock to move to an area with much less diversity than San Jose and then to land out in the county where old ways of thinking persist even more. This discrepancy lit a fire in her heart to move the dial toward a more inclusive and welcoming environment in this new community. 

Alicia has always been a person who believed in equity, the beauty of diversity and the power of deepening understanding. She has served on numerous committees in the Meridian School District focusing on building a school district that holds these values close at heart and in each classroom. 

Alicia works as a holistic movement coach and somatic stress release practitioner with deep connection to the natural world. There is nothing more queer than nature and we are nature. She hopes to be a living example of how remembering this connection can bring us all together and bring us into better balance and the right relationship with all beings. Alicia sees service on the PFLAG board as an honor and huge pleasure and looks forward to building a stronger community through greater understanding. 

Jenny – PFLAG Board Member

Jenny moved to Bellingham in 2019 to attend Western Washington University after growing up in the Seattle area. They quickly fell in love with all that our county has to offer, from community connections to scenic views. 

Working in public education, Jenny is passionate about equity and inclusion for all. She discovered PFLAG when supporting a transgender young adult in need of assistance for gender affirming care, and became incredibly excited to volunteer with an organization that centers education and advocacy with a tangible impact on our local community. Being on the PFLAG board allows Jenny to be a part of that tangible impact, supporting the creation of strong allies and helping LGBTQ+ individuals find community and safety.

In their free time, Jenny loves dancing, gardening, and making crafts of all kinds.

Peter – PFLAG Board Member

Peter first came to Bellingham in the mid-90s to attend Western Washington University and obtained a Master’s in Marine Biology. He returned in 2005 with his family and is grateful everyday to call Whatcom County home.

When Peter learned that members of his family were trans he sought out ways to support the local LGTBQ+ community by volunteering with Whatcom Youth Pride, PrideinBellingham, and at his place of work. For himself, he began attending the monthly PFLAG support meetings. The people he has encountered through volunteering and, especially, PFLAG, has solidified the importance and joy of a welcoming community and an open heart. Peter joined the PFLAG Whatcom Board in 2026. He looks forward to helping continue and grow the work PFLAG Whatcom does on behalf of the queer community in our region.

In his free time you’ll find Peter playing tabletop games, sharing his love of reading and nature with his adult children, and wishing he was tidepooling.

A.T. – PFLAG Board Treasurer

A. moved to Bellingham in 2018 to attend Western Washington University where he studied a variety of fields including philosophy, identity, and local ecology. He quickly fell in love with the forests, mountains, waterways, flora, and fauna (including the humans!) of the Salish Sea region. 

In this beautifully diverse temperate rainforest, A. has come to understand humanity as inseparable from nature’s cycles. Ecologies flourish when their beings are diverse and cooperate as well as compete. Thus, he believes that diversity, interdependence, and connection are essential to sustainably flourishing human societies. He sees his work at PFLAG Whatcom as a way to act on those beliefs, supporting understanding and cooperation across identities. 

He is currently training to be a bookkeeper and has always enjoyed balancing his household budget. He is the sort of person who makes spreadsheets for fun and genuinely enjoys filling out forms. 

When not working with numbers, he dabbles in mixed media and a variety of crafts. He and his partner play board games and tabletop role playing games. They have a senior chihuahua-terrier who is spoiled to perfection, and they are slowly creating a food forest in their backyard with an emphasis on native plants.

Steve – PFLAG Board Member

Steve is a social worker of 20+ years, bringing with him compassion and empathy, along with a clinical lens through which he views LGBTQ+ matters. He started out attending meetings, looking to learn how to better support his diverse family, which grew into him wanting to take more of an active role, giving back to the LGBTQ+ community. Steve is also passionate about people’s access to food, reproductive rights, is an amateur mycologist, and can make you a very good pizza.