Susan Manuel
Secretary of the Board

Susan Manuel’s interest in housing in Woodstock grew in part from her work with Woodstock Immigrant Support (WIS), her association with the Secret City, a local arts organization, and the love of her neighbors’ children. Over the decade she has lived in Woodstock she has seen people—including the family living next door and creative friends--leave, due to a prohibitively expensive environment for young families, artists, seniors, and immigrants who make up much of the workforce here. 

Susan had just wrapped up 20 years at the United Nations when she moved to Woodstock in 2013. A former newspaper journalist, she spent most of her UN career on overseas posts on three continents, leading public communications on peacekeeping. As part of the overall efforts to assist post-conflict countries--and often in circumstances of local trauma, her work required managing media relations, multimedia teams and productions, large and diverse staffs, and budgets topping $1 million. From Woodstock, she has continued to carry out projects for the UN while engaging in a range of activities involving critical community issues.

She has been an active member of the WIS and Ulster Immigrant Defense Network, which led to a commitment to help redress the housing deficiencies for area residents. She is also on the board of the Secret City and has been volunteering and fundraising for candidates in local races as well as for conservation groups involved with the protection of natural resources in the area, in particular, the Woodstock Land Conservancy and Catskill Mountain Keepers. She believes that the area’s deficit of affordable and middle-income housing is as harmful to the community as the loss of wild areas and that both wild and populated areas need nurturing and sustained protection so that a diverse community can enjoy life here in all its aspects.