Board of Directors

U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp served as the first female senator elected from North Dakota from 2013 – 2019.

During her six years in the U.S. Senate, Heitkamp quickly became a proven negotiator who worked across the aisle to fight for rural America. She personally showed that if senators work together, it can lead to real solutions. Throughout her time in the Senate, Heidi prioritized improving the lives of Indigenous people and working families, stopping human trafficking; guaranteeing affordable health care; addressing childhood trauma; eliminating unnecessary regulation; and securing an energy policy that keeps cost low but achieves climate goals. Providing equal economic opportunity to Rural America continues to be her lifelong pursuit.

Heitkamp previously served as North Dakota’s Attorney General, and elected state Tax Commissioner. She serves on numerous boards including The McCain Institute, The Howard Buffett Foundation, and The German Marshall Fund. She is the founder and Chair of the One Country Project, an organization focused on addressing the needs and concerns of rural America. Heidi was recently named the Director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, a university she has long been committed to and a place where she enjoys engaging with students over civic discussions while encouraging them to seek opportunities in public service to our country. Heidi also serves as a contributor to both CNBC and ABC News.

Joe Donnelly is a former senator from Indiana. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012 and remained in that position until January 2019. He was nominated on October 8, 2021, and confirmed January 20, 2022, as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. As the US Ambassador to the Holy See he ensured the views of the United States were heard each time the Vatican considered new policies. He served in the position until July 2024.

Joe was born in Massapequa, New York and graduated from the University of Notre Dame and earned his Juris Doctor from Notre Dame Law School. As president of the local Mishawaka Marian High School Board, he showed the leadership needed to create a bright future for the next generation of Hoosiers and brought people together to find commonsense solutions. In 2006, he brought that perspective to Washington when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives to represent Indiana’s Second District. He served three terms.

Senator Donnelly relied on that same philosophy when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012. He focused on finding bipartisan solutions that would grow Indiana’s middle class, and he worked to maintain his connection to the state while always listening to Hoosiers’ concerns. His service on committees with direct application to the industries and livelihoods of Indiana were essential to the success of the state’s economic vitality.

Today, Joe is teaching classes at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN. He lives in the state with his wife Jill, whom he met when they were both students at Notre Dame. They have two grown children, Joe Jr. and Molly.

A 5th generation Iowan, J.D. Scholten is a member of the Iowa House of Representatives for District 1 and a retired professional baseball player. He is widely known for being nominated for the U.S. House of Representative’s 4th District in Iowa in the 2018 elections. His creative grassroots campaign drew national attention to how Democrats can compete in rural areas. In 2018, his campaign lost by just 3% —fewer than 11,000 votes—in a district with 70,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats, which Trump won by 27% in 2016. His subsequent race in 2020 against Randy Feenstra, the Republican candidate in 2020, has catapulted Scholten to fame in political circles in Iowa.

The Sioux City native attended college and played baseball at Morningside College and the University of Nebraska. After college, he played baseball in 7 different countries. He then went on to work as a paralegal before he launched his congressional campaigns.

Currently, J.D. is a rural advocate raising awareness of issues that often don’t make the headlines in national publications..

Mike Espy has been a trailblazer throughout his career. He began his career in public service as the Assistant Secretary of State in Mississippi, where he helped reform school finances to increase funding for rural public schools. He went on to serve as the Assistant Attorney General and the Director of the Mississippi Consumer Protection and Medicaid Fraud Divisions until 1986 when he became the first African American elected to Congress from Mississippi since the Reconstruction Era.

As a member of Congress, Espy served on the Agriculture, Budget, and Select Committee on Hunger and wrote critical economic development legislation that benefitted rural communities, among other accomplishments achieved through working collaboratively with both his Democratic and Republican colleagues.

After six years in Congress, Espy was nominated by President Bill Clinton to serve as Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture. He was the first African American to hold this position, where he expanded trade markets for farmers and worked to ensure rural America’s priorities were addressed in Washington and abroad.

In 2018, Espy was a run-off candidate in the Special Election for U.S. Senate in Mississippi and became the Democratic nominee for the same seat in 2020. In the 2018 run-off, he received 46.4% of the vote, which was the largest percentage for a Democratic candidate in Mississippi since 1988. In 2020, he garnered the highest number of votes of any Democrat in Mississippi’s history for a federal race.

Ashton Clemmons has always had a passion for serving the people of the state she proudly calls home. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill as a NC Teaching Fellow, she taught school in Durham and Guilford counties, and went on to earn her Master’s in School Leadership from Harvard University, and her Doctorate in Education from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

Her commitment to education led her to serve as principal of schools in Rockingham and Guilford counties, where she led the turn-around of one of the state’s lowest performing schools. While serving as an educational leader, Ashton was selected one of the Triad Business Journal’s “40 Leaders under 40” and has also been honored by the United Way with its Human Rights Advocate award.

Ashton Clemmons is currently serving in North Carolina’s 57th House District for her second term. While serving in the legislature Representative Clemmons is a leader on education issues as well as voting rights, criminal justice reform, and environmental issues. The mother of three young children, Ashton is an energetic and passionate advocate for better schools and job training programs, as well as policies that protect our health care, environment and voting rights. She lives in Greensboro with her husband Bryan Clemmons.

Sarah Godlewski is a fifth-generation Wisconsinite who garnered national attention for her 2022 U.S. Senate campaign that aimed to put working families first. She served as State Treasurer of Wisconsin from 2019 – 2022, having been elected after successfully leading a bipartisan coalition to save the office in 2018. As Treasurer, she invested in the economic security of all Wisconsinites, and helped to build wealth and strong financial futures for families and communities throughout the state.

Prior to her tenure as State Treasurer, Sarah was the co-founder of a multimillion-dollar socially responsible investment firm called MaSa Partners that invests in early-stage businesses and a co-founder of WE Capital Fund, which empowers female entrepreneurs through financing opportunities. Her work has been nationally recognized for achieving a positive impact through investments in renewable and clean energy, women-owned businesses, and agriculture in Wisconsin and around the world, while delivering strong financial returns. 

Sarah gained financial expertise working with the Pentagon for almost a decade where she helped save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. She began her financial career supporting micro-lending initiatives in rural India where she saw firsthand how access to capital can positively transform entire communities – access that she has worked to build throughout her state.

Sarah earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in peace and conflict resolution studies from George Mason University, where she was student body president. She was a national security fellow with the Air War College and attended the Women’s Campaign School at Yale University. She has a Certificate in Public Treasury Management from the National Institute of Public Finance and Pepperdine School of Management. She attended the University of Virginia Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership and the University of Pennsylvania’s Executive Program for Public Administration.