Rand Jack honored with Lifetime Achievement Award

Rand Jack has been given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Bellingham Regional Chamber of Commerce for 2018. In making the award, Jack was cited for his work with the Whatcom Land Trust as a founder and board member for 35 years. He was integrally involved with negotiating major transactions including Clark's Point, Teddy Bear Cove, the Nesset Farm and the South Fork Park, the 2,200-acre Canyon Lake Community Forest with 1,000 year-old yellow cedar trees, Stimpson Family Nature Reserve, the 275-acre Lily Point Marine Park with 1.4 miles of shoreline, Maple Beach, Point Whitehorn Marine Reserve, the 4,400-acre reconveyance to create parkland around Lake Whatcom, Galbraith Mountain and, most recently, the Governors Point Nature Reserve.

In 1991, he started the Law and Diversity Program at Fairhaven College, WWU, where he taught for 15 years. The program was for under-achieving students from communities underrepresented in the legal system who showed a spark of promise and who wanted go to law school and return to serve their communities.

He served as the legal representation upholding a ban on jet skis in the San Juan Islands, challenging the Lynden ban on dancing and serving alcohol in the same place, and helping represent victims of childhood sexual abuse by a Catholic priest, including some here in Bellingham. He helped originate and for 10 years raised funds to support a project in the Upper Arun Valley, a remote mountain region of Nepal where villagers learned to cultivate medicinal and aromatic plants for sale in Tibet to supplement their marginal subsistence incomes.

An extremely gifted carver, he has donated an 18-foot totem pole to the Whatcom Museum and numerous bird carvings to charity auctions (birdsbyrandjack.com).