Arlington, MA—The Mystic River Watershed Association (MyRWA) is pleased to announce the addition of Céline Mukasine Bagley and Kaila Bachman Chavez to its Board of Directors. These new members are deeply active in their communities and bring expertise in non-profit operations and finance and open space design. Kaila and Céline were voted onto the board at MyRWA’s Annual Meeting and Celebration on October 14, 2026. They will serve 3-year terms, expiring in October 2029.
Céline Mukasine Bagley (she/her), Malden, MA | Céline serves as the Chief Financial Officer at the International Institute of New England. She aspires to collaborate with individuals and entities from a variety of backgrounds to promote kind, compassionate, healthy, and inclusive communities. She has more than a decade of experience leading at the intersection of finance, people, and culture to help mission-driven organizations build resilient fiscal and operational infrastructure to achieve long-lasting impact. Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with her partner and their Cockapoo, taking care of her growing collection of houseplants, the outdoors, reading, podcasts, traveling, painting, and music.
Kaila Bachman Chavez (she/her), Medford, MA | Kaila is a principal at CBA Landscape Architects LLC, where the primary focus of her career is the landscape architectural design of public parks, open spaces, and affordable housing in collaboration with the communities who use and manage these environments. Her work is constantly evolving and giving her new opportunities to learn and collaborate with the public, other professionals in the architecture/construction/engineering and environmental consulting fields, municipal planning and recreation departments, and state and local regulatory boards and commissions. Kaila spends much of her leisure time outdoors—paddling and racing dragon boats with her team, Boston 1 Dragon Boat; taking her outrigger canoe out in Upper Mystic Lake; bike commuting to her office in Cambridge and on adventures with her daughter; hiking in the Middlesex Fells (and beyond!); and skiing with family and friends.
MyRWA board members Helen Quach, Kelly Ryan, Monica Ghosh Driggers, and Ryan Dings were also re-elected to a second term on the Board of Directors. The board is charged with organizational oversight, leadership in strategic planning, and connecting to the wider community. MyRWA is led by professional staff and also organizes thousands of volunteers and community members.
Mystic River Watershed Association Staff and Board. Credit: Daria Santollani
The MyRWA Annual Meeting also featured two awards—the Ripple Award, presented to Thomas Green of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag, and the Volunteers of the Year Award, presented to administrative volunteers Alice Chen and Jon Kaufman.
Thomas Spirit Tree Green, Vice President of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag, received the Ripple Award. Thomas is an indigenous educator, an accomplished artist, and a leading figure of the Massachusett Tribe of Ponkapoag. He was honored for his work highlighting and reclaiming indigenous cultural practices across the Mystic River watershed, including facilitating a three-part event series on traditional fish weir building practices, ecology, and history this fall. Over the years, he has led sessions with and participated in numerous conversations with watershed communities and partners, offering an indigenous perspective on land and water stewardship and programming. He has also promoted indigenous language and cultural recognition on recent signage projects.
Alice Chen of Winchester received the Volunteer of the Year Award. Alice is a senior at Winchester High School and is a dedicated administrative volunteer for MyRWA. This year, she helped capture data from 50+ events in the watershed, organized MyRWA’s Mystic Lakes herring monitoring data, and conducted monthly database cleanups. She also streamlined MyRWA’s Herring Run and Paddle prize recruitment system, and volunteered in person on the day of the event. To do all of this work, Alice learned how to use the statistics coding software R for the very first time.
Jon Kaufman of Malden received the Volunteer of the Year Award. Jon Kaufman is a proud Malden resident and the associate director of physics-based machine learning at DeepCure. Jon worked with MyRWA on the CLEANAIR project—a three-year study, funded by the EPA, to monitor transportation- related air pollutants in Malden, Charlestown, Everett, and East Boston. Jon was indispensable to this project, taking multiple poorly formatted, large spreadsheets of data from different instruments and databases to create readable graphs for the public. Jon is continuing his work with us by joining the IT/AI thinking group at MyRWA, where he will help the organization develop guidelines for AI use.
Finally, MyRWA recognized water quality monitors celebrating anniversaries of 15, 20, and 25 years. MyRWA’s long-standing water quality monitoring program relies on the hard work of community scientists sampling at sites across the watershed. These volunteer monitors are out in the field all year round, braving the weather to contribute knowledge that guides policy, education, and understanding of the river’s health. They bring infectious joy to the work and have paved the way for MyRWA to become a reliable and trusted organization. Water quality monitors honored include Katie Moore (10 years), Karen Buck (15 years), Jack Beusmans (15 years), Bob Knippen (20 years), and Tracy Olson (25 years).
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About the Mystic River Watershed Association:
The Mystic River Watershed Association works to improve the lives of the more than 600,000 residents of Mystic River communities through its efforts to protect and restore water quality, natural habitat, and open space throughout the 76-square-mile watershed. The Mystic River watershed is comprised of 21 communities: Arlington, Belmont, Boston (Charlestown & East Boston), Burlington, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Lexington, Malden, Medford, Melrose, Reading, Revere, Somerville, Stoneham, Wakefield, Watertown, Wilmington, Winchester, Winthrop, Woburn. For more information, visit www.MysticRiver.org.
