Cheryl Butler

Cheri, as she is better known to friends and colleagues, has worked at Hampshire since January 2005. Before that she was raising community support for CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture), a non-profit that was actually born at Hampshire and started the "Be a Local Hero, Buy Locally Grown" campaign here in the Valley, which has done a great job helping strengthen our local farming system. She is a Hampshire alum wanna-be, but has to content herself with paying visits to alumni in Washington (both DC and the state), Oregon, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, Boston and New England, and the mountain states of Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, as well as other random places that alumni land near these regions. Good thing she likes traveling, and loves getting to know Hampshire alums. They are indeed some of the most interesting, vital, committed, creative, hard working, and influential people in the world. The same can be said for the parents of Hampshire students and alums whom she also visits sometimes. She encourages them all to stay engaged with Hampshire and to support the college philanthropically, and works to find creative, meaningful and important ways for them to do so.

At home in Northampton, Cheri is the mother of a son in college (alas not Hampshire, as he dreams of soccer stardom) and a daughter in high school. Her husband is on the staff at Amherst College and logs about 3,500 miles per year on his road bike. She grows strawberries, raspberries and lots of flowers. She fondly recalls the days when she was a Class III whitewater kayaker and rode horses alot. She still dreams of starting an alternative school where children can learn freely. But maybe that dream will be more realistically realized through her work building Hampshire College.

Cheri graduated from Boston University and has a masters in human services management from Brandeis. She has been an adjunct professor teaching non-profit financial management, a social worker, and a finance director for various community mental health/social service agencies in Cambridge, Northampton, and Amherst. Hampshire is the only higher ed institution she has worked for, and probably the only one she would ever choose to.