About Us
Neighbors for More Neighbors WNC is a program of MountainTrue, a regional nonprofit organization championing resilient forests, clean waters, and healthy communities in the Southern Blue Ridge Mountains. MountainTrue has been working to protect the places we share since 1982 by fighting threats like oil and gas extraction within our region’s National Forests and also by promoting responsible land use according to smart growth principles.
Neighbors for More Neighbors WNC is an expansion of our Healthy Communities program. We hope you’ll join us in supporting policies that protect and create homes for our neighbors in places that reduce our collective carbon footprint.
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Our Team
Susan Bean
As the Housing & Transportation Director for MountainTrue, Susan analyzes and informs our policy priorities for housing and transportation projects across our geographic footprint. Originally from Atlanta, GA, Susan earned her B.A. in Religion from Davidson College, despite spending the majority of her time there running outdoor adventure trips with the Davidson Outdoors program. Following her passion for outdoor education, she next traveled out west to work for the National Outdoor Leadership School leading whitewater paddling trips in Utah, Colorado and Idaho. She returned to the Southeast to earn her Masters in Public Administration from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she continued training wilderness trip leaders as a graduate assistant for the university’s outdoor program.
In 2011 Susan moved to Asheville and applied her program and leadership development skills as the program director for Leadership Asheville for four years before joining MountainTrue as our Community Engagement Director. After 7 years in that role, she transitioned to working within our Healthy Communities program focusing on housing and transportation issues. She is actively involved in the community serving as a member of CoThinkk and volunteering as a facilitator with the Building Bridges program in Asheville. In her free time, she loves hiking, road biking, and gardening.
Chris Joyell
Chris has served as Director of the Asheville Design Center (ADC) since 2009. ADC, which merged with MountainTrue in 2017, connects volunteer designers—architects, engineers, landscape architects, planners, and graphic designers—with projects that promote healthy, vibrant, and equitable communities. Prior to his arrival in Western North Carolina, Chris worked with the Nature Conservancy, Connecticut River Watershed Council, and League of Conservation Voters.
Chris grew up in Connecticut and moved with his wife Nicole to Asheville in 2005. They now live in West Asheville with their dogs, Uli and Bunny. Chris’s interests include running, hiking, fishing, and fantasy baseball.