Our Leadership Team | AAUW Hendersonville (NC) Branch

Sandy Bernard – Branch Administrator/President

Sandy Bernard joined AAUW in 1972 and was president of AAUW New York State, the AAUW Legal Advocacy Fund and AAUW National (1997-2001). She is a member of the Asheville, Hendersonville, and Tar Heel, NC Branches.

Her work experience included kindergarten and Head Start teacher, freelance landscape designer, interim executive director for several organizations and executive director of the (then) largest women’s network of its kind in the country. During those years she also served on the National Women’s Hall of Fame Board and on the NY Legislative Advisory Committee on Women’s Issues.

Sandy is now happily retired — from work but not AAUW! In addition to serving as the Hendersonville President, she’s a board member of the TarHeel NC Branch.

She also loves a lively book group, gardening, travel, good friends, family, and her place at the beach!

Margi Rex – Finance Director

Margi’s career started in insurance and in particular, being on the ground floor of the establishment of the 401(k). As motherhood took over, she became an active member of AAUW in suburban Philadelphia.

When Margi returned to work, she worked for a startup company in CAD (Computer Aided Design), followed by establishing a European sales office for a Virginia manufacturing company. Her last job was as a financial and operations manager for a Pennsylvania manufacturing company.

AAUW gave her the opportunity to use her organizational skills and to improve her ability to work with people from all walks of life.

Anne Goff – Membership Treasurer

Anne Goff

Wendy Owen – Membership Director

Princess Ferguson – Outreach Director

Princess Ingrid Ferguson has lived extensively overseas and in Alaska and Hawaii. She received her Masters degree in Social Work (MSW) from the University of Hawaii at age 46 after 11 years of classes. As a retired woman she has taught ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) and tutored reading, engaged in numerous volunteer activities, and is an advocate for women’s rights. She also finds time to keep track of her six children, 14 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

Kim Nelson – Program Director

Kim Nelson was born in 1950 in Easton, Pennsylvania and was raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. She attended art school briefly in Boston, then graduated with a B.A. in English from the State University of New York at New Paltz. After moving back to New Jersey, she earned a Masters in Education from Rutgers University in New Brunswick. For 25 years, Kim made Orlando, Florida her home, where she lived with her husband and several pets on a small farm.

The family moved to the mountains near Hendersonville in 2019.

Professionally, Kim has had dual careers as a non-profit arts administrator and as an adjunct college instructor. She has served in such varied administrative positions as Director of Development and Volunteer Coordinator for the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the George Street Playhouse, and the Rutgers University Art Museum. She served over 7 years as the Coordinator of the Museum of Seminole County History in Sanford. She has also taught English, Reading and Humanities in colleges such as the University of Central Florida, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Valencia, DeVry University and Seminole State College. Kim looks forward to teaching a Creative Writing class at Blue Ridge Community College in January 2022.

In 2006, Kim traveled to Italy to visit her maternal grandparents’ ancestral home in a small hilltop town in Abruzzo Province. She was so moved by this “Roots” experience that she decided to write a book based on their immigration story. Ten years later, she self-published Stitching—a Novel of Love and Immigration. With extensive research, she constructed a fictionalized version of the experience of 15 million “new” immigrants, the Europeans who entered the United States through Ellis Island in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This research was later turned into a lecture called “American Immigration in the Early 20th Century” which is presented to local historical societies and libraries at no charge.

Writing has always been a profession for Kim. Stitching-A Novel of Love and Immigration is her first full-length novel but not her first published work. Her writing credits include magazine articles, press releases, even scripts for OSHA videos, in addition to numerous grants and publicity/marketing material. Presently Kim is working on raising funds to retrofit a building on the Museum of Seminole History’s campus to accommodate an exhibit showcasing a gift of 18 antique horse-drawn buggies that is targeted to open in 2022.