We’re excited to welcome Kelsey Helgeson to the Collective Impact team.
Kelsey joins us in a full-time role supporting the administration and growth of our Alberta programs. A core part of her work will focus on producer engagement and partner identification, helping build and strengthen our network across the province. With deep roots in agriculture and hands-on experience in carbon programming, she brings both practical insight and steady operational leadership to the team.
Kelsey first connected with Collective Impact through Kris, whom she worked alongside earlier in her career. During that time, she played a key role in administering carbon programs, including no-till initiatives, precision agriculture and other environmental stewardship projects. She worked directly with program protocols, helped assemble and finalize offset submissions, and collaborated with auditors to review and validate completed files. When she learned that Collective Impact was expanding further into Alberta, the opportunity aligned naturally with her background and long-term interests.
Her career began in the field. While balancing young family life and completing her Animal Science diploma at Lethbridge College, she started soil sampling during a busy spring season. What began as a short-term opportunity quickly grew into a full-time precision agriculture role, supporting producers with variable rate maps, prescription implementation, and in-field data collection. From there, she moved into customer service, operations management, and eventually leadership positions overseeing teams across Canada and internationally. She became known for stepping into complex situations, identifying issues, and bringing clarity and structure to programs in motion.
In later roles within agricultural technology and equipment monitoring, she worked closely with equipment manufacturers and dealerships, helping align products with practical farm needs. While those positions required extensive travel and national-level responsibility, they expanded her understanding of data systems, equipment integration, and the business side of agriculture. Ultimately, family priorities brought her focus back closer to home, but agriculture has always remained central to her life.
Kelsey lives and farms in southern Alberta near the Montana border in the Del Bonita area. Her family operates a 300-head cow/calf operation and Kelsey focuses on her own commercial replacement heifer program. This multi family operation includes working with her parents and sister to produce the forage required for both operations. Farming isn’t just her profession, it’s her lifestyle. Her four teenagers are actively involved on the farm, creating what she jokingly calls her “own little army” when work needs to get done.
Her interest in regenerative agriculture and environmental stewardship dates back to her college years, when she gravitated toward sustainability-focused courses. She remembers when early no-till programs were first introduced and the skepticism that surrounded them. Over time, as producers saw improvements in soil health, water conservation, and farm economics, those practices became more widely accepted. She believes Alberta producers understand the importance of long-term land stewardship, no farmer wants to degrade their land to the point where it becomes unproductive.
What excites Kelsey most about Collective Impact is the practical, trial-based approach. Gathering real data, presenting producers with clear options, and creating opportunities for them to be compensated for positive environmental practices fits naturally with her background. She’s especially energized by the emerging opportunities beyond cropping systems, including some exciting initiatives that Collective Impact is working on.
Outside of work and farming, Kelsey enjoys canning, gardening, food preservation, cooking, and woodworking, practical skills that reflect the same grounded, self-sufficient mindset she brings to agriculture.
We’re thrilled to have Kelsey on board as we continue building strong producer partnerships, by becoming a producer's sustainability collaborator and advancing meaningful programs across Alberta.