The Festival Investment Committee is a group of volunteers that provide guidance, advice and historical context for Festival events and activities.
Don Liebich
Chair
Don is a native of New York and a graduate of the University of Rochester and the Harvard Business School PMD program. He spent his work career with the US Navy Nuclear Submarine service and Sysco Corporation. After retiring from Sysco, he engaged in numerous consulting projects in various countries including Russia, Poland, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Indonesia and Venezuela. He has traveled to the Middle East multiple times in the past fifteen years, and has been involved with economic development, citizen diplomacy and human rights projects in Jordan, Israel, Palestine, UAE and Iran. Don has conducted seminars and taught courses on Islam, US Middle East foreign policy and Iran. He has written two books on US Middle East policy. Don & his wife, Marcia, live in Hailey, Idaho.
Joan Davies
Raised on a farm in Jerome County, Idaho, Joan always had sheep. Their flock was an extremely important part of her family farm. “Truly, sheep have been a part of my entire life since childhood. That is how I learned to love them as pets on a farm and all sheep could do - like keeping us warm,” she shared.
While Joan was growing up, a man named Al Rosa and his mother brought their sheep from Pocatello to the farm next door to winter there and have their lambs. “We took pies to the herders and, in exchange, we would get bum lambs and raise them,” said Joan. “We got to know them well, they were friends and this was a cycle that happened every year. A domestic thing that happens in agriculture - globally - for thousands of years. This is part of the genius of why the Trailing of the Sheep Festival is so important to us as it brings so much education about things for all nationalities of people. This includes bringing stories from the high Himalayas to women’s stories, out to people everywhere that don’t have that opportunity to be grounded like they used to be,” she added.
After having sheep at home, doing 4H in school and then moving to Hailey, Idaho, Joan worked for the University of Idaho Agriculture Extension Service for eight years. She worked with the wool growers and learned the weighing and selling of wool. “It seems like the sheep from the standpoint of living with them, to all the practical things it takes to raise them, has been woven into my life,” Joan shared. When John Peavey was running for office, he invited members of the community - including Joan - out to trail the sheep with him. “It seemed like such a fun thing to do and it evolved,” she said. “It was a time of sharing such good stories and we all thought ‘wouldn’t it be fun to collect pictures for people coming to the event to share over coffee just like the days at the merchant building in Ketchum,’” added Joan.
She was there at the first “coffee chat” and she was there for the founding of the Festival. She helped with the educational classes, cooking classes and advertising with the team.
Joan has been the tie that binds education to the community for over two decades, working exhaustively to change the picture of post-secondary education in the Wood River Valley. For Joan, who remains deeply involved in many aspects of the community, from emergency services to chambers of commerce, getting immersed is just a part of being fully engaged in life.
Joan is still managing The Greenwood Farm (where she grew up) that her parents bought in 1929. The home she was raised in is still there, and a year-and-a-half ago, her son bought the 160-acre homestead that had been divided up and reunited the lands. Joan has three sons and with their children, all spent time on the farm. “It was a wonderful place to take kids to learn so many things. They all have pleasant memories,” she concluded.
Laura Musbach Drake
After serving many non-profit organizations throughout the St. Louis community and larger region for sixteen years, Laura relocated to Sun Valley in 2011 on a new adventure and to continue serving non-profit organizations and charities with her leadership, fundraising, development and event planning skills. Area groups she has worked with include the San Francisco Ballet in Sun Valley project and the Sawtooth Botanical Garden, as well as currently supporting Ballet Sun Valley as the Director of Operations. Laura holds a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia and was a member and held a board seat for the St. Louis Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP). She joined the Festival Team in 2015 and has served as Executive Director since 2016.
Jody B. Olson
Jody served for 30 years as Chairman of the Board for the Public Employee Retirement System of Idaho (PERSI), a currently $23 billion pension fund and the largest financial asset in the state. Formerly, Jody was Vice President of Corporate Development at Trus Joist, a $1 billion Boise, Idaho-based specialty building products company. He was Secretary of the Board of Trus Joist MacMillan, a limited partnership with the Canadian forest products leader MacMillan Bloedel, Ltd., and Chairman of the Board of Norco Windows, Inc., and of Outlook Window Partnership, the sixth largest wood window manufacturer in the United States and the largest in Canada. Jody is an elected member of the Greater Boise Auditorium District Board of Directors. His past board of directors’ experience has included public companies as the audit committee chair and/or designated financial expert. Additionally, Jody previously worked as a CPA with Deloitte & Touche LLP and as an attorney for Hawley, Troxell, Ennis & Hawley in Boise.
Jerry Seiffert
Originally hailing from Minnesota, Jerry worked summers on the Great Northern Railroad in western Montana and, “just never got the West out of his system.” Permanently moving to Idaho in 1971, he has never looked back. His professional career is flooded with interesting positions. He spent eight years in banking with Bank of America as a Corporate Credit Officer in their L.A. Branch’s International Division, as well as in the Caribbean in Anguilla, West Indies, as Branch Manager. He then served as Mayor of the City of Ketchum from 1975-1988, owned a western retail store and was a member of the Adjunct Faculty of the National Fire Academy in Emmetsburg, Maryland, teaching community fire planning in the 1990s. Jerry now is in sales at the Idaho Mountain Express newspaper produced out of Ketchum.
Along with the City Council, he helped restart Wagon Days in 1976, opened the Ore Wagon Museum in the early 1980s and established the city budget for the Ketchum Chamber of Commerce. For fun, Jerry has “trained horses while they trained him,” and enjoyed both the alpine and Nordic skiing showcased in our Valley. A board member since 2007 with the Trailing of the Sheep Festival, Jerry knows the importance of the nationally acclaimed Festival and how critical the participation of the community has been to its growth. He believes that events can’t happen without the staff and volunteers and they are key to our local economy and to our town thriving in the hospitality industry.