ANNalee mcconnell

​Friend, organizer, team player, adventurer.

Likes: Making desserts, hiking (mitigates the desserts!), rehabbing old buildings and overgrown gardens, word games, talks with friends.
Dislikes: Social media, pasta turning mushy, people acting pushy, celery.

Soon after she moved from a wilderness home in Southeast Alaska to Port Townsend in 2020, a new friend asked Annalee to help paint tiny shelters for people living in tents and vehicles. 

Organizing people and projects is in her DNA so she was soon Community Build’s painting coordinator. She’s still part of the group’s leadership team where her “official” job title is Coordination Coordinator. Annalee loves the wide range of activities here and volunteers for many  of them.

Annalee went to Alaska for a summer internship in 1979 . . . and stayed for 40 years doing a crazy, wonderful variety of jobs and adventures. In the 90’s, she was hired by an informal collaboration in Anchorage called the Stone Soup Group to develop a non-profit that helped families of children with special needs and is thriving statewide 30 years later. Being a reading mentor with elementary school kids helped keep her sanity during eight high-pressure years in state government – she never missed a weekly session with her little readers.

​Not long after joining a Love Box, Annalee wanted to go deeper by serving on the board. “Olympic Angels is a heartfelt match for me  and I absolutely love its guiding principle: Let it always be about the children."