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Ashley McLeod: Invested in Offshore Wind Industry
Ashley McLeod likens her professional career to a good mutual fund. “I’m very diversified,” she chuckles, while talking about her path to the offshore wind industry.
Starting her college career as a voice major, Ashley was sure she would sing her way to Broadway, but the First Soprano whose singing voice tracks more in the Alto range these days, discovered the stage where she could make the greatest impact was in education and recreation.
Armed with an undergraduate degree in elementary education and graduate studies in parks and recreation administration, both from Indiana University, this Hoosier native made her way to the East Coast for a job at the Great Neck Rec Center in Virginia Beach more than 30 years ago. Teaching in Norfolk and Chesapeake public schools added to her career portfolio, along with programming responsibilities for day and adventure camps for the Girl Scouts of the Colonial Coast.
Along her career path, leadership skills gleaned from Norfolk’s Azalea Festival (now NATO Festival) and Sister Cities program led her to yet another career change in 2014, which allowed her to showcase her communications and public engagement skills for the Virginia Maritime Association. The maritime experience ultimately opened another door, during the pandemic, to her current position with Avangrid. As lead Public Affairs and Stakeholder Engagement for the clean energy company’s Kitty Hawk Wind project, McLeod has found her niche educating the public and local and state elected officials about economic and sustainable benefits of the emerging industry. Avangrid currently proposes to connect 3.5 Gigawatts of wind energy to the grid in Virginia Beach to energize over 1 million homes.
Ashley is proud of her company’s due diligence in the important permitting process, and she personally enjoys the challenge of educating what she feels is an already home-grown talent pool about myriad opportunities in the field.
Connecting with others in offshore wind and collaborating with individuals who have direct or adjacent industry ties to it is also why she helped form Women of Offshore Wind (WOW). “I’ve never stopped being an educator,” she said, and she embraces every opportunity to use what she calls her “greatest skill set” to tell people about the long-term benefits of offshore wind for clean energy companies and consumers.
No doubt, McLeod’s education background also served her well as a two-term member of the Virginia Beach School Board. Mom to two grown children, Ashley remains active in a number of professional and civic organizations, and when not working, she loves to garden, craft, read on the beach, spend time with her rescue dog, “Howie,” and prepare for her first grandchild (it’s a boy), who arrives in late summer.
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