Board of Directors
Katy Reed Preston, Executive Director
Katy has spent the past two decades working with struggling readers. She attended Ithaca College in New York, earning a degree in Speech and Language Disorders. Having grown up in Oregon, she returned to her hometown to acquire a Masters in Education degree at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon.
She worked for ten years as a Teacher of the Deaf for Northwest Regional Education Service District. The majority of her work was focused on deaf and hard-of-hearing children between the ages of 3-5. She is the author of Metaphor Magic, written to help children understand and analyze metaphors, and is the co-author for a very popular storybook-based curriculum, Happily Ever After: Using Storybooks in Preschool Settings.
After leaving the workforce to raise her family, she began volunteering in the public school her two daughters attended. Working on a daily basis with struggling readers, she volunteered hundreds of hours to help these children achieve literacy skills. This experience led her to the development of The Clackamas Bookshelf, with the hope of bridging the learning gap she saw between children who had access to books at home, and those who did not. Her goal is to increase book ownership throughout the entire county.
One of her favorite books is The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds, because it illustrates how each person has a gift to offer the world, and that one just needs figure out what the gift is.
Erika Spooner
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Erika has been a partner and graphic designer at Creative Abandon for over 20 years. She has worked with clients in many industries including high tech, food manufacturing, employee benefits, and financial services.
Before having a family, Erika spent several years volunteering for non-profits in the local sailing community. When her children started elementary school, she focused her efforts on supporting their education by helping in the classroom, chairing fundraising events, and serving on the parent organization board in a variety of capacities.
She loves books and was thrilled when her boys started reading on their own for pleasure for the first time. When they were small, one of her favorites to read was Are You My Mother?.
Amanda Adams
Amanda has worked in education for over 15 years, first as a preschool director, and now as the Program Coordinator for afterschool programs in the North Clackamas School District. She holds a Master’s Degree in Elementary Education from Concordia University. She learned about The Clackamas Bookshelf through her work at Wichita Center.
Family is a big focus of her life. She has fun watching her son’s basketball games and her partner’s soccer games on weekends, and they all love playing Monopoly on game night.
An avid book lover since childhood, Amanda grew up reading the Goosebumps series, and now enjoys reading books that are being turned into movies. She finds herself drawn to the kids section at bookstores and loves leading children’s activities that connect to a story.
​Natashia Bongiorno​
Natashia works in Contracts in the Defense Aerospace Technology industry and is finishing up her degree from Colorado State University. Prior, she spent several years working for the North Clackamas School District's Wichita Center supporting community service efforts and after-school programs. This is where she first connected with The Clackamas Bookshelf.
She is passionate about community outreach, and loves to spend weekends reading through a stack of books at the beach, or out camping in the woods with her spouse and two dogs.
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She grew up listening to her grandpa read the Baby Farm Animals Little Golden Book and Jerry Smath’s But No Elephants so often that the covers fell off, and renting loads of books from the library for rainy Pacific City beach trips with her mum.
Leslie Robinette
Leslie has been a communications professional for more than 23 years, serving the Gladstone, North Clackamas, and Oregon City school districts and the Bureau of Land Management. She holds a degree in English from the University of Oregon.
She and her husband have two grown sons. As a volunteer, she has served the Gladstone Food Pantry, the Gladstone Clothes Closet, Rotary, and the Gladstone Community Festival. Besides The Clackamas Bookshelf, Leslie now serves on the Board of the Gladstone Education Foundation and leads Gladstone’s Adopt-a-Family project.
Leslie’s love of books began early, and childhood favorites included Harriet the Spy, Little Women, and The Island of the Blue Dolphins. A former employee of Powell’s Books, she is the founding mother of a Book Group that met for 25 years.
Olga Salinas
Olga has worked in early childhood education for more than 20 years, serving Head Start and Clackamas County's Early Learning Hub, where she serves as the Family Engagement Coordinator. She holds a degree in Child & Family Studies from Portland State University.
The mother of two adult girls, this West Linn resident serves on numerous equity groups, including Queer and Allies. She also brings experience as a Girl Scout troop leader.
Books were a key focus during her work with Head Start, where she worked to ensure children could access books in their home language see themselves and their culture in the books they read. She's always had a lot of books at home in English and in Spanish. Her childhood favorite was I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. Her current passion is reading to get information.
