Brooke Helstrom ’27 and Henry Sollitt ’27 have been named as the 2026 Wyss Scholars. Funded by the Wyss Foundation, a private, charitable foundation dedicated to land conservation, the Wyss Scholars Program seeks to identify and support a new generation of leaders focused on land conservation issues.
Brooke Helstrom grew up hiking in the Appalachian mountains and building fairy houses out of acorns and twigs in her New Jersey backyard. Her curiosity for the natural world brought a desire to understand animals and the ecosystems they inhabit. At the University of Southern California, Brooke led camping trips and studied conservation through the University of Botswana. These experiences led her to Montana, where she worked for NRDC on human-wildlife conflict. Before law school, Brooke was the litigation assistant for Earthjustice’s Northern Rockies office in Bozeman. Prior to that, she was Stewardship Manager for the Gallatin Watershed Council, where she led local conservation efforts such as building beaver dam analogs and planting lots of willows. Seeing the impact of these efforts on wildlife and land solidified her pursuit of environmental law.
Last summer, Brooke was a Summer Associate at Crag Law Center in Portland. On campus, Brooke is co-director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund student chapter, a board member and project coordinator for the Northwest Environmental Defense Center, and an extern for Advocates for the West. This summer, she’ll be returning to Earthjustice’s office in Bozeman as a law clerk. She is excited to draw from both the natural and legal worlds and advocate for a legal system with a long-term vision for all species.
Henry Sollitt was raised at the base of Wyoming’s Teton Range and owes many of his fondest childhood memories to western public lands. He began his environmental work as a high school student volunteer, conducting trout redd surveys in Teton Valley, Idaho. At the University of Vermont, Henry studied ecological and political systems as an Environmental Studies major. His love of the West brought him back to Wyoming, where he worked with the Trust for Public Land supporting conservation campaigns to transfer private lands into public ownership. Witnessing firsthand the impacts of climate change on his beloved public lands led him to join the United States Forest Service as a wildland firefighter. After five years, the escalating wildfire crisis in the American West drew him to pursue environmental law at Lewis & Clark, where he is focusing on systemic solutions for sustainable forest management.
As a law student, Henry serves as a board member and Air and Climate Project Coordinator for the Northwest Environmental Defense Center and is an incoming Form & Style Editor for Environmental Law Review. He has worked with Lewis & Clark’s Earthrise Law Center as a law clerk and clinic student, supporting efforts to defend America’s forests and waters. This summer, he will join the Crag Law Center in Portland, Oregon, as a Summer Associate. He is thrilled to continue his work as an advocate for the conservation of wild places and the communities that rely on them.
About the Wyss Scholars Program
Lewis & Clark Law School was selected in 2017 to be part of the Wyss Scholars Program. Funded by The Wyss Foundation, a private, charitable foundation dedicated to land conservation, the Wyss Scholars Program seeks to identify and support a new generation of leaders focused on land conservation issues. Lewis & Clark is one of only a few law schools in the country selected for this program.
Two Wyss Scholars are selected from Lewis & Clark Law School each year on the basis of their leadership potential and academic strength and their commitment to furthering land conservation.
