Andrew Berg joined Friends of the Rouge in February 2026 as Director of Development. He is a native plant nerd, community organizer, and urban explorer who grew up near the main branch of the Rouge River. Andrew has been described as having “an artist’s heart and a systems brain” and brings two decades of expertise as a fundraiser and non-profit manager in arts and culture, higher education, social service, and environment and conservation.
Andrew’s prior professional fundraising experience includes serving as a Director of Development at the University of Chicago, Principal and Major Gifts Officer at Cranbrook Educational Community, and as the Chief Development Officer at Detroit Opera. Andrew also recently authored the donor discussion document for the Save Sibley Prairie Coalition, of which Friends of the Rouge is a member, and where he serves on the Steering and Fundraising Committees. At three separate institutions, he has secured seven-figure gifts from prospects who had never before been visited.
After 15 years in Chicago, he moved back to Michigan and bought his very first native plants and rain barrels from Friends of the Rouge and graduated from the Rain Gardens to the Rescue Course in 2023. He has replaced 2,000 square feet of lawn with over 220 species of Michigan native flowers, grasses, sedges, ferns, shrubs, and trees and installed four rain barrels. His landscape designs include a rain garden, pollinator prairie, shade savanna, woodland understory, and shrub thicket. Additionally, he has vegetables, berry bushes, and 21 dwarf fruit trees – all of which can be made into jam.
In 2024, he revived the Oak Park Garden Tour with a vision of radical inclusivity focused on Growing Verdant Vibrant Community. The 2025 tour featured 40 gardens, 15 tabling organizations with information and inspiration – including Friends of the Rouge – and hundreds of attendees. He is also active in a number of native plant, wildlife, and conservation organizations and has received a dozen habitat certifications for his home gardens.
Previously, Andrew founded a family bike camping program in Chicago to help kids go from riding in the neighborhood to riding in nature and served as a founding member and secretary of the Society for Urban Nature at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. He is also an award-winning Spanish-language interpreter who has appeared on NPR and has lived, worked, and studied in Guatemala, Mexico, and Cuba.
Andrew attended Southfield-Lathrup High School, studied history and Spanish in the Residential College at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and graduated from the Second City Training Center in Chicago. A champion cyclist, he enjoys bikepacking on backroads around Michigan and across the country and exploring Great Lakes waterways on his paddleboard with friends and family. He lives in Oak Park with his two children, floofy cat, hundreds of native plants, and countless pollinators.