Bill Hodge serves as the Director of the Southern Appalachian Wilderness Stewards (SAWS) program. Since starting in 2010, the SAWS program has quickly grown not only in capacity to assist the United States Forest Service in serving and stewarding federally designated wilderness areas across five states, it has also become a constituency building effort to engage, inspire and deploy public lands stewards from a new and more diverse generation. Through direct engagement in on the ground stewardship for designated wilderness, the SAWS program has connected hundreds of new public lands stewards to places and landscapes they may never have experienced. In 2013 the SAWS program employed twenty-three seasonal employees, which supported over eight-thousand volunteer hours across seventeen wilderness areas and five National Forests.