Claudia grew up in Denver, camping, hiking, and exploring the Colorado Rockies with her family and riding in cattle roundups and brandings on her grandfather’s ranch in Merino. Her parents were entrepreneurs and taught their children the values of honesty, independent thinking and risk taking. Claudia attended the University of Michigan. She graduated in 1970 from the Geography Department which matched her interest in the physical world and curiosity about distant places and cultures. She lived in Istanbul for six months working as an au pair for married professors from her department.
She met her husband, William Berg, in New York City. In 1977, William received an offer for an engineering assignment in Nairobi, Kenya working on a water master plan for the country. For the next eighteen months, they worked, camped in the game parks, climbed Mt. Kenya, and traveled to the distant Island of Lamu and to far north Lake Turkana. Claudia was hired to work at the United Nations Environment Program in Nairobi to assist with producing the annual report.
On returning to the US, Bill and Claudia choose to move back to Colorado and settled in Longmont in 1980. Claudia was hired by Rodney Davis, a highly skilled health facilities architect, to help launch a new programming / master planning service from Davis Partnership. Numerous projects were completed with the Davis Partnership for regional hospitals including Lutheran Medical Center, National Jewish Hospital, Porter Memorial Hospital and McKee Medical Center. Her work with Facilities Planning, Inc. included projects at UCH Children’s Hospital and Kaiser Permanente. In 1991, she was invited to join her father at Propst Company in Redmond, WA. conducting studies of the benefits of an innovative new approach to the delivery of linens and supplies for hotel housekeeping.
Within a year, she joined the new company, Hostar International, Inc. as Director of Planning Services. Claudia stayed with the company twenty years rising from Director to VP, President and finally CEO. She retired in 2012. After decades of national and international travel, business, and hotel openings, Claudia could now fulfill a longtime desire - to volunteer and contribute within her own community. In 2017, she joined with other local environmentalists to form SOSVV and became Treasurer for the organization.