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Faculty

Jon D. Erickson

Professor of Ecological Economics; Fellow, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics

Jon Erickson is a Professor at the UVM Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and Fellow of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont. He has published widely on energy & climate change policy, land conservation, watershed planning, environmental public health, and the theory and practice of ecological economics. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania; Visiting Professor at the University of Iceland, Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic, and Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra; and was on the economics faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before joining the University of Vermont in 2002. Jon completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University in Natural Resource Economics in 1997.

Brendan Fisher

Associate Professor, Advisor

Dr. Brendan Fisher is an Associate Professor at the University of Vermont.  His research and fieldwork lie at the nexus of conservation, development, natural resource economics and human behavior.  He is the author of over 50 peer-reviewed articles on topics such as poverty, health, ecosystem services and biological conservation, and the author with colleagues of two books, Valuing Ecosystem Services (Earthscan, London, 2008) and A Field Guide to Economics for Conservationists (Roberts and Company, 2015).  Brendan teaches courses on sustainability science, behavioral economics, environmental/ecological economics and ecosystem management. His field research has been undertaken in Borneo, Cambodia, Mozambique, and Tanzania.  He was recently a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellow working on relationships between the ecological conditions of coastal regions, gender inequality and childhood health.  When he’s not working he spends most of his time enjoying the Vermont outdoors with his wife and three children.

Walter Poleman

Senior Lecturer/ Director GreenHouse Residential Learning Community

Walter Poleman specializes in landscape natural history and ecosystem geography and teaches Natural History and Field Ecology (NR 1), Place-based Landscape Analysis (NR 378), and Ecology of Place (NR 85). He is faculty director of GreenHouse Residential Learning Community, and director the PLACE (Place-based Landscape Analysis and Community Engagement) Program. He has taught ecology for the past ten summers at Vermont Law School, and serves as a trustee for the Vermont Land Trust. His teaching awards include the 2003 Kroespsh-Maurice Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 2005 Outstanding Service-Learning Faculty Award.

Luis Vivanco

Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director, Humanities Center

Luis Vivanco is a Cultural Anthropologist and co-director of UVM’s Humanities Center. His scholarship focuses on understanding the cultural and political aspects of environmental change and efforts to "save nature" through environmental social movements. This research, which he has conducted in Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, and the U.S., explores how meanings of nature and social change are debated, negotiated, imposed, and resisted across diverse social contexts, including community environmental and indigenous groups, the ecotourism economy and advocacy, and sustainable development organizations. This broader research agenda has evolved to include writing about the relationship between visual culture and environment, focusing on how media, cinema, and other public institutions help shape popular understanding of environmental issues. In recent years, Luis has also developed a distinct but related research program investigating the rise of sustainable transportation movements and alternatives to automobility in urban areas, specifically focused on the relationship between bicyce transportation, environmental sustainability, and quality of life.

Pablo Bose

Associate Professor, Department of Geography

I am a migration scholar and an urban geographer who uses primarily qualitative, interdisciplinary and community-based approaches to conduct my research.  My key interests lie in exploring the complex relationships between people and place and especially in the ways that flows of capital, labour, bodies, and ideas may transform various landscapes.  I am currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Interim Director of the Global and Regional Studies Program and the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Vermont.  My three major current projects are on three broad topics: Transnationalism, globalization and urbanization in India Forced migration related to development and environment across the globe Refugee resettlement in non-traditional urban sites in North America Within these areas I conduct research on many sub-topics including Refugee resettlement in the non-traditional destinations in the US Environmentally-induced displacement across the globe Food and migration Transportation and mobility for underserved populations.

Kelly Clark/Keefe

Associate Professor, UVM College of Education and Social Services

Kelly Clark/Keefe is an Associate Professor in the College of Education and Social Services at the University of Vermont, where she engages in teaching and service activities across the Department of Leadership and Developmental Sciences, including the Higher Education and Student Affairs, Human Development and Family Sciences, Educational Leadership, and Educational Foundations programs. Kelly’s research brings material feminist and poststructural theories of embodiment, agency, subjectivity and language to bear on a range of overlapping topics including: the physicality of educational subjectivity (with an emphasis on college student identity), sociocultural studies of stratified versions of schooling and college access, and conceptual analyses of educational leadership. Kelly’s research interests also extend to the study of the social sciences themselves, whereby she engages philosophies of language and affect to argue the usefulness of embodied, arts-informed methodologies.

Jon D. Erickson

Professor of Ecological Economics; Fellow, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics

Jon Erickson is a Professor at the UVM Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and Fellow of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont. He has published widely on energy & climate change policy, land conservation, watershed planning, environmental public health, and the theory and practice of ecological economics. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania; Visiting Professor at the University of Iceland, Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic, and Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra; and was on the economics faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before joining the University of Vermont in 2002. Jon completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University in Natural Resource Economics in 1997.

Brendan Fisher

Associate Professor, Advisor

Dr. Brendan Fisher is an Associate Professor at the University of Vermont.  His research and fieldwork lie at the nexus of conservation, development, natural resource economics and human behavior.  He is the author of over 50 peer-reviewed articles on topics such as poverty, health, ecosystem services and biological conservation, and the author with colleagues of two books, Valuing Ecosystem Services (Earthscan, London, 2008) and A Field Guide to Economics for Conservationists (Roberts and Company, 2015).  Brendan teaches courses on sustainability science, behavioral economics, environmental/ecological economics and ecosystem management. His field research has been undertaken in Borneo, Cambodia, Mozambique, and Tanzania.  He was recently a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellow working on relationships between the ecological conditions of coastal regions, gender inequality and childhood health.  When he’s not working he spends most of his time enjoying the Vermont outdoors with his wife and three children.

Rachelle Gould

Assistant Professor

Dr Rachelle Gould's collaborative interdisciplinary research investigates the relationships between ecosystems and well-being, focusing on the intersection of environmental values, learning, and human behavior. Using the lens of Cultural Ecosystem Services and with particular attention to issues of diversity and equity, she examines how nature improves well-being in nonmaterial ways. Rachelle grew up in Southern California, and is still connected to the region’s beaches and arid chaparral – and is also excited to get to know Vermont. Her work on the connections between people and nature has led her to multiple continents and scores of relationships with conservation practitioners, government officials, and local community members. She spent two years in Chile working with The Nature Conservancy and a local NGO, and managing a large-scale Conservation Corridor project. She learned about the dynamic state of conservation doing her Master’s of Forest Science on Non-Timber Forest Products, in partnership with the Bhutanese government’s Environment and Forestry Institute. For over five years, she conducted her dissertation work in Hawaii, on forest restoration and Cultural Ecosystem Services. Most recently, she spent two years as the Managing Post-Doctoral Scholar for the Stanford University Environmental Learning in the Bay Area Project. She is eager to revisit and reinvigorate these connections as her research program develops and expands.

Adrian Ivakhiv

Professor

Adrian Ivakhiv is a Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont, with a joint appointment in the Environmental Program and the Rubenstein School of Environment & Natural Resources. He is a UVM University Scholar (2019-20) and Public Humanities Fellow, and recently held the Steven Rubenstein Professorship for Environment and Natural Resources (2016-19). He heads the EcoCultureLab, which organizes collaborative engagements between ecologically oriented artists, scientists, humanists, and the broader community. Prof. Ivakhiv is a cultural theorist and ecophilosopher, whose research and teaching are focused at the intersections of ecology, culture, identity, religion, media, philosophy, and the creative arts. His books include Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (Indiana University Press, 2001), Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, and Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), and Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (Punctum Books, 2018). With its historical breadth and theoretical innovation, Ecologies of the Moving Image has been called “capacious and authoritative,” “groundbreaking,” a “landmark contribution” to the growing field of ecological cultural studies, and the first book of “eco-film-philosophy.” Expanding and deepening the eco-philosophy of the earlier book, Shadowing the Anthropocene presents a process-relational “philosophy of life,” a philosophy that sees images as part of the battleground in which humans contest the meanings of an increasingly turbulent world. His current projects include a book entitled The New Lives of Images: Toward an Ontology of the Image-World, a book on the Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion and the philosophy of time, a collaboration on ecological themes and approaches across the arts, and an anthology of writings on spiritual practice. Prof. Ivakhiv has served as president of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada, an executive editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (Thoemmes Continuum Press, 2005), co-editor of the new international, open-access, peer-reviewed journal Media+Environment, and on the editorial boards of several journals including Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, Green Letters, The Journal of Ecocriticism, Environmental Communication, and two book series in the environmental humanities. He is a Fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment and of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. His articles have been published across numerous disciplines including film and media studies, cultural and literary studies, religious and pilgrimage studies, human geography, and Ukrainian studies. He has been interviewed by popular radio personality Krista Tippett, profiled in a book of “post-Continental” philosophers, and invited to speak on four continents and in well over a dozen countries. Adrian’s interdisciplinary background includes work in the humanities, creative arts, and social sciences. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, his research on culture and environment has taken him to late- and post-Soviet Ukraine (including a year in 1989-90 as Canada-USSR Scholar studying the cultural impacts of the Chernobyl nuclear accident), the Carpathian mountains of east central Europe, Cape Breton Island and Haida Gwaii off either coast of Canada, and to other sites of cultural-ecological contestation in the U.S. Southwest, southwest England, central and eastern Europe, and elsewhere. In a previous life as a choral conductor, experimental composer, and ethno-psych-avant-garage-folk-thrash musician, he performed at monasteries in Egypt, concert stages in Ukraine, and at the Canadian Parliament Buildings in Ottawa (honestly, once). When he isn’t teaching, researching, writing, or attending committee meetings (aargh), he makes music, hikes in the Green Mountains, eats Vermont’s artisanal cheeses, and reads The Syllabus and The Journal of Wild Culture. He has lived in Burlington (Balitán, Odzíhozsék) since 2003. From his west-facing window he watches for Champ.

Bindu Panikkar

Faculty, Rubenstein School for Environment and Natural Resources

Bindu Panikkar is an Assistant Professor at the Environmental Program, Rubenstein School for Environment and Natural Resources at University of Vermont. She works at the intersection of Environmental Health, Environmental Justice, and Science, Technology & Society Studies. Her work examines environmental controversies surrounding emerging contaminants, land use development, and technology politics and its social, legal, ethical, and environmental justice implications.   She has been working on environmental health and environmental justice issues since 2005 starting with her doctoral research exploring occupational health issues among immigrant workers in construction, cleaning and day laborer industries in Somerville, MA. Her current work examines a range of environmental justice issues in Vermont including environmental health disparities in the state, migrant occupational health issues, food, energy, transportation justice, and land use policies that reinforce environmental injustices in Vermont.   She is also working on a monograph examining environmental justice controversies surrounding new extractive resource expansions of Pebble Mine in the Bristol Bay and the Donlin Mine in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and the visions of alternate materials and post-carbon futures proposed by activists, native communities, artists, theorists, media and cultural producers in Alaska. This project examines why particular imaginaries take hold while others do not and how certain epistemologies and ontologies are enhanced or undermined. It argues that the mine permitting processes are not only highly visible battles over land and resources but are active spaces for debating and addressing inequities, just sustainable material and relational practices, and indigenous sovereignty.   Her prior work examined community health outcomes from PFAS exposure in Merrimack, New Hampshire; transboundary conflicts surrounding water in the Kabul River Basin; impacts on navigation, food security, and health from sea ice change in the communities of Kugluktuk and Cambridge Bay in Nunavut, Canada; reflexive research ethics in fetal tissue xenotransplantation research; the ethics of uranium mining research; and the teratogenic effects of depleted uranium. Bindu is also a fellow at the Gund Institute of the Environment and the Associate Director of Institute of Environmental Diplomacy and Security. She also serves on the board of Community Action Works, Vermont Natural Resources Council, and the BIPOC Advisory committee of RENEW Vermont. Bindu got her PhD in Environmental Health from Tufts University.  

Walter Poleman

Senior Lecturer/ Director GreenHouse Residential Learning Community

Walter Poleman specializes in landscape natural history and ecosystem geography and teaches Natural History and Field Ecology (NR 1), Place-based Landscape Analysis (NR 378), and Ecology of Place (NR 85). He is faculty director of GreenHouse Residential Learning Community, and director the PLACE (Place-based Landscape Analysis and Community Engagement) Program. He has taught ecology for the past ten summers at Vermont Law School, and serves as a trustee for the Vermont Land Trust. His teaching awards include the 2003 Kroespsh-Maurice Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 2005 Outstanding Service-Learning Faculty Award.

Cynthia Reyes

Associate Professor, College of Education & Social Services

I take up the role of identity in language and literacy, and in my scholarly work and teaching. I believe it is important for researchers and teachers to consider the multitude of social and cultural identities that inform their participants’ and students’ literate practices. By understanding our students and their lived experiences, teachers can improve their pedagogy. My research interests and advocacy work focus on the intersections of identity, young adolescent literacy, instruction and English language learners, social justice, language policy, and foundations. My work has been published in the Research in the Teaching of English, Educational Foundations, The Reading Teacher, and the Middle Grades Review.

Kris Stepenuck

Extension Associate Professor: Watershed Science, Policy and Education and Lake Champlain Sea Grant Program Leader

Kris Stepenuck is the Extension Leader for Lake Champlain Sea Grant Program and Extension Assistant Professor of Watershed Science Policy and Education. As the Extension Leader, she oversees Extension and outreach activities to promote healthy coastal ecosystems, resilient communities, and an environmentally literate populace across the Lake Champlain Basin. Her current efforts focus on community resilience to climate change, clean boating, best winter maintenance practices, and healthy soils. Previously, she managed Wisconsin’s volunteer stream monitoring program for nearly 15 years, expanding the program from a small educational effort to a multi-level educational, research and management-focused endeavor carried out by hundreds of volunteers at more than 600 stream sites across Wisconsin. Her research interests span both the natural and social sciences, with focus on water resources issues and citizen science. She supports a national network of volunteer water monitoring programs by maintaining a collection of web-based learning modules with best practices, a jobs board, listserv, and events calendar at: www.volunteermonitoring.org. She recently concluded her 3-year term on the inaugural board of directors of the Citizen Science Association, serving most recently as chair, and previously as vice chair and secretary during her term. She currently serves on the Education and Outreach Committee of the Lake Champlain Basin Program and on the Watersheds United Vermont Steering Committee. She is the US co-lead for the Public Advisory Group for the Lake Champlain-Richelieu Flood Study.

Luis Vivanco

Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director, Humanities Center

Luis Vivanco is a Cultural Anthropologist and co-director of UVM’s Humanities Center. His scholarship focuses on understanding the cultural and political aspects of environmental change and efforts to "save nature" through environmental social movements. This research, which he has conducted in Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, and the U.S., explores how meanings of nature and social change are debated, negotiated, imposed, and resisted across diverse social contexts, including community environmental and indigenous groups, the ecotourism economy and advocacy, and sustainable development organizations. This broader research agenda has evolved to include writing about the relationship between visual culture and environment, focusing on how media, cinema, and other public institutions help shape popular understanding of environmental issues. In recent years, Luis has also developed a distinct but related research program investigating the rise of sustainable transportation movements and alternatives to automobility in urban areas, specifically focused on the relationship between bicyce transportation, environmental sustainability, and quality of life.

Eva "Lini" Wollenberg

Research Associate Professor, RSENR

Staff, Alumni

Lauren Akin

Lauren Akin is a musician, storyteller, artist, and educator. Through collaborative, embodied, imaginative practices, she works with youth to unravel the cognitive patterns of empire and co-create experiences that reveal the sanctity of the living world.  She completed her M.S in Leadership for Sustainability at the University of Vermont. She began her doctoral research in Transdisciplinary Leadership, Creativity and Sustainability at the University of Vermont in the Fall of 2020. Lauren brings her commitment to love and liberatory imagination to her operations and student support work within the MLS program.

Margaret Williams

Margaret provides operational and student services support for the MLS and PhD in TLCS programs. She transitioned into this role after spending many years enthralled in the world of molecules and chemical reactions, getting to play in the laboratory and develop programs that tend to the impact of chemicals used in diagnostics manufacturing. Alongside this work, she began organizing with her peers at work to highlight norms that create inequity and hold community dialogues to ask how to shift the culture. She also began deepening her relationships with the forest, plants, soil, fungi, and gardening which initiated her journey of honoring her own differentiated ways of knowing. She has been involved in community-led food sovereignty projects and now is lucky enough to join local high school students in the stewardship of their school garden. Her experience in the 2019 MLS cohort was transformative, and she is grateful to help make this program possible, carrying an aspiration to navigate her role with love and faith in the possibility of a world where all life can thrive. Margaret resides on occupied Wabanaki lands (midcoast Maine) near the confluence of six rivers, not far from where they become ocean, and is happiest when dancing with her beloveds.

Lauren Akin

Lauren Akin is a musician, storyteller, artist, and educator. Through collaborative, embodied, imaginative practices, she works with youth to unravel the cognitive patterns of empire and co-create experiences that reveal the sanctity of the living world.  She completed her M.S in Leadership for Sustainability at the University of Vermont. She began her doctoral research in Transdisciplinary Leadership, Creativity and Sustainability at the University of Vermont in the Fall of 2020. Lauren brings her commitment to love and liberatory imagination to her operations and student support work within the MLS program.

Margaret Williams

Margaret provides operational and student services support for the MLS and PhD in TLCS programs. She transitioned into this role after spending many years enthralled in the world of molecules and chemical reactions, getting to play in the laboratory and develop programs that tend to the impact of chemicals used in diagnostics manufacturing. Alongside this work, she began organizing with her peers at work to highlight norms that create inequity and hold community dialogues to ask how to shift the culture. She also began deepening her relationships with the forest, plants, soil, fungi, and gardening which initiated her journey of honoring her own differentiated ways of knowing. She has been involved in community-led food sovereignty projects and now is lucky enough to join local high school students in the stewardship of their school garden. Her experience in the 2019 MLS cohort was transformative, and she is grateful to help make this program possible, carrying an aspiration to navigate her role with love and faith in the possibility of a world where all life can thrive. Margaret resides on occupied Wabanaki lands (midcoast Maine) near the confluence of six rivers, not far from where they become ocean, and is happiest when dancing with her beloveds.

Staff, Professional Affiliates

Randi Byrd

Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians

Randi R. Byrd is a Professional Affiliate of the University of Vermont's Leadership for Sustainability Master's Program, with over a decade of community engagement experience within indigenous communities in North Carolina and nationally, around health and wellness practices through holistic communal approaches, community grassroots organizing that values indigenous ways of knowing and practices, affirming tribal self-determination in sustainable planning and fostering mutually beneficial partnerships that strategically and meaningfully strengthen communities. She is also a giant pumpkin grower and horticultural therapist, utilizing plants and ecosystems to show/remind us of tending relationships and offer old/new ways of seeing pathways through the teachings of nature. She served as the former Senior Program Officer for Community Engagement for the American Indian Center at UNC Chapel Hill and in 2016, received the C. Knox Massey Distinguished Service Award for her service to and with indigenous peoples facilitating the Healthy Native North Carolinians Network. She is also a sister of Alpha Pi Omega Sorority, Inc., and has an active leadership role in the North Carolina Native American Ethnobotany Project, which reaffirms relationships with native wild plant relatives, encourages remembering and relearning medicinal and cultural value of native wild plants, and documents and disseminates collective cultural knowledge about native wild plants in meaningful ways.

Randi Byrd

Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians

Randi R. Byrd is a Professional Affiliate of the University of Vermont's Leadership for Sustainability Master's Program, with over a decade of community engagement experience within indigenous communities in North Carolina and nationally, around health and wellness practices through holistic communal approaches, community grassroots organizing that values indigenous ways of knowing and practices, affirming tribal self-determination in sustainable planning and fostering mutually beneficial partnerships that strategically and meaningfully strengthen communities. She is also a giant pumpkin grower and horticultural therapist, utilizing plants and ecosystems to show/remind us of tending relationships and offer old/new ways of seeing pathways through the teachings of nature. She served as the former Senior Program Officer for Community Engagement for the American Indian Center at UNC Chapel Hill and in 2016, received the C. Knox Massey Distinguished Service Award for her service to and with indigenous peoples facilitating the Healthy Native North Carolinians Network. She is also a sister of Alpha Pi Omega Sorority, Inc., and has an active leadership role in the North Carolina Native American Ethnobotany Project, which reaffirms relationships with native wild plant relatives, encourages remembering and relearning medicinal and cultural value of native wild plants, and documents and disseminates collective cultural knowledge about native wild plants in meaningful ways.

Staff, Faculty

Matt Kolan

Director, Leadership for Sustainability

Matt is the director of the University of Vermont’s Master’s Program in Leadership for Sustainability (MLS) and the PhD Program in Transdisciplinary Leadership and Creativity for Sustainability (TLCS). He teaches courses on ecological leadership; power and privilege; systems change; and field ecology.  His research with the Crossroads Leadership Lab explores endangered and emergent leadership practices that align with the wisdom of nature; engage complexity, mystery, and multiple ways of knowing; challenge forces of domination and oppression; and center love, well-being, and learning. Matt was the winner of the University-wide Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award in 2016 and the Outstanding Ally Award for working across difference in 2013.  Matt also partners with and provides advising, coaching, and educational consulting to many organizations that are committed to equity and creating conditions for all life to thrive.

Matt Kolan

Director, Leadership for Sustainability

Matt is the director of the University of Vermont’s Master’s Program in Leadership for Sustainability (MLS) and the PhD Program in Transdisciplinary Leadership and Creativity for Sustainability (TLCS). He teaches courses on ecological leadership; power and privilege; systems change; and field ecology.  His research with the Crossroads Leadership Lab explores endangered and emergent leadership practices that align with the wisdom of nature; engage complexity, mystery, and multiple ways of knowing; challenge forces of domination and oppression; and center love, well-being, and learning. Matt was the winner of the University-wide Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award in 2016 and the Outstanding Ally Award for working across difference in 2013.  Matt also partners with and provides advising, coaching, and educational consulting to many organizations that are committed to equity and creating conditions for all life to thrive.

Staff

Dru Roessle

As part of the admissions process, Dru connects with anyone who finds themselves interested in applying to the Master's in Leadership for Sustainability Program and Transdisciplinary, Creativity, and Leadership for Sustainability PhD program. In this and Dru's other work, she participates with others in processes of reflection and synthesis.   Mostly in Vermont, Dru's partnered with grassroots collectives, non-profits, government agencies, policymakers, and philanthropy during times of planning or transitions to collaborate in surfacing and aligning efforts with what's moving. After working in state government and the non-profit sector for about a decade in the realm of performance management and improvement, and through her time in the MLS program, Dru's been practicing a question about disentangling  yearnings to feel change happening from the control-oriented frameworks of problem-solving, cause and effect thinking, and perfectionism that she's learned in bureaucratic and administrative systems. Dru also makes collage art and hosts workshops and gatherings in a big barn in northeast Vermont. 

Staff, Professional Affiliates, Faculty

Heather Laine Talley

Professional Affiliate

Heather grew up in South Louisiana, where she was first mobilized by queer, Cajun Catholic workers who organized for redistribution of wealth while building wildly inclusive community. Since that time she has found a political home with wide-ranging community organizations and grassroots projects organizing for queer justice, a transformed criminal justice system, the eradication of white supremacy, and a world where women and girl’s lives are valued and celebrated. She established her roots in the Blue Ridge mountains of Asheville, NC in 1998, drawn here by vibrant queer and deeply Southern community. Heather has worked as a sociology and gender studies professor, writer and editor at The Feminist Wire, facilitator and program developer, and group fitness instructor. Currently, she works for the Tzedek Social Justice fund where works to move money and tell stories to resource and inspire new ways of living and being. Regardless of what her paid work is, she aims to use transformative hospitality, sincere words, delicious food, deep analysis, and honest storytelling to heal herself and her community. Heather has a Ph.D. in sociology from Vanderbilt University. Her book Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance is the winner of the biennial Body and Embodiment Book Award presented by the American Sociological Association. Her greatest joy is cooking for and feeding her partner Lee, their child Hollis, and her abundant and beloved chosen family. When she is not working and parenting, Heather is tending new writing projects and holding space for people at the end of life and those navigating grief. http://www.heatherlainetalley.com/

Marie C. Vea

Assistant Dean for Student Services and Staff Development

Ed.D, Assistant Dean for Student Services and Staff Development My home and place are on unceded Yokuts land (Fresno, CA) where my Filipino family tenderly remind me, “No one goes until we all go”; and on Wabanaki land (Essex and Craftsbury, VT) where my chosen family live, and where the seasonal changes are good for my soul.  I am passionate about inviting all folks to fall in love with nature through cross-country skiing, water time, learning wild edibles, and other adventures, but most importantly being in right relationship with our human and more-than-human kin.  One or my core questions is: “How do I meet this moment with courage, vulnerability, and creativity?”   My academic interests include exploring radically inclusive education and honoring multiple ways of knowing, and my methods are rooted in a recognition that our collective futures are intimately connected. I serve as Assistant Dean for Student Services and Staff Development and as faculty in the Leadership for Sustainability Graduate program both at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont. It is my privilege to work with people across diverse places toward building communities where all beings may thrive. I have a BA degree in English and Psychology, an Ed.M. in Counseling and Higher Education Administration, and an Ed.D in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies.

Heather Laine Talley

Professional Affiliate

Heather grew up in South Louisiana, where she was first mobilized by queer, Cajun Catholic workers who organized for redistribution of wealth while building wildly inclusive community. Since that time she has found a political home with wide-ranging community organizations and grassroots projects organizing for queer justice, a transformed criminal justice system, the eradication of white supremacy, and a world where women and girl’s lives are valued and celebrated. She established her roots in the Blue Ridge mountains of Asheville, NC in 1998, drawn here by vibrant queer and deeply Southern community. Heather has worked as a sociology and gender studies professor, writer and editor at The Feminist Wire, facilitator and program developer, and group fitness instructor. Currently, she works for the Tzedek Social Justice fund where works to move money and tell stories to resource and inspire new ways of living and being. Regardless of what her paid work is, she aims to use transformative hospitality, sincere words, delicious food, deep analysis, and honest storytelling to heal herself and her community. Heather has a Ph.D. in sociology from Vanderbilt University. Her book Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance is the winner of the biennial Body and Embodiment Book Award presented by the American Sociological Association. Her greatest joy is cooking for and feeding her partner Lee, their child Hollis, and her abundant and beloved chosen family. When she is not working and parenting, Heather is tending new writing projects and holding space for people at the end of life and those navigating grief. http://www.heatherlainetalley.com/

Marie C. Vea

Assistant Dean for Student Services and Staff Development

Ed.D, Assistant Dean for Student Services and Staff Development My home and place are on unceded Yokuts land (Fresno, CA) where my Filipino family tenderly remind me, “No one goes until we all go”; and on Wabanaki land (Essex and Craftsbury, VT) where my chosen family live, and where the seasonal changes are good for my soul.  I am passionate about inviting all folks to fall in love with nature through cross-country skiing, water time, learning wild edibles, and other adventures, but most importantly being in right relationship with our human and more-than-human kin.  One or my core questions is: “How do I meet this moment with courage, vulnerability, and creativity?”   My academic interests include exploring radically inclusive education and honoring multiple ways of knowing, and my methods are rooted in a recognition that our collective futures are intimately connected. I serve as Assistant Dean for Student Services and Staff Development and as faculty in the Leadership for Sustainability Graduate program both at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont. It is my privilege to work with people across diverse places toward building communities where all beings may thrive. I have a BA degree in English and Psychology, an Ed.M. in Counseling and Higher Education Administration, and an Ed.D in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies.

Heather Laine Talley

Professional Affiliate

Heather grew up in South Louisiana, where she was first mobilized by queer, Cajun Catholic workers who organized for redistribution of wealth while building wildly inclusive community. Since that time she has found a political home with wide-ranging community organizations and grassroots projects organizing for queer justice, a transformed criminal justice system, the eradication of white supremacy, and a world where women and girl’s lives are valued and celebrated. She established her roots in the Blue Ridge mountains of Asheville, NC in 1998, drawn here by vibrant queer and deeply Southern community. Heather has worked as a sociology and gender studies professor, writer and editor at The Feminist Wire, facilitator and program developer, and group fitness instructor. Currently, she works for the Tzedek Social Justice fund where works to move money and tell stories to resource and inspire new ways of living and being. Regardless of what her paid work is, she aims to use transformative hospitality, sincere words, delicious food, deep analysis, and honest storytelling to heal herself and her community. Heather has a Ph.D. in sociology from Vanderbilt University. Her book Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance is the winner of the biennial Body and Embodiment Book Award presented by the American Sociological Association. Her greatest joy is cooking for and feeding her partner Lee, their child Hollis, and her abundant and beloved chosen family. When she is not working and parenting, Heather is tending new writing projects and holding space for people at the end of life and those navigating grief. http://www.heatherlainetalley.com/

Marie C. Vea

Assistant Dean for Student Services and Staff Development

Ed.D, Assistant Dean for Student Services and Staff Development My home and place are on unceded Yokuts land (Fresno, CA) where my Filipino family tenderly remind me, “No one goes until we all go”; and on Wabanaki land (Essex and Craftsbury, VT) where my chosen family live, and where the seasonal changes are good for my soul.  I am passionate about inviting all folks to fall in love with nature through cross-country skiing, water time, learning wild edibles, and other adventures, but most importantly being in right relationship with our human and more-than-human kin.  One or my core questions is: “How do I meet this moment with courage, vulnerability, and creativity?”   My academic interests include exploring radically inclusive education and honoring multiple ways of knowing, and my methods are rooted in a recognition that our collective futures are intimately connected. I serve as Assistant Dean for Student Services and Staff Development and as faculty in the Leadership for Sustainability Graduate program both at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont. It is my privilege to work with people across diverse places toward building communities where all beings may thrive. I have a BA degree in English and Psychology, an Ed.M. in Counseling and Higher Education Administration, and an Ed.D in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies.

Professional Affiliates

Ryun Anderson

Ryun Anderson lives in southern Maine where she tends to the places where life and love take root with a sense of attention and wonder.  Ryun’s early work involved supporting youth leadership that emerges from the heart of their being. Both outdoors and inside, she has supported youth advocacy and co-created alternatives to dominant institutions, including youth-facilitated processes for repairing harm, and a statewide youth peer support network. Ryun later led a statewide restorative justice organization, co-developing programming with people who had caused harm, as well as survivors of individual and institutional harm, and facilitating systems change within schools and organizations. The organization transformed toward leadership by those directly impacted by systems, but in this process, there was pain and harm. After leaving, Ryun entered into a period of reflection and capacity-building for work that centers love, enduring  solidarity, and healing, especially when working in coalition in proximity to both institutional and movement spaces. This took the form of practicing as a trauma therapist, deepening relationships with mentors, training in interfaith movement chaplaincy, and engaging with self-care and repair when repair was welcomed.  Her current work focuses on accompaniment. This takes place in multiple pathways, with community dialogue, with individuals transforming their relationship to systems of domination, with organizations who are making more room for life to flow within, and within a learning ecosystem dedicated to leadership for sustainability. Her relationships of responsibility and care in this work are beloved and tended daily, and we grow together.

María Estela Barco Huerta

Desarrollo Económico y Social de los Mexicanos Indígenas (DESMI) Coordinator and Legal Representative

I was born the second daughter of a modest family in the Federal District, today Mexico City.  I studied Social Work at the Vasco de Quiroga School in Comala, Colima.  In 1976 I arrived to Chiapas to the Diocese of San Cristobal de Las Casas, as part of a missionary congregation called Franciscan Eucharistic Missionaries, which I left towards the end of 1979.  It was during this time that I began to build relationships with the Ch'ol Indigenous People in the northern regions of Chiapas.  I assumed the responsibility of accompanying the communities and the catechists who had a clear vision of the need to organize themselves and to understand the socio-political situation. This time period was a time of a faith committed to history and political action rooted in the lives of people and communities efforts to address exploitation, submission, systemic poverty and marginalization. I am a founder, alongside other women, of the Diocesan Coordination of Women (CODIMUJ), an initiative to link all the groups of indigenous and peasant women, to strengthen the voices of women, to create awareness of patriarchal relationships and violence against women, and to transform these systems and build spaces of freedom. In 1996 I was part of the founding of the Commission for the Support of Unity and Community Reconciliation (CORECO). I am still a member of the Board of Directors of this non-governmental organization and act as a witness of the emergence of the consciousness of the people and their ability to be defenders of their rights, now in a clear position against transnational interests, committed to the defense of the territory. In 1993 I was invited to work in DESMI, A.C. as an administrator, combining direct work in the communities and the work of administration of a non-governmental organization, after my extensive experience of accompanying the struggle of the people.  From DESMI I committed myself to collaborate in the process of peace with justice and dignity.  Since 1993, I have been part of the operational team of DESMI, serving as administrator, area manager and since 2012 I was appointed Coordinator and Legal representative.  This position has left me with many lessons learned. In 2014, I was nominated by IDEX (now Thousand Currents) to receive the Global Exchange Recognition of Human Rights Awards, which I received in May 2014 in San Francisco, California, for my life-work trajectory.  Since 2015 I have participated with Thousand Currents in the Academy, to transform American philanthropy, consciousness, and the world.   At the invitation of the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center, I was able to be a witness at the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal in the session of the Northern Zone of Tila, to denounce the violence carried out by counter-insurgency groups, para-military organizations such as the organization Peace and Justice, which operated in the municipalities of Tila and Sabanilla in the years 1995-1998. Various crimes committed by these paramilitary organizations remain in impunity and the communities maintain the memory of these events and demand justice and truth. I believe that if I had not come across this process of the communities that was being woven, I don't know where I would be today. I have learned and I am what I am because I am in this land. I am the product of two processes, that of the diocese of San Cristobal and that of the organization of the Zapatista peoples. They are like two rivers that formed me and continue to form me. From the diocese the commitment, the spirituality, the strength that comes from the closeness to the people.  From the Zapatista organization, the part of the political and organizational conscience, the rebelliousness, the commitment because we know that there is something that is being transformed, that what I do is an important part of that process. The affection I have for the people with whom I work/relate is of greatest importance. They are beings who are in my head and in my heart. The commitment to this work comes from the spiritual strength of the people, from their resistance, that in spite of having the minimum, they give everything to build that other world we dream of and aspire to.  DESMI has been the opportunity to continue doing this work, to accompany the journey of the autonomy of the peoples.

Dara Bayer

Dara Kwayera Imani Bayer is an artist, spirit seeker, social justice organizer, and educator who strives to build self-determined and interconnected communities in all areas of her life. Her grassroots community based work has focused on abolitionist and environmental justice organizing. As a painter, she is interested in exploring history, contradiction, and possibility, particularly as these themes relate to Black liberation and ancestral healing. As an organizer and educator, she is passionate about integrating social transformation and spiritual consciousness, particularly in building intergenerational connections, addressing interpersonal and structural harm through transformative practices, and supporting the empowerment of young women. She has worked as a high school teacher in Boston Public Schools, a Restorative and Transformative Justice educator and facilitator, and is currently Co-Director of the Cambridge Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team (HEART), a non-carceral community care and crisis response organization. She is based in Boston, MA. 

Sharon Bridgforth

A child of the Great African-American Migration, Sharon Bridgforth was raised by Black Southerners who made home in Los Angeles/determined to make a better life for themselves and those to come. A Black queer gurl coming of age during assassinations, riots, the Black Power Movement and Soul Music – Sharon strives to model the unbending dignity, commitment to community, self-determination and Love of Black cultures that was modeled for her. 

Sharon is proud to be Artist In-Residence at Thousand Currents/an organization that supports grassroots, community based projects lead by women, youth and indigenous people in the global south. Widely published, Sharon is a Doris Duke Performing Artist, a Creative Capital Artist, New Dramatists alumnae and is recipient of funding from The Whitman Institute, MAP Fund and the National Performance Network. Check out her current project, dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Home at: http://sharonbridgforth.com

Mohamad A. Chakaki

Planner, Educator, Facilitator & Writer

Mohamad grew up playing in the sand and surf on both sides of the Arabian Peninsula, and then on the edges of eastern forests and city streets in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. His intellectual and professional interests lie where the lines blur between East and West, cities and nature, art and science, and so on.   Mohamad holds a Masters of Environmental Management with a focus on Urban Ecology and Environmental Design from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and undergraduate degrees in Religion and Biology from The George Washington University. He completed doctoral coursework at the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, with research into emerging urban landscapes in the modern Middle East.   Mohamad has followed his passion for working in nature and with people in parks and gardens across the US, with the Peace Corps in Central Africa, and the United Nations in Syria. He consults on environment and community development projects in both the US and the Arab Middle East. Mohamad was a co-founder of the DC Green Muslims network, is a Senior Fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program, and a faculty member and affiliated trainer with the Center for Whole Communities.

Ramsey Champagne

Ramsey is a counselor, consultant, and educator.  She specializes in working with people who have been impacted (both experiencing and causing) by interpersonal, systemic, and structural systems of harm and oppression.  In her consulting work, Ramsey works with groups and organizations in order to identify and address relational, structural, and systemic factors that inhibit people's participation and wellbeing within the space.  Throughout her life, her language and cognitive frameworks have continued catching up to the moments where she has been unaware of her privilege and/or complicit in systems of oppression.  Most of her growing and emerging language and frameworks are the direct result of the love and labor of people who have navigated different spaces of privilege and oppression than she has, especially folks of color. Ramsey is deeply rooted in people and places: her family of origin and her ancestors from Scotland, Ireland, and Northern France; the glacial moraines and lakes of Northern Michigan; her chosen family through the hemlock woods; a collection of hippies who lived off the grid in Northern Michigan; her rugby team; the supervisors and teachers; her partner and children; and the friends and podmates who help her navigate accountability, relationship, and community in ways that feel aligned.  To ground herself, Ramsey is re-learning how to tend and nurture her garden, avidly mountain bikes, and loves swinging kettlebells.  

Janine Clookey

Janine Clookey is retired from Middlebury College where she served as Mathematics Instructor, Director of Academic Support, Dean of Commons, and Posse Mentor.   Her areas of study have included student learning in Mathematics and the experience of educational trauma, especially relative to Mathematics.  As Dean and in the provision of academic support resources she kept the guiding values of student agency, leadership, and respect for traditions from home at the center as students connected and accessed what they needed. As Posse Mentor, she worked with students of diverse backgrounds as they cooperate to solve complex problems. 

Elena Georgiou

Elena Georgiou is the author of the short-story collection The Immigrant’s Refrigerator, and the poetry collections Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants, and mercy mercy me. She also co-edited (with Michael Lassell) the poetry anthology, The World In Us. She has received a Lambda Literary Award, an Astraea Emerging Writers Award, and two fellowships: one from the New York Foundation of the Arts, the other from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In addition to her writing, Elena works as an editor at Tarpaulin Sky; an independent press that focuses on the publication of cross-genre and hybrid literary forms. Elena recently left her role as director of the MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College (Vermont & Washington), to focus her creative energies on writing and activism. As the daughter of immigrant parents who then immigrated herself, the heart of her work is to closely examine what divides us and what unites us as humans. She embraces each of her creative endeavors as an attempt to ask unanswerable questions in the hope that these explorations might magnify our unquestionable connection to one another.

Pia Infante

Co-Executive Director of the Whitman Institute

Pia’s previous work as an organizational consultant and coach helped further equity-driven efforts nationwide for fifteen years. Just prior to her current role, Pia was the Director of Organizational Partnerships at Rockwood Leadership Institute, where she served on the senior leadership team and led a capacity building initiative for nationally recognized progressive movement leaders. Pia is currently the Board Chair of the Center for Media Justice, lead faculty for the IDEX Academy, and co-creator of the seminal "Organizational Development for Social Change" framework. Pia is an ICF certified executive leadership coach, holds a M.A. in Education from the New School for Social Research, and a B.A. in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley. Follow her @PiaVision.

Omi Jones

Professor, African and African Diaspora Studies Department, University of Texas at Austin

Omi Osun Joni L. Jones is an artist/scholar and Professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin.  Her work focuses on performance ethnography, theatrical jazz, Yoruba-based aesthetics, Black Feminisms, and activist theatre.  Her original performances include sista docta—a critique of the academy, and Searching for Osun—a performance ethnography around Yoruba-based spirituality and identity. She has conducted theatre for social change workshops for the Forum on Governance and Democracy in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, for Educafro in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and for the Austin Project which she founded as a collaboration of women of color artists, scholars, activists and allies who use art for re-imagining society. The work of the Austin Project is documented in Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia and the Austin Project, co-edited by Jones, Sharon Bridgforth and Lisa Moore (University of Texas Press, 2010).  Jones’s print scholarship can be found in TDR, TPQ, Theatre Journal and Theatre Topics.  She is a member of the Urban Futures Network Think Tank at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and serves as Artist-in-Residence (with her partner Sharon Bridgforth) for Thousand Currents in Oakland.  Her collaborative ethnography, Theatrical Jazz:  Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment, was released through the Ohio State University Press in 2015.  

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Distinguished Teaching Professor and Director, Center for Native Peoples and the Environment

Dr. Kimmerer is a mother, plant ecologist, writer and SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. She serves as the founding Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. Her research interests include the role of traditional ecological knowledge in ecological restoration and the ecology of mosses. In collaboration with tribal partners, she and her students have an active research program in the ecology and restoration of plants of cultural significance to Native people. She is active in efforts to broaden access to environmental science education for Native students, and to create new models for integration of indigenous philosophy and scientific tools on behalf of land and culture. She is engaged in programs which introduce the benefits of traditional ecological knowledge to the scientific community, in a way that respects and protects indigenous knowledge. Dr. Kimmerer has taught courses in botany, ecology, ethnobotany, indigenous environmental issues as well as a seminar in application of traditional ecological knowledge to conservation. She is the co-founder and past president of the Traditional Ecological Knowledge section of the Ecological Society of America.  Dr. Kimmerer serves as a Senior Fellow for the Center for Nature and Humans. Of European and Anishinaabe ancestry, Robin is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. Dr. Kimmerer is the author of numerous scientific papers on the ecology of mosses and restoration ecology and on the contributions of traditional ecological knowledge to our understanding of the natural world. She is also active in literary biology. Her essays appear in Whole Terrain, Adirondack Life, Orion and several anthologies. She is the author of “Gathering Moss” which incorporates both traditional indigenous knowledge and scientific perspectives and was awarded the prestigious John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing in 2005. Her latest book “Braiding Sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants” was released in 2013 and was awarded the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. She has served as writer in residence at the Andrews Experimental Forest, Blue Mountain Center, the Sitka Center and the Mesa Refuge.  She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.

Jennifer Lentfer

Director of Communications, Thousand Currents

Jennifer Lentfer is a farm girl turned international aid worker. She is the Director of Communications at Thousand Currents, a California-based international grantmaker and is the creator of the blog, how-matters.org. She was named as one of Foreign Policy Magazine's "100 women to follow on Twitter” at @intldogooder.  Jennifer is constantly looking for ways to portray the realities of people’s lives, their struggles, their strengths – as well as outsiders’ roles and mistakes – in an impatient, “silver bullet solutions” world. A book which she co-edited, Smart Risks: How small grants are helping to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, came out in 2017 and features the growing community of grantmakers that find and fund visionary grassroots leaders around the world. With her students at Georgetown University in 2014, she published “The Development Element: Guidelines for the future of communicating about the end of global poverty.” Lentfer has worked with over 300 grassroots organizations in east and southern Africa over the past decade. She has served with Oxfam, Catholic Relief Services, American Red Cross, UNICEF, and Firelight Foundation, where she focused on organizational development and learning.  Today she works to place community-driven initiatives and grassroots movements at the forefront of international aid, philanthropy, and social enterprise. It’s no wonder, given that her hometown of Bruning, Nebraska, USA has a population of just 248 people.

Henrietta Mann

Tsetsehestaestse (Cheyenne) Dr. Henrietta Mann is a beloved affiliate of UVM’s Leadership for Sustainability Graduate programs.  She is Professor Emerita at Montana State University, where she was the first to occupy the Katz Endowed Chair in Native American Studies. She is the founding President of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal College.  Her immense contributions to Tribal education and Native American Studies continue to be recognized through many honors and awards.  In 1991, Rolling Stone Magazine named Dr. Mann as one of the ten leading professors in the nation. In 2008 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Indian Education Association. The College Board, Native American Student Advocacy Institute (NASAI) presented her with its first Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013, and has since created the Dr. Henrietta Mann Leadership Award to acknowledge and thank leaders for their advocacy in improving lives within native communities.  In 2014 MONEY Magazine named her a MONEY Hero Award Winner, one of 50 Unsung Heroes/50 States, conferred for her extraordinary work with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal College in improving the financial well-being of others.  In 2016, she became one of two Native Americans ever to be elected to the National Academy of Education. Indian Country Today has included her in its 2016 “50 Faces of Indian Country.” In 2017, she received a SPIRIT ALIGNED Legacy Leader Award as a carrier of Indigenous community values, memory and wisdom from the Spirit Aligned Leadership Program, based in Akwesasne, New York, which partners with NoVo Foundation and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. In 2018, she was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.  Dr. Mann has served as Elder-in-Residence at Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Most recently, Dr. Mann earned the acclaimed 2021 National Humanities Medal presented by the National Endowment for the Humanities and President Joe Biden during the Arts and Humanities Award Ceremony and dinner at the White House in March 2023. She is currently the Chair of the Board of the Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples and continues to serve on boards at the national and international levels.   

Rebecca McCown

Director of the National Park Service Stewardship Institute

Dr. Rebecca Stanfield McCown has been named Director of the National Park Service Stewardship Institute at Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Woodstock, Vermont. Stanfield McCown will assume this new role immediately. "Rebecca is an innovative program manager who has focused her work at the Stewardship Institute on supporting park service staff and partners so they can in turn better serve the American public. Through building partnerships and advancing creative approaches to community engagement and leadership development, Rebecca has shown tremendous skill at bringing practitioners together to advance common goals," remarked Rick Kendall, superintendent of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller NHP, Saint-Gaudens NHS, and the NPS Stewardship Institute. For the last five years, Stanfield McCown has served as a program manager at the Stewardship Institute. She began her National Park Service career as a student employee at the Institute (then known as the Conservation Study Institute) while completing her doctoral research. Since joining the Institute, her work has focused on youth program evaluation, cultural competency and diversity training, leadership development, and evaluation and promotion of practices that contribute to successful park leadership. Most recently, Stanfield McCown has played an important role in developing and launching the NPS Urban Agenda. "I believe the Stewardship Institute plays a critical role in enhancing the collaborative leadership capacity of the Service," said Stanfield McCown. "I am honored to have the opportunity to guide the Institute in exploring the evolving field of conservation leadership. Through this exploration we can determine how best to support the Service and our partners in managing the special places and stories that craft our country's narrative. I look forward to continuing to work with my NPS colleagues and the Institute's partners in my new position, in particular, as we prepare for the National Park Service's next 100 years." Stanfield McCown holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Resources Recreation and Tourism from Colorado State University and a Master of Science and Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. She currently lives in Lebanon, New Hampshire, with her husband and 5-year-old son.

Danyelle O'Hara

Growing up first in a military family in different states around the country, including Hawaii, then in a small town in Montana, where my city-bred parents forged a new life for us as back-to-the landers, and later on a scholarship at an east coast boarding school, I had ideas early on about place, connection, and belonging and not belonging. Following one fairly nebulous calling to “be of service” and another clearer one to see the world, I lived and worked for years in Africa, first in West Africa with Catholic Relief Services and later with the World Wildlife Fund in Central Africa. My experiences in Africa over the course of more than a decade taught me many things about livelihood, connection to the land, and stewardship of that land. Living and working in Africa also taught me about accountability for my work, surfacing in me a desire to work closer to home, where I would be pushed more to link my own destiny with that of people with whom I was working. When marriage to a Louisianan brought me to the American South, a place I’d never been and that felt in many ways as foreign as Africa, I was surprised to find threads of familiarity. The accents, the rhythm of speech, and mannerisms of rural folks reminded me of my grandparents, who, prior to moving north with many of their counterparts during the Great Migration, had grown up in the rural south. While I am by no means an insider, my connection to people, history, and land in the south is undeniable. My work (in the U.S. and Africa) has been to help build capacity in issues related to community development, community change, and natural resources management. I do this by helping to strengthen organizational infrastructure that supports communities in developing visions for their aspirations and practical plans for achieving those visions in the most inclusive ways possible. It is in these communities that I have learned that the main indicators of good work on my part, whether conservation, community development, or anything else, is that people—mostly African Americans of modest means—experience connection to the work and each other, improvement in their lives, and a sense of belonging in their place.

L'Dawn Olsen

Eastern Shoshone

L’Dawn Olsen is the thankful daughter of an Eastern Shoshone mother belonging to the Yellow Bangs clan. She lives in Fort Washakie on Shoshone ancestral homelands on what is now called the Wind River Indian Reservation, Wyoming.  Her Native ancestry is her North Star and roots the way she stands in the world and serves the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho people as a community intellectual and organizer, and as the Equity and Inclusion Specialist for the Wyoming Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. She was a fellow and holds an MFA from Brown University. Her education, training, and service employs decolonization technology in the reclamation and renewal of Indigenous ancestral ways of knowing and being toward Indigenous liberation, self-determination, and sovereignty. Close to her heart are the current projects Reclaiming Shoshone Ancestral Food Gathering, Peacemakers Lodge of Wind River, and Healing Rose: Native Women and Girls Well-Living Lodge.

Jennifer Randolph

Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah

Jennifer is an enrolled member of the federally recognized Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah. She is the mother, daughter, grand-daughter, great-grand-daughter, niece, and auntie to Aquinnah Wampanoag women and girls. Jennifer moved to her tribal traditional homelands and community in 2000 while in her early twenties. She has been serving her tribe as staff, contractor, and committee member and in other various capacities for over 20 years. Jen is the Executive Director of the Northeast Native Network of Healing and Kinship.  As a survivor herself, she spearheaded a community assessment initiative and developed a tribal advocacy program for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Jennifer believes in building capacity for services with the people of the tribal community. Jennifer’s vision is to end violence against Native people, using methods deeply rooted in pre-contact culture and traditions.

Mistinguette Smith

Public Scholar and Social Innovator

Mistinguette Smith’s passion is helping mission driven organizations demonstrate real-world outcomes. Drawing on her decades of community-driven innovation in the public and social sectors, she teaches experienced leaders how to create the conditions for system change, including how to use living in the ecotones of race, class, sexual orientation and gender identity as critical locations for twenty-first century leadership. Smith currently directs The Black/Land Project, a participatory action research project that gathers and analyses narratives about the relationship between black Americans, land and self-determination. Smith is a Senior Associate with the Interaction Institute for Social Change, where she offers consulting and training about facilitative leadership and democratic design. A graduate of Smith College, she holds the MPA from New York University, where she was the Rosen Fellow for Women in Public Service. Committed to scholarship as a public good, she was the Twink Frey Visiting Social Activist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and her work appears in both academic and literary journals.

Connor Stedman

Ecological Designer, Educator, Facilitator

Connor Stedman is a planner and agro-ecological designer with AppleSeed Permaculture LLC, a writer and organizer with the Greenhorns and Agrarian Trust, and an educator around North America.  His work bridges regenerative agriculture, deep nature connection, stories of place, and socially engaged ecological design.  As an educator, Connor serves as lead faculty for the Omega Institute’s Ecological Literacy Immersion Program and a lead facilitator for Art of Mentoring trainings around the US.  He holds an M.S. in Ecological Planning from UVM and lives in the Hudson River Valley of New York.

Antionette Tellez-Humble

Antionette Tellez-Humble provides executive coaching, leadership development and strategic consulting to individuals, for profits and non-profits. Her client list includes the Native American Community Academy Inspired Schools Network (NISN), California Native Vote Project, and the Coaching for Justice, Healing and Liberation Training Program. She works to support leaders driven to create and lead teams that are committed to elevating their communities’ gifts and strengths. In addition to non-profits, her client list includes individuals and organizations in philanthropy, the private sector and government office. Before returning to her consulting business, Antionette worked as a program officer with the WK Kellogg Foundation. While at the foundation, she had the privilege to learn and work with local, county, tribal, state and national leaders focused on improving the lives of children. Her work has included early childhood education and intervention, policy work, issue and political campaigns each as a method to support and raise community health and well-being. Antionette is a proud, second generation Chicana/Mexicana from Albuquerque’s north valley, the ancestral lands of the Tiwa. She is a nationally recognized coach, facilitator and organization development expert. Antionette specializes in working with leaders who have been asked by their community to take on higher leadership roles within their organization, government or business. Married to her partner, Brad, before the turn of the last century, she is a super-fan of their only son, Bradley and is committed to be a better and more fun wife, mom, daughter, auntie, friend and human. https://tellezhumble.com/ 

Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees

Artist and Catalyst

Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees has spent a life at the crossroads where species, cultures, beliefs and the unknown collide and find both dissonance and resonance.   Based on Seven Directions Practiceâ that she developed over 25 years with the input and guidance of indigenous elders, her current work, Practice for Living/Living Practice, helps humans re-orient to our indigenous mind and regenerate our essential relationship with the Earth’s wisdom. As an educator/artist/activist she has worked with individuals, communities, local governments and organizations in the US, Europe and New Zealand in arts, education, health care, prisons and cross cultural communication. She is past recipient of the Lila Wallace International Artist Award and has held positions as Academic Challenge Scholar in Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University and Scholar in Residence in the schools of Business and Fine Arts at Miami University and at Cleveland Institute of Art.

Alexandra Valladares

As an organizer, educator, musician, circle host, DPS parent, City of Durham Human Relations Commissioner, and newly elected Durham School Board member, Alexandra Valladares brings joy and love to her various communities. Her fluency in Spanish, French and English allows for versatility in communicating with diverse members of the community.  She has a Bachelors in Chemistry and a Masters in Earth Science from North Carolina Central University. As a scientist by training, Alexandra is a deep listener and observer, skills she passes on to the next generation through BOOST, Duke’s middle-school STEM program founded by Durham’s beloved  Dr. Brenda Armstrong. Alexandra is an analyst and a storyteller, a musician and poet, an organizer and a fierce advocate for underserved communities. Alexandra conducts most of her work as an organizer outside of formal organizations and her passion is to tend to the ecosystem of relationships that underpin the social realities of the Latinx, indigenous and Black communities of Durham, North Carolina. She leads workshops and efforts that support health, education, resilience, equity, culture, and community care and hosts in a way that fosters authentic connection, respect, and trust. She is a Professional Affiliate with the Leadership for Sustainability Master’s Program, under the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. She curates the page for Comunidad de Durham on Facebook. Alexandra is the Artist In Residence at Duke University Hospital where she visits patients bedside and performs comforting music for them and their families.

Tom Wessels

Ecologist & Professor Emeritus at Antioch University New England

Tom Wessels is an ecologist and professor emeritus at Antioch University New England where he founded the master's degree program in Conservation Biology. As a generalist, Tom's interests include forest, desert, alpine, and arctic ecosystems, geomorphology, evolutionary ecology, complex systems science, and the interface of landscape and culture. His background in ecology and complexity allow Tom to apply the principles of self-organization and co-evolution as a means to examine human systems such as the workings of an organization or even an economic system. His books include: Reading the Forested Landscape, The Granite Landscape, Untamed Vermont, The Myth of Progress, and Forest Forensics. His forthcoming book—Granite, Fire, and Fog: The Natural and Cultural History of Acadia—will be released by The University Press of New England during the spring of 2017. Tom has conducted ecology and sustainability workshops throughout the United States for more than three decades.

Victor Wooten

Bassist, Composer, Author, and Educator

Victor Wooten redefines the word musician. Regaled as the most influential bassist since Jaco Pastorius, Victor is known for his solo recordings and tours, and as a member of the Grammy-winning supergroup, Béla Fleck & The Flecktones. He is an innovator on the bass guitar, as well as a talented composer, arranger, producer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist. Victor is the loving husband and devoted father of four; the youngest sibling of the amazing Wooten brothers (Regi, Roy, Rudy and Joseph), and the bassist in their famed family band; the student in the martial art of Wing Chun and the nature survival skill of Tracking; the teacher of dozens of bass players at his acclaimed annual Bass & Nature camp; and the master magician.

Britt Yamamoto

CEO and Co-Founder, Perennial

Britt Yamamoto has developed and led a number of social enterprises and conducted extensive academic work in the fields of international development, civil society, and food and agriculture. He is the co-founder and CEO of Perennial where he manages operations, builds partnerships, and facilitates leadership trainings for community-based leaders from Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East. From 2006-2016 he was Core Faculty in the Center for Creative Change at Antioch University Seattle, where he led seminars and advised graduate students in social change and leadership. In 2008, Britt founded iLEAP, an international nonprofit creating a new generation of social leaders and global citizens throughout the world. In 2016, iLEAP was recognized as a “leadership development pioneer” in the social sector by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. He has also been an organic farmer, created social businesses focused on food, and taught about leadership and change in the citizen sector since 1998. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Washington and an M.S. in Community Development from the University of California at Davis

Professional Affiliates, Faculty

Mr. Greg Jacobs

Coharie

Mr. Greg Jacobs is a citizen of the Coharie Tribe and serves as the Tribal Administrator for the Coharie Intra-Tribal Council, headquartered at the historic East Carolina Indian School and present-day Coharie Tribal Center in Clinton, NC. Mr. Jacobs is a graduate of the inaugural NC Native Leadership Institute, 2013-2014.  Mr. Jacobs serves on the board for United Tribes of North Carolina. In 2014, he was recognized and awarded the title of “Elder of the Year” by the North Carolina Native American Youth Organization.  Mr. Greg Jacobs received the MLS program’s first honorary faculty award in 2018.  

Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil, FRSL is a poet and the author of several full-length collections, most recently How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press), which won the TS Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society selection. Incubation: a space for monsters, a prose/hybrid work, will be published by Kelsey Street Press in Fall 2022, with new writing on performance and an accompanying essay by Eunsong Kim. An Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College (University of Cambridge), Kapil was  elected in 2022 as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.  Other accomplishments include a Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University, and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors (UK). Kapil taught for twenty years at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and also maintained a private bodywork practice.  Her body of work spans creative writing, performance, elder care, massage therapy, anti-colonial research, and teaching. At the University of Vermont, she has contributed to the Master's in Leadership for Sustainability as an affiliate, co-teaching modules with Sayra Pinto and Elena Georgiou. Since 2019, she has contributed to the development and piloting of a low-residency, practice-based PhD that focuses on leadership, creativity, and systems change.  

Sayra Pinto

Practitioner, Writer, Theorist

Dr. Sayra Pinto is the Chief Practitioner for Moon Jaguar Strategies LLC, a consulting company supporting cross sector organizations to build strategies and cultures to transform themselves and the world. She founded and is a strategic advisor to the Restore Circles Initiative through her role as the Chair of the Crossroads Leadership Lab at UVM. In a 30-year career devoted to cross-sectoral social transformation, Sayra has worked with numerous human service organizations, colleges and universities, public schools, and philanthropic organizations.  Sayra is an adjunct faculty member of the Graduate College at the University of Vermont’s Rubinstein School where she teaches in  Master’s of Leadership in Sustainability program. Sayra holds an undergraduate degree from Middlebury College, an MFA from Goddard College, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the Union Institute and University. She has published two chapbooks and a doctoral dissertation to date: Pinol : Poems (2012), Vatolandia (2012), and the dissertation The Ontology of Love: A Framework for Re-Indigenizing Communities of Color in the U.S (2015), among other publications.

Mr. Greg Jacobs

Coharie

Mr. Greg Jacobs is a citizen of the Coharie Tribe and serves as the Tribal Administrator for the Coharie Intra-Tribal Council, headquartered at the historic East Carolina Indian School and present-day Coharie Tribal Center in Clinton, NC. Mr. Jacobs is a graduate of the inaugural NC Native Leadership Institute, 2013-2014.  Mr. Jacobs serves on the board for United Tribes of North Carolina. In 2014, he was recognized and awarded the title of “Elder of the Year” by the North Carolina Native American Youth Organization.  Mr. Greg Jacobs received the MLS program’s first honorary faculty award in 2018.  

Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil, FRSL is a poet and the author of several full-length collections, most recently How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press), which won the TS Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society selection. Incubation: a space for monsters, a prose/hybrid work, will be published by Kelsey Street Press in Fall 2022, with new writing on performance and an accompanying essay by Eunsong Kim. An Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College (University of Cambridge), Kapil was  elected in 2022 as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.  Other accomplishments include a Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University, and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors (UK). Kapil taught for twenty years at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and also maintained a private bodywork practice.  Her body of work spans creative writing, performance, elder care, massage therapy, anti-colonial research, and teaching. At the University of Vermont, she has contributed to the Master's in Leadership for Sustainability as an affiliate, co-teaching modules with Sayra Pinto and Elena Georgiou. Since 2019, she has contributed to the development and piloting of a low-residency, practice-based PhD that focuses on leadership, creativity, and systems change.  

Sayra Pinto

Practitioner, Writer, Theorist

Dr. Sayra Pinto is the Chief Practitioner for Moon Jaguar Strategies LLC, a consulting company supporting cross sector organizations to build strategies and cultures to transform themselves and the world. She founded and is a strategic advisor to the Restore Circles Initiative through her role as the Chair of the Crossroads Leadership Lab at UVM. In a 30-year career devoted to cross-sectoral social transformation, Sayra has worked with numerous human service organizations, colleges and universities, public schools, and philanthropic organizations.  Sayra is an adjunct faculty member of the Graduate College at the University of Vermont’s Rubinstein School where she teaches in  Master’s of Leadership in Sustainability program. Sayra holds an undergraduate degree from Middlebury College, an MFA from Goddard College, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the Union Institute and University. She has published two chapbooks and a doctoral dissertation to date: Pinol : Poems (2012), Vatolandia (2012), and the dissertation The Ontology of Love: A Framework for Re-Indigenizing Communities of Color in the U.S (2015), among other publications.