Velma loves learning – about herself, other people, and how systems work. She excels at understanding the details, keeping sight of the big picture, and crafting creative solutions to whatever challenge shows up. She has the privilege of a 20+ year career in the public benefit sector, being the mother of an amazing child, leading an organization dear to her heart, and moving back home to rural Missouri after many years in the SFBA. Cats, dancing and deep conversations feed her soul.
Matthew Sherman
Masters in Performance Psychology, 15 years as a chef and restauranteur, planting seeds for my future kids existence and learning the trade of social farming. Basically I am lost and dont know what I am doing...but, very much inspired.
Skye Steritz
I am Celtic descendant living on Eyak land in Alaska. I am the President and Co-Founder of Noble Ocean Farms. Our goal is to enhance food security and ocean health through growing nutrient-rich kelp (large seaweeds).
Claire Arkin
Claire is a communications and community engagement professional who has worked in both the for-profit, government, and non-profit sectors on issues such as environmental justice, public education, and local food systems. She is currently the Global Communications Lead at GAIA, a cross-regional network of frontline groups and organizations fighting injustice from waste pollution, and building just and equitable zero waste alternatives. Her work has appeared in outlets like The Guardian, The San Francisco Chronicle, and NextCity.
Caroline Brain
Whilst an ever-curious & evolving student of our interconnected & inspiring universe, Caroline Brain is currently focused on building a fermented beverage business, Kif & co, aimed at exploring, sharing & evangelizing the magic of microorganisms and fermentation. Brought to this opportunity by a passion for changing the Western food system, she is particularly interested in the lynchpin that food/food culture can provide in addressing the suite of issues and opportunities at hand in our 21st century life. She adores being outdoors, nature, yoga, cooking, fermenting, meditation, small businesses, community- minded coffee shops, urban design, podcasts and travel.
Dulce Noonan
Dulce Noonan is a marathoner, pianist, foodie, music, and traveling lover. With bachelor’s degrees in Gastronomy (chef), Business Management and International Trade, in her loved Mexico City, she has been working for the last 3 years for Preserve Farm kitchens as a General Manager. She has learnt a lot about regenerative farming and conscious co-packing. She is always looking to learn new things, new people and enjoy great experiences.
Adrienne Baker
A socially conscious artist, Adrienne strives to use her voice to help others find theirs. A dedicated educator, Adrienne teaches privately - flute, voice and piano - to students of diverse musical backgrounds and ages. There is no greater joy to her than to simultaneously foster a life long love of learning and appreciation for music. The intersection of community and commitment with their accompanying values was a foundation of her upbringing and permeates her creative process and output.
Through her collaborative duo with saxophonist Seychelle Dunn-Corbin, NorthStar Duo, they work to promote and expose audiences to works for winds. Previous commissions include Spirituals for Wind Duo, an arrangement of negro spirituals by composer Anthony Green. Some of their commissions include a premiere in Boston of Aaron Jay Meyers' You Save One You Save the World Entire and Liz Gelinas' The Sky Is Green. Their current passions involve commissioning new works and championing pre-existing works by composers of color and women through their podcast, ‘NorthStar Duo and Keeping Score’.
An active freelancer, she is a musician member of the Groupmuse Founding Council, exploring musician collectivism through cooperative ideals. She is also a certified Suzuki instructor and seeking a doctorate in musical arts from Rutgers University with an expected graduation in 2023.
Hannah Forman
Hannah is a queer Jewish organizer and educator from Toronto, Canada. She holds a Master’s degree in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto, a certificate in Movement Chaplaincy, and is the co-founder of Resource Movement (Resource Generation’s Canadian sibling org.). Currently Hannah is a Campaign Fellow at Movement School which aims to translate activist power into political power. Hannah also works as a facilitator for an LGBTQ Jewish organization in the US as well as an Indigenous solidarity project in Canada. Hannah is committed to fighting for and co-creating a world where prisons are abolished, Indigenous sovereignty is restored, workers own their labor, capitalism is dismantled, and everyone can be free.
Jake Sablosky
Jake grew up in the Oregon forests and nature plays an import role in his life. His core purpose is “learning to teach and teaching to learn.” He holds an MBA from the University of Oregon. Currently he is president of NuNaturals, a 30-year-old natural foods company owned and operated by his family. He sees himself as a steward leader navigating the path to 30 more years of sustainable, ethical business. He is interested in B Corps, backpacking, and regenerative agriculture.
Marianne Olney-Hamel
Marianne is a food systems worker and entrepreneur. She currently co-manages the Berkeley Basket CSA, an urban farming project in the East Bay Area in California. She is interested in organizing around climate change, racial justice, and co-creating organizations that support their workers, communities, and the planet.
Joshua Álvarez
Joshua Álvarez is an advocate, creative visionary, and conscious business coach focusing on the intersections of healing, justice, and collective liberation. He has studied business for over 10 years and has served communities globally, including serving in the Peace Corps. Joshua has worked with socially and environmentally conscious entrepreneurs, including Certified B Corps like TOMS, Raven + Lily, and Krochet Kids, to create businesses that are making a positive impact in a sustainable way. In the past few years, he has worked with consulting firms led by people of color focusing on intersectionality, racial justice, and equity within philanthropy. He recently launched his own business, offering creative services and coaching for entrepreneurs who are envisioning a new economy based on the principles of empathy, solidarity, and liberation with decolonizing practices. You can learn more about him and his offerings at joshuaialvarez.com.
Emi Yoko
Emi works for a national racial justice organization. She believes that abolition is the necessary solution, that it’s possible to live in a world without capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, and that movement building is what will change our culture and bring us collective liberation. Outside of work, she enjoys backpacking and being outdoors, growing food, and building her political analysis around various issue areas. She currently resides in Oakland with her husband and cat. Emi owes her stubbornness and intentionality to the collective of Japanese women who raised her, including her sister, mother, aunties, and grandmother.
Alice Henry
Alice Henry is a researcher, facilitator, and program coordinator with expertise in zero waste and the circular economy, as well as collaborative decision-making. She brings experience in the repair economy, working on textile waste social innovation, investigating the secondhand economy and lighter living landscape, and working as part of a tech startup in the sharing economy to her current work as the Senior Project Coordinator of the Just Circular Recovery and Transition program under the Share Reuse Repair Initiative. She also works as the Chief Community Officer of Elevate and as an Associate of One Earth.
Azure Skye
Azure is a Researcher, a Creative, a Naturalist, and a Visionary. Having been exposed to a myriad of socio-economic and cultural experiences, she applies a global and compassionate lens to all she commits to. Using her technical and personal wisdom to build economies and community centered around integrity, inclusion, and redemption, she is manifesting an ethical empire while constantly broadening her abilities in service to sustainability, climate advocacy, marginalized populations, and creative reform.
Rebecca Coffey
Rebecca serves as Impact Growth Partner's lead consultant. Since IGP’s inception, Rebecca has stewarded companies across a wide range of industries, from footwear and fashion to investing, through the process of measuring and improving their social and environmental impact. These companies include Vivobarefoot, Good Culture, Tidal NY, and Greenvest among others.
Rebecca brings nearly 15 years of nonprofit strategic growth, revenue generation, board development, and organizational collaboration to the field of stakeholder capitalism. As founder and previous director of New Haven Farms (now Gather New Haven) and a Deshpande Foundation Fellow, Rebecca understands how to successfully build and run a mission-driven organization.
Rebecca earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, MPA in Environmental Science and Policy from Columbia, and lives in Vermont with her husband and three young children.
Mosa Tsay
Mosa Tsay is currently supporting musicians impacted by COVID-19 as a worker-owner of Groupmuse (www.groupmuse.com), an online platform that connects musicians with local audiences, and gives musicians 100% of contributions from performances. As Executive Director of Groupmuse Foundation, Mosa is dedicated to organizing musicians to increase inclusion and resilience in classical music. As a cellist, she has performed internationally, and recently returned from a year in Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship. Mosa is a graduate of The Juilliard School and UC Berkeley, where she received two bachelor’s degrees, in Music and in Society and Environment.
Akil Bell
Akil, is from Los Angeles, a graduate of CSULB and the Grants Manager for Black Women for Wellness. For 30 years, he has worked throughout Los Angeles, the San Gabriel Valley, The Inland Empire and Ethiopia. He sees education, wellness practices and systemic leadership as tools for promoting Human, Community and Capital development. Akil's passion for wellness and capital development emerged as he became adept at advocating for access and equity for people in under represented communities.
Akil serves as a board member for the Learning, Enrichment Academic Resource Network, The Pan African Technical Association and the ShadeTree Multicultural Foundation. He loves to travel and create healing spaces for people to support spiritual development.
Jessica Rosenberg
Jessica is an organizer, writer, and early-riser, currently rerooting in Minneapolis, MN. She became a rabbi in order to learn her people’s diverse and nuanced histories, and create spaces, rituals, tools, and organizing that help transform our relationships to past, present and future. After five years as part of the Radical Jewish Calendar collective, she is eagerly diving into next economy learning, to be able to bring just transition and solidarity economy principles to her work and organizing. She is grateful to be part of and always learning from movements for the just distribution of land and wealth, and the abolition of police, prisons and someday (fingers-crossed), nation-states.
Anthony Corsaro
My mission is to help heal our people and planet through ventures that inspire the production and consumption of healthy, nutrient dense foods.
I have had a lifelong love affair with fresh, healthy food: from growing up in the family produce business, to fueling my body as a division one athlete, to a decade long journey with the autoimmune disease hidradenitis suppurativa.
I am passionate about human health, regenerative agriculture, and biodiversity. I am committed to helping develop our food system into a process that incentivizes all stakeholders to produce and consume the best food for human and planetary health.
Karla Brollier
Karla Brollier is of the Yidateni Na' Tribe of the Ahtna Athabaskan peoples, she was born and raised in Alaska where she obtained her undergraduate degree as well as an MBA. Karla is the Founder and Senior Consultant for Saghani Consulting which is an emergent economy, social justice and climate impact consulting firm that works with clients to assess, develop, and implement strategies, initiatives, policies and to conduct research and evaluation the world’s most urgent social and environmental challenges.
Karla is the Founder and Director of The Climate Justice Initiative, which focuses on Indigenous Peoples, Human Rights and Climate Change. The Climate Justice Initiative is the first and only Indigenous led and focused climate change organization in the United States that protects both environmental and human rights, and the only Indigenous women-led and focused climate change organization in the US.
Karla is a catalyst in the climate and human rights movement in both the public and private sectors; she has spent much of her career consulting and working in emergent issues such as policy, economic models, environmental justice and has worked with the Climate Reality Project, the UN & directly with several US administrations and a multitude of international and nationally based climate change related programs and groups such as for the former VP Al Gore and the World Economic Forum. Karla has given plenary presentation at the international level including the WEF, presented at the United Nations, lectured at multiple universities, as well as facilitates and teaches workshops and classes around the globe.