Adjunct Professor | Institute of American Indian Arts

Leah Mata Fragua (yak tittʸu tittʸu Northern Chumash), an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts and an artist, works to give greater voice and visibility to her tribal community, including by reclaiming its homelands and language. Her current project includes a partnership with Cal Poly Housing, where she serves as project lead for her tribe.

Certified Clinical Herbalist

Assistant Professor and Department Chair of Native American Studies | Humboldt State

Cutcha Risling Baldy, Ph.D. (Hupa, Yurok, Karuk), Assistant Professor and Department Chair of Native American Studies at Humboldt State and co-founder of the Native Women's Collective, a nonprofit supporting the revitalization of Native American arts and culture, researches Indigenous feminisms, California Indians and decolonization. She is the author of: We Are Dancing For You: Native feminisms and the revitalization of women's coming-of-age.

| Native California Indian Artist

L. Frank Manriquez (Tongva/Ajachmem), an award-winning Native California Indian artist working in many media and a tribal scholar, community activist, and language advocate, has exhibited her artwork in museums and galleries nationally and internationally. She has served or serves on a number of boards, including that of the California Indian Basketweavers Association (for 15 years) and the Cultural Conservancy, and is a founding board member of the Advocates for Indigenous California Languages.

Native Ecologist, Artist

Edward Willie, a true native of California (of Pomo, Wintu, Paiute, and Wailaki ancestry), is a native ecologist with 40+ years’ experience teaching Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), Herbalism, Permaculture, and ancient skills to people of all ages. Also an artist (drawing, painting, and sculpture), he has in recent years been a core organizer of the annual Buckeye Gathering, a gathering in support of ancestral skills and village building. He is an adjunct teacher for Weaving Earth.

| Third Mesa village

Ruby Chimerica (Hopi) from the Third Mesa village, Bacavi, on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, specializes in hands-on demonstrations of Hopi basket weaving and the preparation of traditional Hopi foods, including piki bread-making. Piki, made with blue corn and culinary ash, is shared and eaten at many community celebrations, festival and dances.

Board Member | California Basket Weavers Association

Alice Lincoln-Cook, a Klamath, CA-based Karuk tribal member, is a highly sought-after teacher of traditional basket weaving who serves on the board of the California Basket Weavers Association. Alice teaches widely in schools and other institutions and at events throughout the Pacific Northwest region.

Founding Member | California Indian Basketweavers Association

Wilverna Reece is an award-winning master basket-weaver and Karuk Tribal Council member who travels extensively sharing her art at numerous tribal events, educational institutions and museums nationally (including the Smithsonian), as well as a leading advocate for traditional ecological knowledge and the co-management of tribal lands. Wilverna also serves on several boards and was a founding member of the California Indian Basketweavers Association.

Teacher

Shelbey Cook, a Karuk tribal member, is an up-and-coming traditional basket weaver and teacher of that craft who comes from a family lineage of renowned weavers.

Denna Dodds, a Karuk tribal member from northern California, is a highly accomplished traditional weaver in the “twining” style who was trained by Karuk master weaver Wilverna Reece (who in turn had learned the art from Grace and Madeline Davis).

Indigenous Anthropologist

Heidi Lucero (Acjachemen/Mutsun Ohlone) is an Indigenous anthropologist; an accomplished native artist and basketweaver; a teacher of traditional cultural knowledge, including the use of native foods to improve the health of native populations; and an activist fighting for the protection of sacred sites and the return of ancestors and sacred objects under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).

Executive Director | California Indian Basketweavers’ Association

Rebecca Tortes (Mt. Cahuilla/Luiseño/Assiniboine Sioux) currently serves as the Executive Director for the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association (CIBA), a statewide non-profit working to preserve, promote and perpetuate California Indian basket weaving traditions. In addition to her work with CIBA, Ms. Tortes works in a consulting capacity with numerous California tribes and tribal non-profits, supporting the development of language revitalization and cultural programs.

Environmental Director | Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians

Sarah Ryan, the Environmental Director of the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, works closely with tribal members, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Board and US EPA Region 9 on water quality and natural resource protection, including on: algal toxin testing; pesticide, nutrient and mercury monitoring in Clear Lake and its tributaries; storm water management; shoreline restoration; and other crucial water and environmental tasks.

Water Resources Analyst

Deb Lane has been playing the drums for most of her life. Formerly a member of the Santa Cruz World Beat Band, Pele Juju, she performs with artists throughout the Bay Area and beyond. In addition to her musical endeavors, Deb is a leader in water-use efficiency and works as a Water Resources Analyst.

NGO Administrator

Afia Walking Tree, a renowned multi-instrumental percussionist, performer, educator, earth practitioner, NGO administrator, and longtime activist focused on transformative cultural healing across ethnic and generational lines using drumming as her main tool, is founder of the Drum Mobile, a portable drum-arts learning laboratory that makes accessible the power of African drumming and Permaculture to communities of color internationally.

CEO and Founder | Bioneers

Kenny Ausubel, CEO and founder (in 1990) of Bioneers, is an award-winning social entrepreneur, journalist, author and filmmaker. Co-founder and first CEO of the organic seed company, Seeds of Change, his film (and companion book) Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime helped influence national alternative medicine policy. He has edited several books and written four, including, most recently, Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature.

Co-Founder | Bioneers

Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and its Chief Relationship Strategist is also co-founder of Women Bridging Worlds and Connecting Women Leading Change. She co-edited the anthology book, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and most recently wrote Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. An award-winning social entrepreneur, Nina teaches and speaks internationally, and previously served as President of Seeds of Change and Director of Strategic Marketing for Odwalla.

Ana Sophia Demetrakopoulos works at the intersections of trauma-informed practices, adult learning, inter-personal neurobiology, and social and racial justice to promote embodied dialogue, “meaning making,” and collaborative capacity building. Her work seeks to support people to increase their self-awareness, mutual visibility and strategic visioning at the individual and community levels by helping them access and ground themselves in their authentic voices.

| Native California Indian Artist

L. Frank Manriquez (Tongva/Ajachmem), an award-winning Native California Indian artist working in many media and a tribal scholar, community activist, and language advocate, has exhibited her artwork in museums and galleries nationally and internationally. She has served or serves on a number of boards, including that of the California Indian Basketweavers Association (for 15 years) and the Cultural Conservancy, and is a founding board member of the Advocates for Indigenous California Languages.

Co-Founder | Bioneers

Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and its Chief Relationship Strategist is also co-founder of Women Bridging Worlds and Connecting Women Leading Change. She co-edited the anthology book, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and most recently wrote Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. An award-winning social entrepreneur, Nina teaches and speaks internationally, and previously served as President of Seeds of Change and Director of Strategic Marketing for Odwalla.

Professor | Oberlin College

David W. Orr, a Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics (Emeritus) at Oberlin College, is a pioneering, award-winning thought leader in the fields of Sustainability and Ecological Literacy. The author and co-author of countless articles and papers and several seminal books, including, most recently, Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency, he has served as a board member or adviser to many foundations and organizations (including Bioneers!). His current work is on the state of our democracy.

Co-Founder | Bioneers

Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and its Chief Relationship Strategist is also co-founder of Women Bridging Worlds and Connecting Women Leading Change. She co-edited the anthology book, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and most recently wrote Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. An award-winning social entrepreneur, Nina teaches and speaks internationally, and previously served as President of Seeds of Change and Director of Strategic Marketing for Odwalla.

Author

Terry Tempest Williams, one of the greatest living authors from the American West, is also a longtime award-winning conservationist and activist, who has taken on, among other issues, nuclear testing, the Iraq War, the neglect of women’s health, and the destruction of nature, especially in her beloved “Red Rock” region of her native Utah and in Alaska. Her many prestigious prize-winning books include: Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert; The Open Space of Democracy; and Finding Beauty in a Broken World. She is currently a Fellow in the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program at the University of Utah and a Fellow at Dartmouth College, where she continues to teach.

Artists

Climbing PoeTree (Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman) are award-winning multimedia artists, organizers, educators and a spoken word duo who have independently organized more than 30 tours, taking their work from South Africa to Cuba, the UK to Mexico, and 11,000 miles around the U.S. on a bus running on recycled vegetable oil, presenting alongside powerhouses such as Vandana Shiva, Angela Davis, Alicia Keys, and Alice Walker, in venues ranging from the UN to Harvard to Riker's Island Prison.

Executive Director | National Compadres Network

Héctor Sánchez-Flores is the Executive Director of the National Compadres Network (NCN), an organization that develops and supports culturally centered programs for boys and men of color, Latino and Indigenous youth, and families. NCN draws from the ancestral wisdom and resilience of communities affected by trauma and racism to promote deep healing and transformative, equitable change.

| Sacred Circles Center

Jerry Tello of Mexican, Texan and Coahuiltecan ancestry, raised in South Central Los Angeles, has worked for 40+ years as a leading expert in transformational healing for men and boys of color; racial justice; peaceful community mobilization; and providing domestic violence awareness, healing and support services to war veterans and their spouses. He currently works with the Sacred Circles Center in Whittier, California and is a member of its performance group.

Co-Founder | Bioneers

Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and its Chief Relationship Strategist is also co-founder of Women Bridging Worlds and Connecting Women Leading Change. She co-edited the anthology book, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and most recently wrote Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. An award-winning social entrepreneur, Nina teaches and speaks internationally, and previously served as President of Seeds of Change and Director of Strategic Marketing for Odwalla.

Founder | V-Day

Eve Ensler, Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, and one of the world’s most important activists on behalf of women’s rights, is the author of many plays, including, most famously the extraordinarily influential and impactful The Vagina Monologues, which has been performed all over the globe in 50 or so languages. She is the founder of V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls, which has raised over $100 million and generated slews of highly effective anti-violence programs around the world; as well as of One Billion Rising, the largest global mass action to end gender based violence. Eve is the author of Insecure At Last: A Political Memoir and I Am An Emotional Creature, and, most recently, The Apology. She also co-founded the City of Joy, a center for women survivors of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was the subject of the award-winning documentary City of Joy. Eve, a survivor of violence, has dedicated her life to ending violence against women and girls.

Director of Green Strategy | Data for Progress

Julian Brave NoiseCat, Director of Green Strategy at the think tank, Data for Progress, and “Narrative Change Director” for the Natural History Museum artist and activist collective, is also a correspondent for Real America with Jorge Ramos and a Contributing Editor at Canadian Geographic. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation and many other publications. A member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen, he grew up in Oakland, California.

Publisher | Mother Jones

Steve Katz, Ph.D., Publisher of Mother Jones, has been with the magazine since 2003, wearing a wide range of hats in the organization over that time. He currently devotes most of his time to development, membership and special fundraising campaigns. His previous jobs have included Vice President for Development at Earthjustice, activism in the South Bronx in the 1970s. and work in the nonprofit theater scene in the Bay Area.

CEO | Mother Jones

Monika Bauerlein is CEO of Mother Jones, the American Society of Magazine Editors’ 2017 Magazine of the Year. Previously, she served as co-editor with Clara Jeffery, who is now editor-in-chief. Together, they spearheaded an era of editorial growth and innovation, marked by tenfold growth in audience and newsroom staff. As CEO, Bauerlein has focused on expanding MoJo’s journalistic capacity on core beats and signature investigations—such as 2016’s private prison expose and MoJo’s scoop on the Russia memos—while developing a new business model built on engagement and reader support. In the past she has also worked as an alt-weekly editor, political reporter, corporate trainer, sausage slinger and fishing-line packager. She lives in Oakland.

Artist

Tim Merry works with major businesses, government agencies, local communities, and regional collaboratives to help engender breakthrough systems change through coaching, training, keynote speaking, engagement, and facilitation designed to energize and shake up the status quo. Tim is also a traveling spoken word artist inspired by poets from the ancient Anglo Saxon oral tradition all the way through history to modern poets such as Kate Tempest.

Ana Sophia Demetrakopoulos works at the intersections of trauma-informed practices, adult learning, inter-personal neurobiology, and social and racial justice to promote embodied dialogue, “meaning making,” and collaborative capacity building. Her work seeks to support people to increase their self-awareness, mutual visibility and strategic visioning at the individual and community levels by helping them access and ground themselves in their authentic voices.

Project Manager | Bay Area Climate Adaptation Network

Yeshe Salz, Project Manager for the Bay Area Climate Adaptation Network, is a coalition-builder, facilitator and climate justice advocate working at the nexus of climate resilience, community-driven planning and racial justice. Yeshe has organized with environmental justice organizations across the Bay Area such as PODER and CBE and worked internationally in the fields of indigenous community empowerment, cultural sovereignty and clean water rights.

Founder | Santa Cruz Permaculture

David Shaw, a permaculture and whole systems designer, facilitator, and educator, founded Santa Cruz Permaculture and the Right Livelihood College at UC Santa Cruz, a partnership with the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” He supports communities locally and globally to transform their shared future through strategic dialogue and collective action.

Founder | Green Gal

Melissa Ott Fant is a writer, organic gardener, baker, and consultant based in Reno, NV. After working in higher education sustainability for years, she apprenticed at the UCSC Farm and received her Permaculture Design Certificate in 2017. Her business, Green Gal, provides marketing services to socially/environmentally conscious businesses, and depending upon the season also offers organic sourdough bread, vegetables, and flowers to the local community.

| Cornucopia Food Forest Garden

John Valenzuela, a horticulturist, consultant and educator who focuses on a diversity of productive trees, shrubs, vines and other perennials, growing an “ecosystem of abundance” with his Cornucopia Food Forest Gardens, has taught permaculture for 30 years, from Hawai’i to California, Washington state and Central America. He is actively engaged with the non-profit California Rare Fruit Growers organization.

Environmental Architect

Stuart Muir Wilson, an environmental architect, lecturer, writer, development consultant, Permaculture teacher and mushroom grower with a special focus on ecological justice issues, has worked at both international and grassroots levels in Mexico, Germany, Nepal the U.S. and Australia on a range of projects that seek to catalyze positive environmental and social systems change.

Founder | Santa Cruz Permaculture

David Shaw, a permaculture and whole systems designer, facilitator, and educator, founded Santa Cruz Permaculture and the Right Livelihood College at UC Santa Cruz, a partnership with the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” He supports communities locally and globally to transform their shared future through strategic dialogue and collective action.

Founder | Green Gal

Melissa Ott Fant is a writer, organic gardener, baker, and consultant based in Reno, NV. After working in higher education sustainability for years, she apprenticed at the UCSC Farm and received her Permaculture Design Certificate in 2017. Her business, Green Gal, provides marketing services to socially/environmentally conscious businesses, and depending upon the season also offers organic sourdough bread, vegetables, and flowers to the local community.

Professor | Bard College

Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. teaches Environmental Literature and Media Arts at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. Her writer’s guide, The Elemental Journey of Purposeful Memoir, won a 2017 Nautilus Silver Award. She is also the Publisher of Green Fire Press and leads workshops in purposeful memoir internationally and online.

CEO | Mother Jones

Monika Bauerlein is CEO of Mother Jones, the American Society of Magazine Editors’ 2017 Magazine of the Year. Previously, she served as co-editor with Clara Jeffery, who is now editor-in-chief. Together, they spearheaded an era of editorial growth and innovation, marked by tenfold growth in audience and newsroom staff. As CEO, Bauerlein has focused on expanding MoJo’s journalistic capacity on core beats and signature investigations—such as 2016’s private prison expose and MoJo’s scoop on the Russia memos—while developing a new business model built on engagement and reader support. In the past she has also worked as an alt-weekly editor, political reporter, corporate trainer, sausage slinger and fishing-line packager. She lives in Oakland.

Executive Editor | Grist

Nikhil Swaminathan, an award-winning journalist and the Executive Editor of Grist, the nation’s leading environmental news site, oversees a distributed nonprofit newsroom of 15 journalists. Previously, he led the publication's coverage of Environmental Justice, and he's held editorial positions at Scientific American, Al Jazeera America, GOOD, and Archaeology. Prior to joining Grist, Nikhil was an inaugural Ida B. Wells Fellow at Type Investigations.

Publisher | San Francisco Public Press

Lila LaHood is Publisher of the San Francisco Public Press, a nonprofit news organization producing local public-interest journalism online, in a quarterly newspaper and on KSFP 102.5 FM in San Francisco. A graduate of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and of Stanford, she is a member of San Francisco’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force and the board of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California chapter.

Publisher | CalMatters

Marcia Parker is Publisher of CalMatters, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization covering California state government. Formerly Editorial Director for Patch's West Coast local news sites, CIR's California Watch site launch manager, and Assistant Dean at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, Marcia serves on the Institute for Nonprofit News board, the Stanford Knight Journalism Fellowships selection committee, and also teaches at Northwestern University's SF campus.

CEO | Black Executive Men

Jewel Love is a licensed psychotherapist, CEO of Black Executive Men, and Creative Director for Urban Healers. All three of his ventures seek to help men heal, establish healthier relationships, and launch their unique purposes in life.

Co-Founder/Director | Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education

Lauren Dalberth Hage, co-founder/Director of the Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education, is a designer, facilitator, wilderness guide and consultant who leads a variety of adult, teen and family programs that weave together deep nature connection, community resilience, permaculture, and social justice. Lauren also works with communities to support the honoring of life transitions, with a special focus on the reclamation of a healthy cultural relationship to menstruation.

Co-Founder | Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education

Dave Hage, co-founder of the Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education (WE) helps lead the center's 9-month immersion program and various other programs for adults and teens, as well as providing group and individual mentoring. He is passionate about helping others find their unique genius and personal relationship to creativity via a deep connection to the earth.

Ana Sophia Demetrakopoulos works at the intersections of trauma-informed practices, adult learning, inter-personal neurobiology, and social and racial justice to promote embodied dialogue, “meaning making,” and collaborative capacity building. Her work seeks to support people to increase their self-awareness, mutual visibility and strategic visioning at the individual and community levels by helping them access and ground themselves in their authentic voices.

Architect

Al Tozer, a Bend, Oregon-based pioneering figure in “deep green,” “net zero energy,” “biophilic” architecture with 25+ years’ experience in the field whose firm, Tozer Design, designed the world’s first certified Living Building residential project, recently served as the Living Building Challenge Director at the International Living Future Institute in Seattle. Al has also served as a City of Bend Planning Commissioner and co-authored Bend’s General Plan.

Practice Leader and Ecological Engineer | Biohabitats Inc.

Erin English, PE, Practice Leader and Ecological Engineer at Biohabitats Inc., leads Biohabitats’ Integrated water strategies planning and engineering efforts. Combining engineering and her passion for water and ecology, she helps clients throughout the world design and build innovative water infrastructure, including some award-winning projects that have achieved the Living Building Challenge’s uniquely rigorous Net Zero Water benchmark.

Principal | Shepley Bulfinch

Sonja Bochart, IIDA, a principal with Shepley Bulfinch, has 20+ years’ experience as a wellness focused designer. Her work includes education, healthcare and workplace design, including Living Building Challenge™, LEED®, WELL™, and SITES™ Platinum certified projects. Sonja also leads immersive and experientially based biophilic design workshops, focused on fostering human-nature connection and promoting designs that support human and ecological vitality and health.

Author

Kami McBride’s 30 years of teaching herbal medicine is steeped in her calling to activate a deep connection with the earth in our culture and to inspire the next generation to love and care for plants. Kami has taught herbal medicine at UCSF School of Nursing and has helped thousands of families learn to use herbs for self-care. She is the author of The Herbal Kitchen.

Instructional Strategist | Rialto, California, Unified School District

Juanita Chan, M.A.Ed., an Instructional Strategist for the Rialto, California, Unified School District whose main focus is on math and science instruction, has a background in Entomology and plant vector pathogen epidemiology, among other disciplines, and has had many jobs in pedagogy, from teaching math and science at several grade levels to developing curriculums, organizing science fairs and leading various school departments.

Director | Biomimicry Institute

Beth Rattner directs the Biomimicry Institute's strategic vision, managing the organization's program development, fundraising, and marketing efforts. Her previous positions have included: working with William McDonough and Michael Braungart on The Upcycle; co-founding and leading the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute; directing one of the first sustainability business consulting firms, Blu Skye; and Business Manager for Hewlett Packard's Emerging Market Solutions (EMS) group.

| National Geographic Educator Fellow

Kavita Gupta, a highly influential, award winning educator, a public high school teacher for 20+ years and member of the inaugural class of National Geographic Educator fellows, has been a leading advocate for holistic science education (including regarding Climate Change) in multiple leadership positions nationally. Kavita has also mentored many award winning student projects in prestigious science competitions and published many articles in educational journals.

Executive Director | California Global Education Project

Emily M. Schell, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the California Global Education Project and serves as co-chair to the California Environmental Literacy Initiative. Her former positions include: teacher, principal, and Social Studies resource teacher at San Diego Unified School District; History-Social Science Coordinator at San Diego County Office of Education; liaison to National Geographic Education Foundation; and pre-service educator at San Diego State University.

Winner of the 2019 Biomimicry Youth Design Challenge

Caleb Jordan-McDaniels is a budding biologist and engineer whose deep interest in biomimicry has been the foundation for a number of design projects. Most recently, Caleb led a small team of other high school students to win the 2019 Biomimicry Youth Design Challenge with a tide-based electricity generation system modeled after the seeds of Alsomitra macrocarpa, a species of vining gourd.

Ana Sophia Demetrakopoulos works at the intersections of trauma-informed practices, adult learning, inter-personal neurobiology, and social and racial justice to promote embodied dialogue, “meaning making,” and collaborative capacity building. Her work seeks to support people to increase their self-awareness, mutual visibility and strategic visioning at the individual and community levels by helping them access and ground themselves in their authentic voices.

Author

Terry Tempest Williams, one of the greatest living authors from the American West, is also a longtime award-winning conservationist and activist, who has taken on, among other issues, nuclear testing, the Iraq War, the neglect of women’s health, and the destruction of nature, especially in her beloved “Red Rock” region of her native Utah and in Alaska. Her many prestigious prize-winning books include: Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert; The Open Space of Democracy; and Finding Beauty in a Broken World. She is currently a Fellow in the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program at the University of Utah and a Fellow at Dartmouth College, where she continues to teach.

Founder | V-Day

Eve Ensler, Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, and one of the world’s most important activists on behalf of women’s rights, is the author of many plays, including, most famously the extraordinarily influential and impactful The Vagina Monologues, which has been performed all over the globe in 50 or so languages. She is the founder of V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls, which has raised over $100 million and generated slews of highly effective anti-violence programs around the world; as well as of One Billion Rising, the largest global mass action to end gender based violence. Eve is the author of Insecure At Last: A Political Memoir and I Am An Emotional Creature, and, most recently, The Apology. She also co-founded the City of Joy, a center for women survivors of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was the subject of the award-winning documentary City of Joy. Eve, a survivor of violence, has dedicated her life to ending violence against women and girls.

Founder | Revolutionary Love Project

Valarie Kaur, born into a family of Sikh farmers who settled in California in 1913, is a seasoned civil rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, lawyer, faith leader, and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, which seeks to champion love as a public ethic and wellspring for social action. She began to document hate crimes against Sikh and Muslim Americans after 9/11 and produced the award-winning film Divided We Fall. She has worked extensively on hate crimes, racial profiling, immigration detention, solitary confinement, mass shootings, marriage equality, and Internet freedom and founded the Groundswell Movement, “America’s largest multi-faith online organizing network.” She is currently a Senior Fellow at Auburn Theological Seminary and her book, Revolutionary Love, will be out early next year.

Ana Sophia Demetrakopoulos works at the intersections of trauma-informed practices, adult learning, inter-personal neurobiology, and social and racial justice to promote embodied dialogue, “meaning making,” and collaborative capacity building. Her work seeks to support people to increase their self-awareness, mutual visibility and strategic visioning at the individual and community levels by helping them access and ground themselves in their authentic voices.

Executive Director | Freedom Lodge

Ruby Gibson, Th.D., a longtime champion of women’s rights, earth-centered principles and prayer, Indigenous sovereignty, and somatic healing, developed two intergenerational trauma recovery models—Somatic Archaeology© and Generational BrainspottingTM. She is the author of My Body, My Earth, The Practice of Somatic Archaeolog, and the founder and Executive Director of Freedom Lodge, a non-profit in Rapid City, SD, whose mission is the healing and wellness of all Indigenous people.

Ana Sophia Demetrakopoulos works at the intersections of trauma-informed practices, adult learning, inter-personal neurobiology, and social and racial justice to promote embodied dialogue, “meaning making,” and collaborative capacity building. Her work seeks to support people to increase their self-awareness, mutual visibility and strategic visioning at the individual and community levels by helping them access and ground themselves in their authentic voices.

Assistant Professor and Department Chair of Native American Studies | Humboldt State

Cutcha Risling Baldy, Ph.D. (Hupa, Yurok, Karuk), Assistant Professor and Department Chair of Native American Studies at Humboldt State and co-founder of the Native Women's Collective, a nonprofit supporting the revitalization of Native American arts and culture, researches Indigenous feminisms, California Indians and decolonization. She is the author of: We Are Dancing For You: Native feminisms and the revitalization of women's coming-of-age.

Certified Clinical Herbalist

Co-Founder | Wisconsin’s Singing Trees Farm Collective

Danielle Hill, a citizen of the federally recognized Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and a student midwife passionate about reinvigorating Indigenous birthing practices, is a co-founder of Wisconsin’s Singing Trees Farm Collective, a women-owned collaborative land restoration project focused on reintroducing pre-colonial crops in the Midwest and land guardianship based on feminist and Indigenous principles.

| Radical Joy for Hard Times

Polly Howells, a former board chair of Bioneers, is a facilitator for the Pachamama Alliance's "Awakening the Dreamer Symposium" and is a core member of Woodstock NY Transition. She trained for ten years with Jungian Analyst Marion Woodman and she co-leads a five-day yearly retreat for women called "Reclaiming Our Lives, Reclaiming Our Earth." She is currently on the board of Radical Joy for Hard Times.

Founder and Director | Radical Joy for Hard Times

Trebbe Johnson, the founder/Director of Radical Joy for Hard Times, a global network devoted to finding and making beauty in wounded places, is the author of Radical Joy for Hard Times, 101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty, and The World Is a Waiting Lover, and she leads workshops and wilderness trips worldwide devoted to the discovery of wisdom and insight in nature.

President-Elect | USPATH - World Professional Association for Transgender Health

Erica E. Anderson, Ph.D., an eminent clinical psychologist, academic administrator, healthcare executive and professor (currently at UCSF Benioff), as well as a consultant to major companies, has had an illustrious four-decade long career in public health, clinical psychology, healthcare management and pediatrics. A leading expert in transgender and gender nonconforming health issues, she is the President-Elect of USPATH, the newly created affiliate of WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

CEO | Affirmative Acts Consulting

Fresh “Lev” White, CEO of Affirmative Acts Consulting, is a Bay Area-based certified coach, diversity trainer, mindfulness meditation teacher, speaker, and writer. Lev is also the founder of the Trans and GQ Mindfulness Sangha and a contributor to several collections and anthologies, including Real World Mindfulness for Beginners, Trans Buddhist Anthology, and Trans Bodies/Trans Selves.

Photographer

Salgu Wissmath, a nonbinary, Sacramento-based photographer whose work explores the intersections of mental health, queer identity, faith, and stories by and for people of color and the queer community, currently freelances for editorial publications and nonprofits in Northern California. Salgu's past editorial work has been published in a wide range of leading media, including The New York Times, Guardian, and NPR.

Executive Director | Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth

Teiahsha Bankhead, MSW, Ph.D., Executive Director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY), is a social justice activist, licensed psychotherapist and a professor who has taught racial, gender and sexual orientation diversity, theories of criminal behavior, and US social policy. Formerly a Research Fellow at both the National Institute of Mental Health and the U.S. Psychiatric Congress, she is the co-author of Preserving Privilege: California Politics, Propositions and People of Color.

President | Restorative Solutions

Randy Compton is the President and co-founder of Restorative Solutions, Inc., where he designs and implements school-based restorative justice initiatives. Working with the School Mediation Center, he coordinated the National Curriculum Integration Project, founded two major conferences, served on the Standards Committee for the Conflict Resolution Education Network, authored numerous articles, wrote and edited curricula and videos and presented at conferences throughout the U.S.

| AECreative Consulting Partners

Ashara Ekundayo is an independent curator, entrepreneur in creative fields, and organizer working internationally across spiritual, civic, and social innovation spaces. Through her company, AECreative Consulting Partners, she seeks to engage artists and cultural production in movement building and offers an afro-futurist, intersectional framework that centers the lives and traditions of black womxn. She is author of two forthcoming books, Artist As First Responder, and Riot Babies.

Multimedia Artist

Tara Trudell is a socially and environmentally “engaged” multimedia artist who weaves poetry, photography, film, and audio components into her work. Recently she has tackled issues such as the crisis at the USA/Mexico border. One of her techniques consists of writing poems about topics, then rolling the poems into paper beads that become prayers that transport each poem’s purpose and energy into the world.

Multidisciplinary Artist | thewayblackmachine

Christa Bell is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and writer from Seattle whose work addresses the spiritual and psychic recovery of Black women in the West. In 2018 and 2019, her co-curatorial project, thewayblackmachine, a digital archive documenting state violence against Black people, toured with ICA Boston’s exhibition, Art in the Age of the Internet, and her solo work, Her Great Battle Against The Truth, exhibited at the 2019 Every Woman Bienial.

Founder | Oakland Public Conservatory of Music

Angela M. Wellman, an award-winning musician, scholar, educator, and activist, is the founder of the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music which centers the Black experience in the development of American musical culture and identity. She is presently completing her dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison exploring the impact of racism and white supremacy on access to music education for Black students.

Climate Justice Organizer | Youth Vs. Apocalypse

Isha Clarke is a dynamic, passionate high school student environmental and social justice activist born, raised, and educated in Oakland, CA. Her experience has taught her first-hand that threats to the environment disproportionately affect people of color, low-income folks, and young people, and this realization has fueled her passion to fight to create a just and equitable world while maintaining a livable climate.

Co-Founder/Director | Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education

Lauren Dalberth Hage, co-founder/Director of the Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education, is a designer, facilitator, wilderness guide and consultant who leads a variety of adult, teen and family programs that weave together deep nature connection, community resilience, permaculture, and social justice. Lauren also works with communities to support the honoring of life transitions, with a special focus on the reclamation of a healthy cultural relationship to menstruation.

Co-Founder | Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education

Dave Hage, co-founder of the Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education (WE) helps lead the center's 9-month immersion program and various other programs for adults and teens, as well as providing group and individual mentoring. He is passionate about helping others find their unique genius and personal relationship to creativity via a deep connection to the earth.

Director, Writer and Producer | USC’s School of Cinematic Arts

Jeremy Kagan, an award-winning, internationally recognized director, writer, and producer of feature films and television, is a tenured professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and runs its Change Making Media Lab. Jeremy has directed 12 features including his most recent, Shot. His past films include: Heroes, The Big Fix, The Chosen and The Journey of Natty Gann. Jeremy’s many awards include the Humanitas Award and an Emmy.

Executive Director | Oceanic Preservation Society

Louie Psihoyos, award-winning filmmaker and Executive Director of the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), is one of the world’s top photographers whose work has often appeared in National Geographic and on hundreds of magazine covers. An ardent diver, Psihoyos’ most passionate mission is to reveal the dramatic decline of the oceans and to work to save the planet. His films include the Academy Award-winning documentary, The Cove, Racing Extinction, and The Game Changers.

Assistant Director | New Media Rights

Shaun Spalding, a former commercial filmmaker, is a highly experienced IP attorney specializing in digital entertainment transactions and licensing and the Assistant Director of New Media Rights, a non-profit representing creators and startups otherwise unable to afford legal services. He is also a professor at California Western School of Law and teaches highly popular online courses in legal basics for creatives.

Writer/Producer

Stephen Most, a writer, filmmaker, and playwright, is the author of Stories Make the World, Reflections on Storytelling and the Art of the Documentary and River of Renewal, Myth and History in the Klamath Basin. The writer/producer of River of Renewal, Nature's Orchestra, and Wilder than Wild, he has writing credits on four Academy Award-nominated documentaries and five Emmy winners.

Associate Professor | UC Santa Cruz

Jennifer Taylor, a filmmaker, Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz and Director of that school’s Graduate Studies of the Social Documentation MFA program as well as a Sundance Documentary Institute Fellow, makes colorful, character-based films about real people with extraordinary stories. Her work has been shown at Sundance and a wide range of film festivals nationally and internationally.

Co-founder | Yisrael Family Urban Farm

Chanowk Yisrael, co-founder of the Yisrael Family Urban Farm in Sacramento’s South Oak Park neighborhood, gave up a life in corporate America to become an award-winning, pioneering urban homesteader. Director of Urban Organic Sustainability for Hip Hop is Green, a plant-based hip hop multimedia organization, he also serves on the board of the South Oak Park Community Association and Slow Food Sacramento.

Director | Yisrael Family Urban Farm

Judith Yisrael, Director of the Yisrael Family Urban Farm in Sacramento’s South Oak Park neighborhood (a classic “food desert”), is an herbalist, award-winning community educator and mother dedicated to sharing her knowledge of nature’s power to heal—physically, emotionally and psychologically. A member of the American Herbalist Guild, she is also a master soap maker whose handmade skin care products are available at retail outlets throughout Sacramento.

Co-Owner/Farmer | Rise & Root Farm

Karen Washington, co-owner/farmer of Rise & Root Farm, has been a legendary activist in the community gardening movement since 1985. Renowned for turning empty Bronx lots into verdant spaces, Karen is: a former President of the NYC Community Garden Coalition; a board member of: the NY Botanical Gardens, Why Hunger, and NYC Farm School; a co-founder of Black Urban Growers (BUGS); and a pioneering force in establishing urban farmers’ markets.

Co-Director | Soil Born Farms

Shawn Harrison is the founder and Co-Director of Soil Born Farms, a non-profit urban farming and education center located in Sacramento, CA, which provides hands-on training at its 55 acre urban farm and at school gardens in the community to educate youth and adults about the connections between food, health and the health of the environment.

Restorative Food Systems Director | Bioneers

Arty Mangan, Bioneers' Restorative Food Systems Director, joined Bioneers in 1998 as Project Manager for the Restorative Development Initiative. A former board president of the Ecological Farming Association and member of the Santa Cruz GE Subcommittee that banned GE crops, Arty has worked with farmers and agriculture since 1978, first as a partner in Live Juice and later with Odwalla, where he was in charge of fruit sourcing.

| Sacred Circles Center

Jerry Tello of Mexican, Texan and Coahuiltecan ancestry, raised in South Central Los Angeles, has worked for 40+ years as a leading expert in transformational healing for men and boys of color; racial justice; peaceful community mobilization; and providing domestic violence awareness, healing and support services to war veterans and their spouses. He currently works with the Sacred Circles Center in Whittier, California and is a member of its performance group.

CEO | Black Executive Men

Jewel Love is a licensed psychotherapist, CEO of Black Executive Men, and Creative Director for Urban Healers. All three of his ventures seek to help men heal, establish healthier relationships, and launch their unique purposes in life.

Co-Founder | Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education

Will Scott is a co-founder and member of the teaching team at the Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education. He co-creates nature-based, relationally-focused educational initiatives that reside at the intersections of ecological health, human development, social justice, and emergent response.

Executive Director | National Compadres Network

Héctor Sánchez-Flores is the Executive Director of the National Compadres Network (NCN), an organization that develops and supports culturally centered programs for boys and men of color, Latino and Indigenous youth, and families. NCN draws from the ancestral wisdom and resilience of communities affected by trauma and racism to promote deep healing and transformative, equitable change.

Chair | Everett Program

Chris Benner, Ph.D., the Dorothy E. Everett Chair in Global Information and Social Entrepreneurship and a Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at UC Santa Cruz, directs the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change and the Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation. He has authored or co-authored six books (most recently Equity, Growth and Community) and more that 70 journal articles, chapters and research reports.

Environmental Architect

Stuart Muir Wilson, an environmental architect, lecturer, writer, development consultant, Permaculture teacher and mushroom grower with a special focus on ecological justice issues, has worked at both international and grassroots levels in Mexico, Germany, Nepal the U.S. and Australia on a range of projects that seek to catalyze positive environmental and social systems change.

Founder | Santa Cruz Permaculture

David Shaw, a permaculture and whole systems designer, facilitator, and educator, founded Santa Cruz Permaculture and the Right Livelihood College at UC Santa Cruz, a partnership with the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” He supports communities locally and globally to transform their shared future through strategic dialogue and collective action.

Director of Policy and Systems Design | Schumacher Center for a New Economics

Greg Watson, Director of Policy and Systems Design at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, has spent four decades seeking to apply systems thinking to achieve a just and sustainable world. His long CV includes stints as Massachusetts’ Commissioner of Agriculture, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust and of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, and founding the Cuba-U.S. Agroecology Network, among many other prestigious positions.

Founder | Project Drawdown

Paul Hawken, one of the most important environmental authors, activists, thinkers and entrepreneurs of our era, has dedicated his life to sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. His many bestselling books include such massively influential texts as: The Next Economy; The Ecology of Commerce; Blessed Unrest; and most recently, Drawdown, The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. Paul is the founder of Project Drawdown, a non-profit dedicated to researching real solutions to global warming.

Professor | Oberlin College

David W. Orr, a Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics (Emeritus) at Oberlin College, is a pioneering, award-winning thought leader in the fields of Sustainability and Ecological Literacy. The author and co-author of countless articles and papers and several seminal books, including, most recently, Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency, he has served as a board member or adviser to many foundations and organizations (including Bioneers!). His current work is on the state of our democracy.

| Truong & Associates

Vien Truong, JD, a leading expert on building an equitable green economy, has helped develop many major energy, environmental and economic justice policies and programs at the state, federal, and local levels. A former President/CEO of the Dream Corps, her firm, Truong & Associates, advises lawmakers and organizations globally on developing sustainable, equitable environmental policies. Among her many award-winning achievements Vien co-led the coalition to pass California’s law creating the biggest fund in history for the most polluted communities.

Executive Director | Freedom Lodge

Ruby Gibson, Th.D., a longtime champion of women’s rights, earth-centered principles and prayer, Indigenous sovereignty, and somatic healing, developed two intergenerational trauma recovery models—Somatic Archaeology© and Generational BrainspottingTM. She is the author of My Body, My Earth, The Practice of Somatic Archaeolog, and the founder and Executive Director of Freedom Lodge, a non-profit in Rapid City, SD, whose mission is the healing and wellness of all Indigenous people.

Dean of the Faculty of Social Work | University of Manitob

Michael Yellow Bird, Ph.D., (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara), Dean of the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Manitoba, previously served as Director of the Indigenous Nations Studies program at the University of Kansas, among many other academic positions. An internationally recognized expert on Indigenous Peoples health and the effects of colonization, he is the author of numerous articles and the co-editor or co-author of several books, including For Indigenous Eyes Only: The Decolonization Handbook.

Founder | Flourish.ink

Christiana Musk, whose background spans environmental and social entrepreneurship (including as a founding partner of Green Mountain Energy) and non-profit and foundation leadership, currently curates the Flourish content for the Near Future Summit and advises several food initiatives. An operating partner at Satori Capital, a sustainable investment firm, she was formerly Executive Director of Food Choice Taskforce and led the food system program for Avatar Alliance Foundation. (flourish.ink)

Ana Sophia Demetrakopoulos works at the intersections of trauma-informed practices, adult learning, inter-personal neurobiology, and social and racial justice to promote embodied dialogue, “meaning making,” and collaborative capacity building. Her work seeks to support people to increase their self-awareness, mutual visibility and strategic visioning at the individual and community levels by helping them access and ground themselves in their authentic voices.

Chairman | Renewal Funds

Joel Solomon, author of The Clean Money Revolution: Reinventing Power, Purpose, and Capitalism and Chairman of Renewal Funds, a $200 million mission venture capital firm, has invested in over 100 early growth-stage companies in North America, delivering above market returns while catalyzing positive social and environmental change.

Founder | Standing in Our Power

Taij Kumarie Moteelall is a writer, performer, facilitator and coach as well as a highly successful fundraiser for social movements. She founded Standing in Our Power, a national network of women of color leaders committed to holistic transformation, sustainability and wellness for all across the gender spectrum, and co-founded Media Sutra, which seeks to be a vehicle for self-determination and collective liberation for creative entrepreneurs of color.

Co-Founder | Edmund Hillary Fellowship

Matthew Monahan is co-founder of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship (EHF), a global community of change-makers headquartered in Aotearoa New Zealand, home of the New Frontiers Summit. He is also a co-founder of the Namaste Foundation, a philanthropic fund focused on supporting environmental and education nonprofit projects.

Co-Founder | Frontline’s to Power

Tianna Arredondo (they/them), of African-American and Mexican ancestry, is co-founder of the Frontline’s to Power (F2P) initiative (affiliated with the Power Shift Network), which works to build a national coalition of environmental justice leaders dedicated to story-based strategy, anti-oppression tactics, and decolonization in daily interactions.

Oakland-based Artist and Organizer

Robin Bean Crane is an Oakland-based artist and organizer who uses storytelling as a tool at the intersection of climate, racial and economic justice to spotlight community-driven solutions to current crises. With a focus on participatory, non-extractive media and experimenting with stop motion and digital animation, Robin works with nonprofits and community groups to create content that meets their needs.

Stop it at the Source Campaigner | 350.org

Clayton Thomas-Müller (Mathias Colomb Cree/aka Pukatawagan), currently the 'Stop it at the Source' campaigner with 350.org, is an award-winning Winnipeg, Canada-based Indigenous Rights/Climate Justice activist and media producer with 17+ years’ experience organizing in hundreds of First Nations across North America against the fossil fuel industry and leading delegations to major UN and other international conclaves. Clayton also serves on many boards, including for: Black Mesa Water Coalition, Indigenous Climate Action, and Bioneers.

Executive Producer and Writer | Wild Hope

Suez Jacobson, Ph.D., a writer, activist and board member of Great Old Broads for Wilderness, is the Executive Producer and writer of the film Wild Hope (being shown at Bioneers this year). Suez, a ski bum in her youth, became a top echelon Wall Street financial analyst, and until last year when she became Emerita, a distinguished professor of economics who developed innovative economics curricula rooted in ecological awareness.

Digital Media Specialist | Regis’ Dayton Memorial Library

Dave Devine, a digital media specialist at Regis’ Dayton Memorial Library in Denver, Colorado, was the Digital Project Content Manager for the film, Wild Hope, being screened at Bioneers this year.

Marketing Coordinator | REBBL Beverage Company

Kathleen Tan is the Marketing Coordinator and “brand storyteller” for the REBBL beverage company, a mission-driven enterprise devoted to combating human trafficking and helping address climate change and biodiversity loss by helping economically empower the often disenfranchised Indigenous and local communities that produce the raw materials for its products, as well as providing exquisite tasting elixirs made from potent ethically-sourced super herbs.

Chief Trickster | Coyote Network News

Caroline W. Casey is the host-creator, “weaver of context” for The Visionary Activist Show (23 + years) on Pacifica Radio Network. With a guiding astro*mytho*politico frame, she highlights guests she views as leading contributors to a “Renaissance of Reverent Ingenuity.” Caroline presents her unique art of “Astro* mythological*political* guiding *meta-story-telling” in myriad multi-media venues.

NGO Administrator

Afia Walking Tree, a renowned multi-instrumental percussionist, performer, educator, earth practitioner, NGO administrator, and longtime activist focused on transformative cultural healing across ethnic and generational lines using drumming as her main tool, is founder of the Drum Mobile, a portable drum-arts learning laboratory that makes accessible the power of African drumming and Permaculture to communities of color internationally.

Water Resources Analyst

Deb Lane has been playing the drums for most of her life. Formerly a member of the Santa Cruz World Beat Band, Pele Juju, she performs with artists throughout the Bay Area and beyond. In addition to her musical endeavors, Deb is a leader in water-use efficiency and works as a Water Resources Analyst.

CEO and Founder | Bioneers

Kenny Ausubel, CEO and founder (in 1990) of Bioneers, is an award-winning social entrepreneur, journalist, author and filmmaker. Co-founder and first CEO of the organic seed company, Seeds of Change, his film (and companion book) Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime helped influence national alternative medicine policy. He has edited several books and written four, including, most recently, Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature.

Co-Founder | Bioneers

Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and its Chief Relationship Strategist is also co-founder of Women Bridging Worlds and Connecting Women Leading Change. She co-edited the anthology book, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and most recently wrote Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. An award-winning social entrepreneur, Nina teaches and speaks internationally, and previously served as President of Seeds of Change and Director of Strategic Marketing for Odwalla.

CEO and Founder | Bioneers

Kenny Ausubel, CEO and founder (in 1990) of Bioneers, is an award-winning social entrepreneur, journalist, author and filmmaker. Co-founder and first CEO of the organic seed company, Seeds of Change, his film (and companion book) Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime helped influence national alternative medicine policy. He has edited several books and written four, including, most recently, Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature.

Co-Founder/Director | Climate Parents at the Sierra Club

Lisa Hoyos, co-founder/Director of Climate Parents at the Sierra Club, has been a campaigner in the labor and environmental movements for 20+ years, working with such organizations as the BlueGreen Alliance; AFL-CIO; Greenpeace; and as a staffer to the California Senate Natural Resources Committee. She also serves on several boards, including for the California League of Conservation Voters, the Labor Network for Sustainability, and the Alliance for Climate Education.

National Field Director | Moms Clean Air Force

Heather McTeer Toney, born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi, was elected that town’s first African-American, first female, and youngest ever Mayor at the age of 27. After her 2nd term, she became Regional Administrator for the EPA’s Southeast Region, appointed by President Obama. A nationally and internationally renowned, award-winning leader in Environmental and Climate Justice, she is currently Field Director for Moms Clean Air Force, an organization of over 1 million parents committed to fighting climate change and air pollution.

CEO and Founder | Bioneers

Kenny Ausubel, CEO and founder (in 1990) of Bioneers, is an award-winning social entrepreneur, journalist, author and filmmaker. Co-founder and first CEO of the organic seed company, Seeds of Change, his film (and companion book) Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime helped influence national alternative medicine policy. He has edited several books and written four, including, most recently, Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature.

Founder | 350.org

Bill McKibben, our nation’s most significant environmental activist, is also a leading journalist, author and academic. A Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, Bill’s The End of Nature (1989) was the first book for a general audience about climate change. A founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, he has won slews of prestigious awards, including the Right Livelihood Award and the Gandhi Prize and Thomas Merton prizes. A former staff writer for the New Yorker, he writes frequently for a wide variety of publications around the world, including the New York Review of Books, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. His most recent book is Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

Co-Founder | Bioneers

Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and its Chief Relationship Strategist is also co-founder of Women Bridging Worlds and Connecting Women Leading Change. She co-edited the anthology book, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and most recently wrote Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. An award-winning social entrepreneur, Nina teaches and speaks internationally, and previously served as President of Seeds of Change and Director of Strategic Marketing for Odwalla.

Founder | Revolutionary Love Project

Valarie Kaur, born into a family of Sikh farmers who settled in California in 1913, is a seasoned civil rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, lawyer, faith leader, and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, which seeks to champion love as a public ethic and wellspring for social action. She began to document hate crimes against Sikh and Muslim Americans after 9/11 and produced the award-winning film Divided We Fall. She has worked extensively on hate crimes, racial profiling, immigration detention, solitary confinement, mass shootings, marriage equality, and Internet freedom and founded the Groundswell Movement, “America’s largest multi-faith online organizing network.” She is currently a Senior Fellow at Auburn Theological Seminary and her book, Revolutionary Love, will be out early next year.

Youth Performance Company

The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company’s extraordinary energy, brilliant choreography and inspired lyrics have been rocking the house at Bioneers for many years. A program of Destiny Arts Center, an Oakland-based violence prevention/arts education nonprofit, the company is a multicultural group of teens that creates original performance art combining hip-hop, dance, theater, martial arts, song, and rap. It has performed locally and nationally since 1993 and has been the subject of two documentary films. DAYPC’s artistic directors are: Sarah Crowell & Rashidi Omari.

Co-Founder | Utah Youth Environmental Solutions

Mishka Banuri is an 18-year-old organizer from Salt Lake City, Utah. After moving to Utah from a suburb in Chicago, she fell in love with the Colorado Plateau's mountains and red rock. She has been politically active since 7th grade, holding statewide organizations, institutions, and politicians accountable for their actions on climate and social issues. She works with Utah Youth for Environmental Solutions (UYES) and is a 2019 Uplift Organizing Fellow to engage young people in the environmental movement, focusing on connecting environmental and social justice issues. Mishka recently won the Brower Youth Award, and was named one of the top 100 Asian Americans in 2018 for her work in Utah. Mishka is also passionate about reproductive justice, particularly centering marginalized voices. She is a peer educator with Teen Council, a program run by Planned Parenthood that provides sexual education to young people. As a Pakistani-American Muslim, Mishka seeks to build bridges and empower Muslim youth and youth of color in Utah. She is the Director of the Ambassador Program for the Emerald Project, which fights the misinterpretation of Islam. She is also the co-founder of the Utah Muslim Women's Alliance, an organization that fights sexist Islamophobia.

CEO and Founder | Bioneers

Kenny Ausubel, CEO and founder (in 1990) of Bioneers, is an award-winning social entrepreneur, journalist, author and filmmaker. Co-founder and first CEO of the organic seed company, Seeds of Change, his film (and companion book) Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime helped influence national alternative medicine policy. He has edited several books and written four, including, most recently, Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature.

Founder | Project Drawdown

Paul Hawken, one of the most important environmental authors, activists, thinkers and entrepreneurs of our era, has dedicated his life to sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. His many bestselling books include such massively influential texts as: The Next Economy; The Ecology of Commerce; Blessed Unrest; and most recently, Drawdown, The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. Paul is the founder of Project Drawdown, a non-profit dedicated to researching real solutions to global warming.

Artist

Tim Merry works with major businesses, government agencies, local communities, and regional collaboratives to help engender breakthrough systems change through coaching, training, keynote speaking, engagement, and facilitation designed to energize and shake up the status quo. Tim is also a traveling spoken word artist inspired by poets from the ancient Anglo Saxon oral tradition all the way through history to modern poets such as Kate Tempest.

Ana Sophia Demetrakopoulos works at the intersections of trauma-informed practices, adult learning, inter-personal neurobiology, and social and racial justice to promote embodied dialogue, “meaning making,” and collaborative capacity building. Her work seeks to support people to increase their self-awareness, mutual visibility and strategic visioning at the individual and community levels by helping them access and ground themselves in their authentic voices.

Project Manager | Bay Area Climate Adaptation Network

Yeshe Salz, Project Manager for the Bay Area Climate Adaptation Network, is a coalition-builder, facilitator and climate justice advocate working at the nexus of climate resilience, community-driven planning and racial justice. Yeshe has organized with environmental justice organizations across the Bay Area such as PODER and CBE and worked internationally in the fields of indigenous community empowerment, cultural sovereignty and clean water rights.

| Cornucopia Food Forest Garden

John Valenzuela, a horticulturist, consultant and educator who focuses on a diversity of productive trees, shrubs, vines and other perennials, growing an “ecosystem of abundance” with his Cornucopia Food Forest Gardens, has taught permaculture for 30 years, from Hawai’i to California, Washington state and Central America. He is actively engaged with the non-profit California Rare Fruit Growers organization.

Founder | Kindred Herbs

Cameron (Cami) Salomon, a plant caretaker and conservationist who, in 2018, founded Kindred Herbs, a specialty nursery dedicated to growing a diversity of medicinal herbs from around the world, is dedicated to defending biodiversity and combating plant overharvesting and habitat loss.

Founder | Green Gal

Melissa Ott Fant is a writer, organic gardener, baker, and consultant based in Reno, NV. After working in higher education sustainability for years, she apprenticed at the UCSC Farm and received her Permaculture Design Certificate in 2017. Her business, Green Gal, provides marketing services to socially/environmentally conscious businesses, and depending upon the season also offers organic sourdough bread, vegetables, and flowers to the local community.

Founder | Santa Cruz Permaculture

David Shaw, a permaculture and whole systems designer, facilitator, and educator, founded Santa Cruz Permaculture and the Right Livelihood College at UC Santa Cruz, a partnership with the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” He supports communities locally and globally to transform their shared future through strategic dialogue and collective action.

Singer-Songwriter | Meadowlark Music Class

Noe Venable, a singer-songwriter, music educator and “spiritual activist,” has released 8 adult and 8 children’s albums and toured nationally. A musical facilitator, Noe uses group singing as a tool for community building with people of all ages and also leads an outdoor parent-child music eco and spirit-themed program called Meadowlark Music Class and a weekly intergenerational chorus for women, Mothersong.

Leader | SolutionCraft

Brennan Blazer Bird, an ecological educator, natural builder, water harvester, and “appropriate techie,” has led a diverse array of artistic and ecological projects around the world. He founded the Peace On Earthbench Movement (POEM), which seeks to inspire youth to transform plastic waste into art, and is currently leading an ecological design, build, and education venture called SolutionCraft. (earthbench.org, solutioncraft.org)

Founder | Crescent Moon Theater Productions

Polina Smith is the founder of Crescent Moon Theater Productions and the art curator for the Bioneers Conference. She received her BFA in theater for social change from Concordia University in 2008 and her MFA at the California Institute of Integral Studies. In 2008, Polina moved to San Francisco to work with The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women under the mentorship of Rhodessa Jones and study clowning at the Circus Center’s Clown Conservatory. In 2014, Polina founded Crescent Moon Theater Productions to create socially relevant and thought provoking new work that spans across the disciplines of theater, dance, music and circus, as well as produce Blessed Unrest, an annual arts and social justice festival in San Francisco. Learn more at: www.crescentmoontheaterproductions.com

Yustina Salnikova and Joel Stockdill are dedicated to re-imagining our relationship to what we call 'waste'. They began collaborating around this common vision in 2016, together they have created over a dozen sculptures on four continents. They are current Guinness Record Holders for creating the World's largest recycled plastic sculpture, "Ethyl" a life sized blue whale.

Yustina Salnikova and Joel Stockdill are dedicated to re-imagining our relationship to what we call 'waste'. They began collaborating around this common vision in 2016, together they have created over a dozen sculptures on four continents. They are current Guinness Record Holders for creating the World's largest recycled plastic sculpture, "Ethyl" a life sized blue whale.

Indigenous Activist

Remy is a multidisciplinary indigenous activist and artist of many different media from the Black Mesa region on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. By utilizing art, activism and technology, his creations are rooted in his heritage and culture addressing social, environmental and political issues. Remy's work and installations can be seen in the streets, major news outlets, traveling in various exhibits and secured in many of the country’s finest evidence lockers, but not before making its statement to the public pushing the important role art plays within movements.

Founder | The Indigenous Youth Foundation

Monique Sol Sonoquie (Chumash, Apache, Yaqui, Zapotec, Irish) is a multi-faceted educator, artist, activist, author, founder of The Indigenous Youth Foundation, Inc., and a practitioner of Maori Healing techniques, to name only a few of her pursuits. A basket-weaver, documentary filmmaker, youth advocate, and traditional food and medicine gatherer, her most recent challenge is weaving with recycled materials, and she is showing her “Pre-Colonial Post-Industrial Village” art piece at Bioneers this year.