Thursday, March 26th
In a time of climate crisis, wars for oil, and rising authoritarianism threatening people and planet, we find hope in resistance and in solutions led by Indigenous peoples and local communities calling for phasing out fossil fuels and a just transition to local, clean and renewable energy. We are also encouraged by subnational and international commitments, including California’s investigation of its imports of oil from the Amazon and its plans to phase out its use of fossil fuel by 2045, as well as Colombia’s announcement during COP30 that it won’t license any new oil extraction. Colombia will, in fact, host the First International Conference for the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels this April together with the Netherlands and several other countries. In this session, some local, national and international leaders in the Just Transition Movement will delve into the challenges and opportunities and share their strategies. With: Michelle Chan, Co-Executive Director of Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN); Katie Valenzuela, CA Policy Consultant & former Sacramento City Council Member; Josh Becker, CA State Senator (D-13) and author of SR 51, a unanimously approved CA state resolution to review imports of crude oil from the Amazon rainforest and an eventual phase-out. Hosted by Leila Salazar-López, Executive Director of Amazon Watch.
March 26th | 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Panelists
Leila Salazar-López
Executive Director | Amazon Watch
Leila Salazar-López has worked for 25+ years to defend the world’s rainforests, human rights and climate through grassroots organizing and international advocacy campaigns. She has been the Executive Director of Amazon Watch since 2015, leading that organization’s work to protect and defend the bio-cultural and climate integrity of the Amazon rainforest in solidarity with Indigenous and forest peoples.
Michelle Chan
Co-Executive Director | Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN)
Michelle Chan is the Co- Executive Director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), a California-based environmental justice organization that builds the power of Asian immigrant and refugee communities and advances climate resilience, affordable housing and a just transition off fossil fuels. Prior to joining APEN, Michelle was the VP of Programs for Friends of the Earth (FOE) US, where she provided strategic leadership for campaigns on climate, energy, oceans, food and economic justice. Previously, she led FOE’s Economic Policy team, and campaigned to hold Wall Street accountable for its environmental impacts.
Katie Valenzuela
CA Policy Consultant
Katie Valenzuela, a policy consultant based in Sacramento, CA, has empowered communities, organizations, and coalitions to engage in state and local policy for 25+ years. She has built legislative campaigns for education justice, civil rights, food access, public safety, public health, housing access, and environmental justice. Katie’s experience includes serving as a member of the Sacramento City Council from December 2020 to 2024, as Policy and Political Director for the California Environmental Justice Alliance, as Principal Consultant for the California Legislature’s Joint Legislative Committee on Climate Change Policies, and as a founding board member of the Sacramento Community Land Trust. She has shared her expertise as an invited speaker and training session leader at major venues across the country.
Josh Becker
Senator | State of California
Senator Josh Becker, JD/MBA, a public policy innovator working at the nexus of community activism, technology and social justice, was elected to the California State Senate in 2020, representing the 13th District, which comprises most of San Mateo County and northern Santa Clara County. Among his many accomplishments, Josh worked with refugees in war-torn Central America in the 90s; later created Full Circle, a community leadership and policy innovation organization; served 7 years on the California State Workforce Development Board; was a founding trustee at UC Merced; co-founded New Cycle Capital, a pioneer in building socially responsible businesses; founded a legal tech accelerator to support innovative entrepreneurs in the public policy realm; and, while still a student, co-founded the Stanford Board Fellows program, which trains students to serve on the boards of local nonprofits. (sd13.senate.ca.gov)
Friday, March 27th
Kyle Trefny was 18 years old in 2020 when skies in the San Francisco Bay Area and much of the Pacific Coast turned orange with wildfire smoke. He will share how that moment led him to become a wildland firefighter and to join other youth in creating FireGeneration Collaborative (FireGen), dedicated to imagining and building a future beyond intense wildfires and their devastating health impacts, a future of healthy communities and livelihoods that recenters Indigenous leadership in land management. Kyle will reflect upon the power of questions, of friendship, of breaking negative cycles, of art, of mentors and elders, and of taking leaps of faith in life.
March 27th | 11:15 am to 11:23 am | Zellerbach Hall
Kyle Trefny
Co-Founder | FireGeneration Collaborative (FireGen)
Kyle Trefny is an organizer, artist, wildland firefighter, and co-founder of FireGeneration Collaborative (FireGen), which started out with a GoFundMe campaign and a petition and became a dynamic, influential youth-led organization that has helped bring about the historic involvement of firefighters and Indigenous fire management practitioners in governance processes and engaged hundreds of young people in fire research. A faculty research assistant at the University of Oregon’s Ecosystem Workforce Program, Kyle is also active in movements for Indigenous sovereignty, queer rights, and climate justice and was a recipient of a 2024 Brower Youth Award.
Outdoor learning and exposure to nature are not simply nice ideas: a cascade of physical, emotional and academic benefits accompany even basic outdoor activities such as recess. For purposefully built models of outdoor and experiential learning, the results are even greater. During the COVID-19 pandemic a long-simmering movement around green schoolyards and outdoor education went from niche to increasingly mainstream. Today, thousands of school districts are working to transform the modern schoolyard from a monoculture of lawns and asphalt to verdant and resilient environments. A movement that is both interdisciplinary and systemic, the goal is to leverage school communities, education systems and school properties in order to restore and regenerate urban ecological systems while transforming how students learn along the way. In this session, visionary movement leaders will share their insights and strategies as to how they are using nature-based solutions to build resilience and transform education. With: Sharon Gamson Danks, founder and CEO of Green Schoolyards America; Rosey A. Jencks, environmental planner and water management expert; Julia Gowin, Urban Forestry Supervisor at CAL FIRE.
March 27th | 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Panelists
Sharon Gamson Danks
Founder and CEO | Green Schoolyards America
Sharon Gamson Danks, MLA-MCP, an environmental city planner, social entrepreneur, and author, founded Green Schoolyards America in 2013 and is its CEO. She has been a leading figure in the “green schoolyard” field for 25+ years, helping build a movement to transform school grounds at scale into vibrant, nature-rich public spaces that engage the community and nurture children as they learn and play. Sharon is the author of Asphalt to Ecosystems and also co-founded the International School Grounds Alliance.
Rosey Jencks
Environmental Planner
Rosey A. Jencks, MLA/EP, an environmental planner with over two decades of experience, leads technical teams in developing community-centered programs and plans for stormwater, wastewater, flood resilience, and sea level rise. Rosey, who has helped numerous communities re-envision their future by integrating green and nature-based infrastructure, believes climate resilience requires a “one water” mindset, focusing on land management and balancing green and grey infrastructure.
Julia Gowin
Urban Forestry Supervisor | CAL FIRE
Julia Gowin, Ph.D., the Northern California Urban Forestry Supervisor for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), co-leads CAL FIRE’s Green Schoolyards Program. Julia is an International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) Certified Arborist, a California Registered Professional Forester, the incoming President for the Western Chapter of the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA), and a founding member of the California Schoolyard Forest System Initiative.
Although they receive less than 1% of climate funding, women-led climate justice grassroots projects around the world are generating cascading benefits, from greater gender and economic equity and less gender violence to improved biodiversity and ecosystems’ health. Simultaneously, the centrality to many Indigenous peoples’ cultures of traditional relationships to place and to honoring all of life as sacred are a tremendous resource in strengthening efforts to protect and renew biodiversity and water resources. Join an emergent conversation to explore what these two vastly under-resourced constituencies have to offer in the quest to co-create regenerative landscapes and futures. Hosted by Osprey Orielle Lake, founder and Executive Director of Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN). With: Zainab Salbi, co-founder of Daughters for Earth; Dilafruz Khonikboyeva, Executive Director of Home Planet Fund.
March 27th | 4:45 pm to 6:00 pm
Panelists
Dilafruz Khonikboyeva
Executive Director | Home Planet Fund
Dilafruz Khonikboyeva, of indigenous Pamiri ancestry from Khorog, Tajikistan, is the Inaugural Executive Director of Home Planet Fund. Previously a political appointee in the Biden-Harris Administration who spent five years with the Aga Khan Development Network and eight years responding to conflict and climate crises, she is a transformational conflict expert, focused on civil war, environment and resource conflicts. Dilafruz has also served on the board of her alma mater, the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University and led the Climate Change Working Group for Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security and Conflict Transformation (WCAPS).
Zainab Salbi
Co-Founder | Daughters for Earth
Zainab Salbi, a humanitarian, author, and media host who has dedicated her life to women’s rights and global freedom, is co-founder of Daughters for Earth, a philanthropic fund and a movement focused on supporting, celebrating, and mobilizing women to protect and restore our Earth. At age 23, she founded Women for Women International, which helped more than 460,000 women survivors of war rebuild their lives. Honored with the TIME100 Impact Award, she has been recognized by Oprah Winfrey, People, and Harper’s Bazaar for her groundbreaking leadership on behalf of women worldwide.
Osprey Orielle Lake
Founder and Executive Director | Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network
Osprey Orielle Lake, the founder and Executive Director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN), works internationally with grassroots, BIPOC and Indigenous leaders, policymakers, and diverse coalitions to build climate justice, resilient communities, and a just transition to a decentralized, democratized clean-energy future. Osprey, who sits on the executive committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature and on the steering committee for the Fossil Free Non-Proliferation Treaty, is the author of The Story is in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis.
Saturday, March 28th
3:00 pm: Water, Spirit, Power
Hosted by Taproot Earth
In this session Bioneers ally Taproot Earth, a global climate justice organization rooted in Louisiana, will bring together Indigenous women leaders from around the world to share their Earth-honoring perspectives and describe the extraordinary pilgrimage they undertook to gather waters from the Nile, Mississippi and Amazon rivers and return them to East Africa where the oldest human bones are found as a necessary spiritual component of their climate justice, Indigenous sovereignty and Black liberation struggles. Hosted by Colette Pichon Battle, Esq., Taproot Earth. With: Phoenix Rose, Ifa spiritual leader from Louisiana; others TBA.
March 28th | 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Panelists
Colette Pichon Battle
Co-Founder | Taproot Earth
Colette Pichon Battle, a generational native of Bayou Liberty, Louisiana, is an award-winning lawyer and prominent climate justice organizer. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when Black and Indigenous communities were largely left out of federal recovery systems, Colette led the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy (GCCLP) to provide relief and legal assistance to Gulf South communities of color. After 17 years at GCCLP’s helm, as frontline communities from the Gulf South to the Global South face ever more devastating storms, droughts, wildfires, heat, and land loss, she co-founded Taproot Earth to create connections and power across issues, movements, and geographies.
Phoenix Rose
Ifa spiritual leader
Bio coming soon.
This session will be facilitated by Brett KenCairn, founding Director of the Center for Regenerative Solutions and Senior Policy Advisor for Climate and Resilience in the City of Boulder’s Climate Initiatives Team. We will gather those working in a wide range of ways to design and implement Nature-based Solutions towards solving critical problems.
March 28th | 4:45 pm to 6:00 pm | Ashby Room, Residence Inn
Panelists
Brett KenCairn
Founding Director | Center for Regenerative Solutions
Brett KenCairn, founding Director of the Center for Regenerative Solutions and Senior Division Manager for Nature-based Climate Solutions for the City of Boulder’s Climate Initiatives Department, has throughout his career supported community-based initiatives across the western U.S., particularly in rural, Native American, and other marginalized communities. He also co-founded several organizations, including: the Rogue River Institute for Ecology and Economy; Indigenous Community Enterprises; Veterans Green Jobs; and Community Energy Systems.
