Founding Director | Ancestral Guard

Sammy Gensaw III is a leader in environmental and cultural preservation in his Yurok community. Director of the Ancestral Guard, a nonprofit focused on teaching traditional fishing and farming methods to Indigenous youth, his approach is deeply rooted in food sovereignty, cultural preservation, community resilience, and self-sufficiency. Gensaw's activist journey began in his early teens with the Klamath Justice Coalition, the largest dam removal and river restoration project in history, and his contributions to restoring Native American foodways are featured in the documentary film, Gather.

Co-Creator & Stewardship Lead | The Shelterwood Collective

Nikola Alexandre, Co-Creator & Stewardship Lead of the Shelterwood Collective, is a Black queer forester with MA degrees in both Forestry and Business Administration from Yale who founded Conservation International’s Ecosystem Restoration Program. After attending a nature-based healing gathering following the Pulse massacre, Nikola committed his life to tending the earth and reclaiming land stewardship as a way of nurturing a future for the communities he belongs to, which led to his co-founding the Shelterwood Collective in Sonoma County.

Co-Founder | Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education

David Hage is co-founder of the Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education and a member of the Teaching Team for Weaving Earth’s adult programs. He has been facilitating circles for youth and adults since 2006 and is passionate about serving others in deepening their own relationship to self, to others, and to place.

Founder | Unity Through Creativity Foundation

Laurie Marshall is an author, artist and innovator with 40+ years’ experience empowering youth and adults through creative collaboration with her “Peace Building through Art inspired by Nature” approach. A visionary educator, she has served mostly low-income children, families and their schools as an Arts Integration and Project Based Learning specialist. Founder of Unity Through Creativity Foundation and the Singing Tree Project, Laurie is a certified K-12 Art and Social Studies Teacher with training in the Waldorf Curriculum, Conversational Intelligence, Peace Literacy and Outward Bound. Her many clients have included NASA, FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Interior, the U.S. Botanical Gardens, and many public schools, hospitals and prisons around the country, and, every year for much of the last two decades, Laurie has facilitated and exhibited Singing Tree murals at Bioneers.

Counselor | Concordia Language Village in Minnesota

Fernanda Lugo, a transdisciplinary scholar/activist with backgrounds in bio-behavioral health and environmental sciences, serves on the board of Eco El Paso and works with Citizens Climate Lobby, Move to Amend, and The Alliance for Just Money. Fernanda’s activism includes working on ecological health, land restoration, soil remediation, livable wages, healthcare, and dignified work for all. She also serves as a counselor for Concordia Language Village in Minnesota and is currently training to be Singing Tree Mural Facilitator, working on “The Singing Tree of a Just and Democratic Economy.”

Certified Facilitator | Singing Tree Project

Leslie Rein, a mental health counselor early in her career, became the head of a large, multi-level department in a Bay Area government agency but has focused since 2017 on visual art, a process which she describes as “a creative soul awakening.” She is a certified Singing Tree Project facilitator and is passionately committed to that approach to collaboration and “peace-building through process” to bring people together, heal common heartbreaks, rebuild trust, strengthen respect, practice acceptance, and cultivate love.  Leslie has facilitated five Singing Tree Murals.

Action Lead Program Manager | Narrative Initiative

Orion Camero, a Filipinx queer visual storytelling educator and cultural organizer, is the Action Lead Program Manager for Narrative Initiative, a story-based social change organization focused on maximizing opportunities to nourish and grow narrative power, equip narrative changemakers, and bond communities to pursue long-term progress for social justice. Orion additionally stewards the California Allegory, an epic collaborative image that acts as a centerpiece for intersectional justice education and cross-movement pollination.

Producer | Weaving Spirits Festival of Two-Spirit Performance

Javier Stell-Frésquez (Piru & Tigua Pueblo ancestry, Mixed Chican@) serves Indigenous communities of the San Francisco (Yelamu) Bay. Many years volunteering on the BAAITS Two-Spirits Powwow Committee have lead to her producing Weaving Spirits Festival of Two-Spirit Performance. She has life-long dance and performance experience and a B.S. in Environmental Studies. Recent multimedia performance work includes the touring show and short film Mother / Forgotten Blaze, and Chaac & Yum, a short two-spirit art film currently showing in film festivals internationally.

Action Lead Program Manager | Narrative Initiative

Orion Camero, a Filipinx queer visual storytelling educator and cultural organizer, is the Action Lead Program Manager for Narrative Initiative, a story-based social change organization focused on maximizing opportunities to nourish and grow narrative power, equip narrative changemakers, and bond communities to pursue long-term progress for social justice. Orion additionally stewards the California Allegory, an epic collaborative image that acts as a centerpiece for intersectional justice education and cross-movement pollination.

Transdisciplinary Artist

Ruby Kaur, a South Asian/Panjabi transdisciplinary artist, land-tender/defender and healer works at the intersections of ecology, community and wellness, exploring how somatic (re)connection to nature is essential to personal and collective well-being. Ruby is rooted in a practice of seva (selfless service) to community, ancestors, and land.

Documentary Filmmaker

Owen Dubeck is a Santa Monica, CA-based avid surfer and documentary filmmaker whose films have raised $1 million+ for social causes, influenced legislation and been screened to audiences across the country. His films include: Free to Care (Audience Award at Austin Film Festival), Paperboy Love Prince Runs for Mayor and, most recently, Abundance. In the early days of the pandemic, Owen helped found and lead an initiative called The Farmlink Project that scaled from a tiny non-profit of college students into a nationally recognized movement that has delivered over 80 million meals.

Founder and Executive Director | Sustainable & Just Future

Sage Lenier is an activist working to build an education system that enables the next generation to become climate solutionists. She got her start teaching her own program at UC Berkeley, which broke records for largest-ever student-led class. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The World Economic Forum, and Teen Vogue, and has brought her to speak at public forums around the world. TIME Magazine named her a 2023 Next Generation Leader for her work with Sustainable & Just Future.

Climate Justice Organizer | Youth Vs. Apocalypse (YVA) CalSTRS Divest Campaign

Zara Ahsan, a 17-year-old climate justice organizer based in Oakland, CA, is one of the leaders of the Youth Vs. Apocalypse (YVA) CalSTRS Divest campaign. She is working across communities and generations to advocate that CalSTRS, the pension system for all California public teachers, pull the billions of dollars it currently invests in fossil fuel companies. Zara is very involved in legislative work, specifically working on SB252, a CA Senate Bill designed to ensure that divestment.

Lead Circle Member | Youth Vs. Apocalypse (YVA)

Aniya Butler, 16, an Oakland-based spoken word poet and performer, is a Climate and Social Justice activist who is a Lead Circle member of Youth Vs. Apocalypse (YVA), where she coordinates its Hip Hop & Climate Justice initiative and serves on the group’s management team.

Founder and Executive Director | Sustainable & Just Future

Sage Lenier is an activist working to build an education system that enables the next generation to become climate solutionists. She got her start teaching her own program at UC Berkeley, which broke records for largest-ever student-led class. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The World Economic Forum, and Teen Vogue, and has brought her to speak at public forums around the world. TIME Magazine named her a 2023 Next Generation Leader for her work with Sustainable & Just Future.

Co-Founder | Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education

David Hage is co-founder of the Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education and a member of the Teaching Team for Weaving Earth’s adult programs. He has been facilitating circles for youth and adults since 2006 and is passionate about serving others in deepening their own relationship to self, to others, and to place.

Author

Hilary Giovale, descended from Celtic, Germanic, Nordic, and Indigenous peoples of ancient Europe, describes herself as a “ninth-generation settler” and “reparationist” who seeks to “divest from whiteness” and follow Indigenous and Black leadership in support of human rights, environmental justice and equitable futures. She is the author of Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing, and Repair.

Living Pantry Coordinator | The Butterfly Movement

Lauren Gucik, a holistic educator and event coordinator currently coordinating The Living Pantry with the Butterfly Movement, is passionate about growing food sovereignty and restoring cultural and ancestral food ways. Lauren says that she “is dedicated to the personal and collective work white people must do to dismantle and unlearn whiteness and birth better relationships with the Earth and all People.”

Co-National Director | The Butterfly Movement

Brandi Mack, Director of Community Engagement with Designing Justice+Designing Spaces (an Oakland-based architecture and real estate development non-profit working to end mass incarceration), Co-National Director for The Butterfly Movement (dedicated to providing personal/professional development for black women and girls), and on the faculty of Biomimicry for Social Innovation’s “Living Systems Leadership” retreat for women, is also a holistic health educator, therapeutic massage therapist, permaculture designer, living systems thought leader, and mother of three daughters.

| The Butterfly Movement

Minkah Taharkah, a Leimert Park/Los Angeles-based self-described “earth steward, multiplicitous artist and intuitive healer,” works with the California Farmer Justice Collaborative on network building, resource sharing, and overall support for new and established BIPOC farmers. Minkah also works with The Butterfly Movement, an enterprise dedicated to empowering Black women and girls through comprehensive pathways of personal development, fostering entrepreneurship via small business incubation, and advocating for social equity and justice.

Community Organizer | Hummingbird Farm Collective

Alondra Aragon, a community organizer since she was 15, has dedicated more than a decade working with environmental and youth justice movements. As a member of the Hummingbird Farm collective, she seeks to: create a space for the community to reconnect with the land and traditional local ecological knowledge; move toward a just transition by growing healthy food, restoring local ecosystems, practicing herbal healing, and providing job training; and build alternative community governance structures.

Engineer, Scientist and Linguistics Researcher | Acnestis By Wind

Charlotte Lenore Michaluk, 17, is a brilliant young, award-winning, multi-disciplinary engineer, scientist and linguistics researcher, passionate about engineering sustainable solutions. Her development of technology for a hybrid wind and fossil fuel powered cargo ship has been widely recognized. Charlotte, who has been certified in freshwater bioassessment for over a decade (!), has been collecting and analyzing field data working with her state’s EPA to preserve ecologically critical wetlands and wildlife corridors in Central New Jersey. Through her organization, Acnestis By Wind, she has been researching using wind power to clean remote shorelines, developing curricula, and protecting wetlands.

The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company (DAYPC) is a diverse group of teens that collaborates with professional artists to create dynamic, original productions. Combining hip hop, modern and aerial dance, theater, song, and rap, company members take the stage to tell stories that stem from their lived experiences and express their visions for a world transformed. Since 1993, DAYPC has performed original work for up to 25,000 audience members annually, garnering critical acclaim and widespread community support for both their technical prowess and their commitment to advancing inclusivity, equity, and justice.

Adjunct Professor in Indigenous Studies | UBC Okanagan

Marlowe Sam (sc̓waʔnytəm), Ph.D., a Wenatchi/Lakes descendant from the Colville Confederated Tribes of Washington State (CCT), is an adjunct professor in Indigenous Studies at UBC Okanagan, a lecturer in the En’owkin Center/Selkirk College Syilx Studies Program, and an expert on Indigenous water rights in Canada as well as in traditional Syilx governance. He is also a traditional harvester and hunter who mentors his grandchildren, seeking to pass on Syilx ways on the land.

Co-Founder | Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education

David Hage is co-founder of the Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education and a member of the Teaching Team for Weaving Earth’s adult programs. He has been facilitating circles for youth and adults since 2006 and is passionate about serving others in deepening their own relationship to self, to others, and to place.

Member | SPOKES

Rose America Garcia, a 17-year-old Nicaraguan-American poet from San Leandro, California, was one of the founders of her school’s poetry club and was recognized as a 2023 Alameda County Youth Poet Laureate Finalist. Rose is a member of SPOKES, a Bay Area cohort of youth leaders and creators affiliated with the San Francisco-based organization, Youth Speaks.

Student | Las Positas Community College

Vivian Owens, 18, in her first year at Las Positas Community College, is a young aspiring artist, actor, fiction writer and poet.

Founder | Unity Through Creativity Foundation

Laurie Marshall is an author, artist and innovator with 40+ years’ experience empowering youth and adults through creative collaboration with her “Peace Building through Art inspired by Nature” approach. A visionary educator, she has served mostly low-income children, families and their schools as an Arts Integration and Project Based Learning specialist. Founder of Unity Through Creativity Foundation and the Singing Tree Project, Laurie is a certified K-12 Art and Social Studies Teacher with training in the Waldorf Curriculum, Conversational Intelligence, Peace Literacy and Outward Bound. Her many clients have included NASA, FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Interior, the U.S. Botanical Gardens, and many public schools, hospitals and prisons around the country, and, every year for much of the last two decades, Laurie has facilitated and exhibited Singing Tree murals at Bioneers.

Certified Facilitator | Singing Tree Project

Leslie Rein, a mental health counselor early in her career, became the head of a large, multi-level department in a Bay Area government agency but has focused since 2017 on visual art, a process which she describes as “a creative soul awakening.” She is a certified Singing Tree Project facilitator and is passionately committed to that approach to collaboration and “peace-building through process” to bring people together, heal common heartbreaks, rebuild trust, strengthen respect, practice acceptance, and cultivate love.  Leslie has facilitated five Singing Tree Murals.

Counselor | Concordia Language Village in Minnesota

Fernanda Lugo, a transdisciplinary scholar/activist with backgrounds in bio-behavioral health and environmental sciences, serves on the board of Eco El Paso and works with Citizens Climate Lobby, Move to Amend, and The Alliance for Just Money. Fernanda’s activism includes working on ecological health, land restoration, soil remediation, livable wages, healthcare, and dignified work for all. She also serves as a counselor for Concordia Language Village in Minnesota and is currently training to be Singing Tree Mural Facilitator, working on “The Singing Tree of a Just and Democratic Economy.”

Bio coming soon.