Board of Directors
Hal Colston
Hal Colston’s lifelong interests of social justice and entrepreneurship have been blended in his career path. For seventeen years he worked in Philadelphia as a manager and a chef, relocating to Vermont to teach at the New England Culinary Institute. Transitioning from food service to social services began with Chittenden Community Action. Joining Lutheran Social Services in 1996, Hal founded the Good News Garage program, to create transportation equity for people in economically distressed communities. Good News Garage has become a national model with locations in several other states. Hal launched NeighborKeepers in January 2006, an inclusive community empowering families to create a sustainable path to adequate resources. In January 2011 Hal was appointed by Governor Peter Shumlin as Executive Director of the Vermont Commission on National and Community Service now renamed SerVermont.
Carolyn Finney
Carolyn Finney was born in New York and grew up on an estate where her father was the caretaker and her mother the housekeeper. Though the land was not their own (her family resided in the gardener’s cottage), her parents poured their love into the land. Staying close to her roots, Carolyn pursed an acting career for eleven years, both in New York and Los Angeles. But a backpacking trip around the world in 1987 changed the course of her life. She spent the next five years traveling and living in Africa and Nepal, respectively. Motivated by these experiences, Carolyn returned to school in 1994 to complete her undergraduate degree, focusing on women and development in Kenya. She then pursued a Masters degree in international development, investigating women’s participation in community forestry management in Nepal. She recently completed her Ph.D. in geography at Clark University in Massachusetts. As a Canon National Parks Science Scholarship recipient, she focused her dissertation research on cultural and environmental encounters in the U.S, highlighting how they are gendered and racialized. In particular, her research seeks to broaden our understanding of African Americans and environment interactions by exploring how the attitudes and beliefs of African Americans are influenced by racialized constructions and representations, informing how African Americans participate in the use of national forests and parks. She is currently a Newhouse/Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Wellesley College in Massachusetts in Environmental Studies and Humanities. She began her position as Assistant Professor in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley in July 2007. The journey continues!
David Grant
David Grant has dedicated his life to the twin themes of Creativity and Sustainability, and he believes that people and organizations are at their best when they are learning and striving in that context. He and his wife Nancy founded and co-directed for eleven years The Mountain School in Vershire, VT, which set the pattern and the standard for seven other semester-long programs around the country. For twelve years he served as President and CEO of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, in Morristown, NJ, which was also known for its innovative programs, notably the largest Poetry Festival in North America every two years and a Capacity Building initiative that provided nonprofit leaders with a series of workshops and seminars to help them build healthy organizations and achieve their missions over time. Himself a scholar and teacher of Mark Twain, David has taken his one-man show as Mark Twain around the world. Currently living in Strafford, Vermont, David consults with foundations, nonprofits, schools, and businesses with a social mission. He is the proud father of Ben, a global sustainability consultant based in New York, and Rob, an actor currently in the MFA program at Yale School of Drama.
Polly Hoppin
Polly Hoppin is on the faculty of the Department of Work Environment at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and leads the environmental health program at the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production. She has been a community organizer (on toxics issues); founded the World Wildlife Fund’s U.S. work on pollution prevention in agriculture, and held senior positions at the EPA and Dept. of Health and Human Services.
Over the years, Polly’s work has focused on developing and promoting solutions to health problems associated with environmental exposures. She has been instrumental in refining and promoting concepts in environmental and health policy that now have wide currency, including pesticide reduction and investments by third party payers in environmental interventions for asthma. Polly believes that health and well-being depend on healthy social and environmental conditions, and on reducing disparities. Consequently, she now spends much of her time identifying strategic opportunities to address social and environmental factors in health and to promote sustainable production and consumption. Her favorite work is analyzing the broad systems contributing to current problems, and facilitating policy and program decision-making by leaders from a range of kinds of organizations, including community-based groups, government agencies and health care institutions, to meet health and environmental goals. Polly lives an urban neighborhood in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, with her husband and two daughters.
Melissa Nelson
Melissa K. Nelson is a cultural ecologist, writer, media-maker and indigenous scholar-activist. She is an associate professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University and executive director of the Cultural Conservancy, an indigenous rights organization, which she has directed since 1993. Her work is dedicated to indigenous revitalization, environmental restoration, intercultural understanding, and the renewal and celebration of community health and cultural arts. She received her B.A. degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, both in the field of Ecology with an emphasis in Native American Studies.
Melissa publishes essays in academic and popular journals and books. Her first edited anthology, Original Instructions – Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future (2008), focuses on the persistence of traditional ecological knowledge by contemporary Native communities. In 2005 Melissa was the co-producer of the award-winning documentary film, The Salt Song Trail: Bringing Creation Back Together. She also serves on the board of directors of the Collective Heritage Institute/Bioneers and is an advisory board member of the Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies. In 2010–2011 she is the Anne Ray Resident Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Sante Fe, where she is writing a book about cultural revitalization and the Salt Song Trail Project. Melissa is Anishinaabe/Métis/Norwegian and an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.
Kesha Ram
Kesha Ram is currently the youngest member of the Vermont Legislature and the youngest state legislator in the nation. She is a strong voice for empowering marginalized communities, creating affordable housing, advancing environmental justice, and promoting a just and sustainable economy. Outside of her legislative duties, Kesha is a legal advocate for victims of domestic violence at Women Helping Battered Women in Chittenden County. She is also a member of the Burlington Environment and Energy Coordinating Committee and Climate Action Plan Policy Team. Kesha graduated from the University of Vermont with dual degrees in Natural Resource Planning and Political Science in 2008. Her achievements have earned her recognition as a Morris K. Udall Scholar, Ronald E. McNair Scholar, Harry S. Truman Scholar, and Oxfam Sister on the Planet.
Lauret Savoy
Lauret Savoy writes across threads of cultural identity to explore their shaping by relationship with and dislocation from the land. Her goal is to produce multiple narratives of such connections and edges from stories we tell of land, its origin and history, to stories we tell of ourselves in the land and of relational identity. A woman of mixed African-American, Native American, and Euro-American heritage, a photographer, and professor of geology and environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, she co-edited The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (Milkweed Editions 2002) with Alison Deming. Savoy has edited, with Eldridge and Judy Moores, the anthology Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology (Trinity University Press, 2006, under poet-publisher Barbara Ras). In fall 2005, she became the director of Mount Holyoke College’s Center for the Environment.
Tom Wessels, Chair
Tom Wessels is a professor of ecology at Antioch University New England where he was the founding director of the masters degree program in Conservation Biology. Tom considers himself a generalist with interests in forest, desert, and alpine ecosystems and the interface of culture and landscape. He is former chair of the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation which fosters environmental leadership through graduate fellowships and organizational grants. Tom is an ecological consultant to the Rain Forest Alliance's SmartWood Green Certification program where he helped draft green certification assessment guidelines for forest operations in the northeastern states and adjacent Canada. His books include: Reading the Forested Landscape, The Granite Landscape, Untamed Vermont, and The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future.