TEAM
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Shawn Stevens is an enrolled member of the Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohicans, whose ancestral homelands are the Berkshires, including the entire Hudson Valley.
Shawn is a Mohican cultural educator, artist, musician, and ceremonial helper, who has been speaking and teaching in the Berkshires for the last twenty years.
Apart from his beautiful artwork, which can be found in all 50 states and 14 countries, he is also a traditional storyteller, drummer, dancer, singer, flute player, as well as an ordained minister of the Universal Church of Light and a certified facilitator of White Bison’s Mending Broken Hearts.
Cheryl Demmert Fairbanks, Esq. supports AVF through a collaboration with the Life Comes From It Foundation. She is Tlingit-Tsimshian and was born in Ketchikan, Alaska.
Cheryl works in the area of Indian law as an attorney and tribal court of appeals justice. Currently she is the Interim Executive Director of the UNM Native American Budget and Policy Institute. She recently was in Oregon serving as the Walter R. Echo-Hawk Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Lewis and Clark; and also she was a visiting Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico’s Southwest Indian Law Clinic. Formerly a Partner at Cuddy McCarthy LLP, she had a general practice in Indian law, including tribal-state relations, personnel, tribal courts, peacemaking and family conferencing, mediation, family, school, education, and indigenous law.
Kristine Marie Hill is a member of the Beaver Clan, Tuscarora nation, Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
As part of her lineage within the Confederacy, she takes her responsibility of peacekeeping and respecting the land and waterways of her peoples seriously. She has been practicing indigenous peacekeeping for over 25 years in the context of the educational and familial systems of her home community on the Tuscarora reservation, serving the next generation’s re-acquisition of their language, traditions, and ceremonies. She is the proud mother of four adult children and six grandchildren, several of whom are speaking the Tuscarora language that her grandmother was forced to forget in the Carlisle boarding school. After over 20 years working in K-12 education systems as an educator, an accountant and auditor, in the past two years, she has followed openings to share practices of peacekeeping beyond her home community and into the larger historical waterways of the Haudenosaunee and beyond.
Sara Jolena Wolcott, M.Div, is a descendent of some of Founding Fathers of the United States of America.
She is now building people's capacity to collectively reMember our ecological familial, national and global origin stories to enable more harmonious futures. An ecotheologian and unconventional minister, she is the founder of Sequoia Samanvaya, a healer, a ceremonialist, and a Legacy Advisor with Innovation 4.4. Her formal education includes an MA in international development from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, UK; and a Masters of Divinity (M.Div.) at Union Theological Seminary. Her international speaking engagements have brought her to 10 countries and she has spoken in over 16 U.S. states. She currently lives on the historical homeland of the Mohigan/Mahican people in the Hudson Valley.
Lev Natan, is the Executive Director & Founder of the Alliance for a Viable Future (AVF).
He is a proud husband and father, and lives with his family in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. Since 2010, Lev has been catalyzing breakthroughs for changemakers, as a leadership coach, organizational consultant, men’s group facilitator, & sound healer.
He founded AVF in 2018 as the core focus of completing an MA in Organizational Leadership. Lev is also certified as an Integrative Sound and Music Practitioner and Empowerment Life Coach.
Lev was raised in the Jewish tradition; his ancestors come from Kiev & Odesa in the Ukraine; and he sustains his connection to the lineage of Kabbalah, Chasidut and Jewish mysticism.
He was ordained to pour sweat lodge in the Southern Ute tradition of his adopted grandfather, s Jake Singer, who is a Sundance Chief. Lev also vision quests every year, and is a Sundancer and pipe-carrier in the Lakota tradition.
SPIRITUAL ADVISOR
Chief Jake Singer serves as the Alliance for a Viable Future’s Spiritual Advisor and sits on the Northeast Indigenous Climate Council.
Chief Singer is a Dine Navajo Medicine Man, Sun Dance Chief, Ceremonial Leader and decorated Vietnam Veteran. He conducts many traditional ceremonies for his community and has been working for twenty-plus years on bringing awareness to support Native American Veterans, as the Commander of Walk with the Warriors, an advocacy and education organization for Native American Veterans. In that role, he walked across the entire continental United States and has held traditional ceremonies in Washington DC to bring awareness to this issue.
He helped to introduce a Bill into the House of Representatives, proposed by the first Native American Secretary of the Interior, Deb Holland, to officially establish November 7th as a Federally-recognized Native American Veteran’s Day holiday.
Chief Singer has been conducting ceremonial prayers for AVF and it’s Executive Director and Founder, Lev Natan, for the last ten years. He adopted Lev as his grandson, sponsored him as a Sundancer, and ordained him to pour the ceremonial sweat lodge.
RIGHTS OF NATURE LEGAL ADVISOR
Thomas Linzey serves as Senior Legal Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights. He is the co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, and is widely recognized as the founder of the contemporary “community rights” movement which has resulted in the adoption of hundreds of municipal laws across the United States. He also sits on the Board of Advisors of the New Earth Foundation.
Linzey is a graduate of Widener Law School and a three-time recipient of the law school’s public interest law award. He has been a finalist for the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award, and is a recipient of the Pennsylvania Farmers Union’s Golden Triangle Legislative Award. He is licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania, and is admitted to practice in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Third, Fourth, Eighth, and Tenth Circuit Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. District Court for the Western and Middle Districts of Pennsylvania.
Linzey is the author of Be The Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community (Gibbs-Smith 2009), the author of On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability (PM Press 2016), and the co-author of We the People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States (PM Press 2016). He was a co-host of Democracy Matters, a syndicated public affairs radio show broadcast from KYRS in Spokane, Washington. He was featured in Leonardo DiCaprio and Tree Media’s film 11th Hour and We the People 2.0 (Official Selection of the Seattle International Film Festival), assisted the Ecuadorian constitutional assembly in 2008 to adopt the world’s first constitution recognizing the independently enforceable Rights of Nature, and is a frequent lecturer at conferences across the country.
Linzey’s work has been featured widely, including in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, and the Nation magazine. In 2007, he was named one of Forbes Magazine’s “Top Ten Revolutionaries,” and he was named one of the top 400 environmentalists of the last 200 years in the two-volume encyclopedia, American Environmental Leaders (3rd Ed. Grey House Publishing 2018). He is currently working on a new book, “Modern American Democracy (and other fairy tales)” (forthcoming, Spring 2021).
NORTHEAST INDIGENOUS CLIMATE COUNCIL MEMBERS
Grandmother Margaret Behan sits on AVF’s Northeast Indigenous Climate Council. She is a Native American woman—Southern Arapaho-Cheyenne on her mother’s side and Northern Arapahoe/Northern Cheyenne on her father’s side—and a fourth generation descendant of an ancestor who was a survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre. Behan is the founder of the Cheyenne Elders Council, a group of native healers and teachers, and a former member of the International Council of 13 Grandmothers.
The Honorable Robert Yazzie, Esq. sits on AVF’s Northeast Indigenous Climate Council and supports AVF through a collaboration with the Life Comes From It Foundation. He served as the Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation from 1992 through 2003. He practiced law in the Navajo Nation for 16 years, and was a district judge for eight years. He is now teaching Navajo Law at the Navajo Technical University. He was the Director of the Diné Policy Institute of Diné College (Navajo Nation), developing policy using authentic Navajo thinking. He is the author of articles and book chapters on many subjects, including Navajo peacemaking, traditional Indian law, and international human rights law. He is a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law, an adjunct professor of the Department of Criminal Justice of Northern Arizona University and a visiting member of the faculty of the National Judicial College. He recently taught Navajo law at the Crownpoint Institute of Technology. Chief Justice Yazzie continues a career devoted to education in formal participation in faculties, lectures and discussions of traditional indigenous law at various venues throughout the world. He has a global audience and he has frequently visited foreign lands to share his wisdom about traditional indigenous justice and governance.
Michael Johnson is a seasoned peace builder who draws on many years as a yoga practitioner for inspiration and inner tranquility. He has inspired people to take positive actions for peace through his writing, personal coaching, public speaking, documentaries, national and local media interviews and community events.
For many decades, Michael has used his creative talents to create documentaries on social issues and global peace initiatives, including the United Nations International Day of Peace
MOHICAN ANCESTRAL HEALING FELLOWSHIP - 2023
Wanonah Spencer, member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohicans
Wanonah is receiving this Six-Month Fellowship to deepen her relationship with The Berkshires - her ancestral homeland. She lives on the Mohican Reservation in Wisconsin, and traveled to the Berkshires with her brother, Shawn Stevens, and daughter, Gracie, in April 2023.
The Fellowship is building her leadership skills so she can achieve her mission of establishing Mohican Roots: Alliance for a Viable Future, a sister organization to AVF, dedicated to cultural revitalization and climate education on her reservation in Wisconsin. Her Fellowship will include work in our key programs - Indigenous Peoples’ Day Weekend and the Berkshires Climate Leadership Collaborative.
STAFF & CONSULTANTS
Michael Foster, Ed.D., M.P.H. - Evaluation Specialist
Dedicated to advancing equity through empowerment evaluation, throughout his career, Michael Foster, Ed.D., M.P.H., has worked on efforts to empower individuals from marginalized communities. He has worked for more than a decade as a consultant at the Leadership Institute at the Santa Fe Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The overarching goal of the Leadership Institute is to build leadership capacity within and across Native American communities throughout New Mexico. Through this work, Dr. Foster has contributed his expertise in program evaluation and curriculum development.
Ana Puente Flores, Legal Support
Ana is from Mexico City. She came to NY in 2015 for her undergraduate studies at the City College of New York. There, she was a Skadden Arps Legal Honors Program fellow and a Beyond Identity scholar-activist.
As Institutional Development and Research Director at the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative (PSVI), she researched femicide in Mexico City, as well as gender violence in post-war contexts in Southeast Asia. She helped build and found the program Beyond Identity: A Political Platform for Scholar-Activists.
In the summer of 2018–during the beginning of the family separation policy–she was a legal intern at the Dilley Pro Bono Project. There, she prepared detained families seeking asylum for their credible-fear interviews. She also led narrative practice workshops with immigrant youth in detention.
As a paralegal at KIND NY’s Detained Team, she created the first culturally relevant Know-Your-Rights training for tender-age children.
She is currently a 2L at CUNY School of Law. With a fellowship from the Sorensen Center for International Peace and Justice, she worked for the organization Lakota Peoples Law Project and helped write an amicus brief in support of ICWA for the case Brackeen v. Haaland in the Supreme Court.
During the summer of 2023, she is interning with elders Justice Cheryl Fairbanks and Chief Justice Robert Yazzie about Indigenous Peacemaking. In her organizing work, she seeks to open up a path for alternative spaces of care, mutual aid, collective storytelling, and cultural revival. Her political energy is geared toward migrant and indigenous folks fighting and thriving for the land, waters, and seeds. With her family, she stewards a community garden where they plant tobacco, maíz, and other plant medicines. Through this work, she seeks to reweave the present human dynamics towards sustainability, memory, collectivity, and balance.
Daniel Roth, Leadership & Strategy
Jumpscale Consultancy
Daniel is an experienced social entrepreneur, movement strategist, and integrative healthcare professional focused on sustainable development, indigenous cultural revitalization, and healing arts. Over the last two decades, he has launched over a dozen non-profit organizations, campaigns, and coalitions. Prior, he served as Director of the Cornell Campus Sustainability Office, started New York's first car-share business, and served as a Board Member of the U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development. As a healthcare professional he brings together acupressure, Ayurveda, somatic movement therapy, and massage therapy. He has provided therapeutic services to uninsured clients at the Ithaca Free Clinic and served as a faculty member at the Finger Lakes School of Massage.
Diana Chaplin - Communications Specialist
Diana brings over 15 years of experience in marketing and communications strategy in both nonprofit and startup organizations with a distinct passion for sustainability, regenerative leadership, and storytelling. Most notably her recent experience includes being the Marketing Director at global reforestation nonprofit One Tree Planted, establishing the organization as a media-savvy environmental brand and growing a robust internal team as the organization funded the planting of over 40 million trees. She oversaw content throughout all web, email, social media, and custom distribution channels, and developed key marketing and communication strategies across audiences that range from one-time donors to large-scale businesses seeking to fulfill sustainability goals. In addition to marketing, Diana's experience includes fundraising, publishing, wellness, and leadership development through the lens of emotional intelligence after working directly with bestselling author and executive leadership expert Daniel Goleman. Through her work, Diana seeks to develop and promote restorative leadership competencies that can lead to a more conscious, connected, and sustainable world.
Emily Costello - Social Media Manager & Content Creator
Emily brings a passion for sustainability and making the world a better place to every aspect of her work. Her most recent experience includes working with thought-leaders and companies advocating for diversity and ESG standards in the communications and consumer packaged goods industries where she designed social media strategies and creative photos and videos in addition to handling all community management to foster support around the brands' mission. Social media is just one of her many interests as a jack-of-all-trades that loves ecology, mycology, volunteering, mental wellness, art, photography, music, and anything science-fiction related. Above all, Emily believes in creating safe spaces for all to collaborate and be their authentic self.
Yonah Sadeh - Video Work, Podcast Production | yonahsadeh@gmail.com
Ryan Nelling - Photography | ryan.m.nelling@gmail.com
Dawn Kasper - Photography & Video Editing | dawnkasper@gmail.com