Lisa Brush – CEO & Founder
Lisa Brush has been leading collaborative conservation initiatives in the environmental sector for over two decades. In her role as CEO and Founder of the award-winning Stewardship Network she has engaged thousands of professionals and volunteers in identifying community and conservation needs of the 21st century and determining strategic support The Network can provide. She has been involved in all aspects of organizational management including foundation/agency relationships; grant based project funding; budget tracking; contract negotiation, implementation, accountability; and staff and board development. Lisa has facilitated strategic planning sessions, focus groups, citizen task forces, community visioning sessions, and public involvement and feedback meetings with groups ranging in size from four to four hundred. Lisa serves on numerous boards of directors, has a BA in Science in Society from Wesleyan University, an MS from University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment, and is a graduate of Michigan State University’s Great Lakes Leadership Academy.
Rachel Muelle – Program Manager
rmuelle@stewardshipnetwork.org
Rachel joined the team in 2016 and she manages a number of TSN’s programs and grant projects. She earned a MS from the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment in Sustainable Systems, and a BS in Environmental Studies and Agriscience from Michigan State University. Rachel has worked on a diverse set of ecological and conservation projects, including neotropical bee habitat in Nicaragua, endangered mountain gorilla behavior in Uganda, and collaborative group function across North America. Rachel is passionate about biodiversity preservation, systems analysis, and hiking.
Rob Luzynski – Network Administrator
Rob joined the team in late 2017 after a few years of working with Lisa unofficially as a mentee and supporter of the Network. He earned his Bachelors of Science degree in Environmental Science with a concentration in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan’s Program in the Environment, where he was awarded outstanding student in his major in 2016. His interests in communications and the arts coupled with his sense of environmental responsibility have coalesced into his current roll with TSN, where he coordinates our website, email, and social media outreach, supports our 3C Coordinators, including facilitating the annual Coordinator Retreat.
Spencer Kellum – COO
skellum@stewardshipnetwork.org
Spencer is responsible both for TSN’s comprehensive operational strategy and for aligning impact via the Network’s collaborative conservation model. In the role of COO, he is focused on the organization’s direction and the day-to-day administration of TSN’s business operations. Spencer is an experienced environmental scientist (SLU, B.S. 2009), conservation leader (GLLA, 2011), community analyst (EMU, M.S. 2013), and integrative anthropologist (UGA, 2018). He works with NGOs, federal, city, and municipal units of government, academic institutions, private businesses, landowners, and volunteers – locally, nationally, and across the globe. By deliberately integrating people, culture, and environment into a comprehensive strategy and an operational approach, his work results in more effective and efficient collaborations to benefit natural and human communities. Learn more about his professional background at LinkedIn. When not working, you can find him pursuing outdoor activities, working with his hands, writing at www.spencerkellum.net, or engaged in a variety of stewardship projects. Connect on Instagram to get a flavor for this side of life.
Contractual Partners:
Alok Mishra – IT
Alok is a consultant and application engineer for a variety of web, interactive, and mobile projects. He is skilled in several development languages and tools, and experienced in designing and building interactive user experiences for internet, mobile and rich media systems. His specialties include Web Applications, eLearning Implementation, Rich Internet Applications, Mobile Web Applications, User Experience, Media, Collaboration, and Migration.
Sarah Kennedy – North River Creative
With over 18 years of graphic design experience, Sarah takes our pen and paper concepts and turns them into the final print pieces you may have seen in person. Her love for nature and the outdoors makes us one of her favorite clients to work for. Sarah graduated in 2002 from Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, with a BA in Graphic Design. Her favorite projects to work on are magazines and brochures. When she’s not working on her graphic design skills, she enjoys traveling with her husband and dogs, going for hikes, and taking photos.
Steppe Solutions – Events Management
Steppe Solutions is a full-service event management agency. Since 2001 they have been providing the direction, focus, creativity, structure, and momentum needed to translate their client’s vision into reality. They produce multi-day conferences, academic symposia, high-profile galas, annual dinners, donor events, and large-scale meetings and celebrations. “We have had the pleasure of producing hundreds of exceptional events over the years, and welcome the opportunity to partner with you on your next event.“
Vicki Staebler – Accounting
Vicki has been doing accounting and taxes for as long as she can remember. She joined TSN’s team in 2014 to manage our finances. She helps us keep track of the fast moving pace of grants and contracts with dozens of partners. She makes sure our vendors and employees get paid on time and she accompanies us through our annual financial review and filing of state and federal documents. When she’s not working with us or all of her other clients, she enjoys spending time with her animals on the farm or on her boat on the chain of lakes.
Board Members:
Chris Theriot
Chris Theriot has more than 15 years working at the intersection of business, policy, and natural resources. He currently works with Resource Recycling Systems to advance corporate sustainability around materials management.
Previously, he worked at Ducks Unlimited and as a consultant to the United Nations Development Program. Theriot earned a MS from the School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan and a MPP from the University of Chicago. He enjoys running, bicycling, fishing, and grouse hunting in the great state of Michigan.
Dino Signore
With more than seventeen years’ experience as a professional facilitator, Dr. Dino Signore has worked with both for-profit and non-profit organizations and specializes in creating productive learning environments, through a unique strategic planning model, peer-to-peer roundtable protocols and a process consultation approach. He has facilitated several hundred sessions with community development leaders across multiple disciplines, non-profit strategic sessions, board development sessions, and peer-to-peer roundtable sessions for business owners and executive directors as well as numerous small business strategy and executive performance sessions.
Mark Shepard
Mark Shepard heads Restoration Agriculture Development andForest Agriculture Nursery, but is most widely known as the author of the award-winning book, Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers. Restoration Agriculture is based off his experiences at New Forest Farm and represents his belief in the ability of sustainably grown perennial food crops to feed us into “our resource-compromised future”. Trained in mechanical engineering and ecology, Mark has combined these two passions to develop equipment and processes for the cultivation, harvesting and processing of forest-derived agricultural products. He is a certified permaculture designer and teaches agroforestry, permaculture, and his innovative systems of water management around the world.
Melanie Herron
Melanie has a record of assisting vulnerable communities in various occupations throughout her 20-year career in Administration. In the early 2000’s, Melanie worked with Safehouse/the Domestic Violence Project Team, creating a survivor toolkit to better assist Washtenaw County domestic abuse survivors. At the University of Michigan, School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE), Melanie assisted the Business Office in collaborating with SNRE faculty to manage their non-sponsored grant awards, also assisting students in managing small student grants. Melanie played a key role at Resource Recycling Systems (RRS) as the Office Administrator and assisted in researching metrics for waste recovery solutions, organics management and corporate sustainability throughout the U.S. Melanie also played a key role in public sector proposal creation and management at RRS.
Melanie’s current role as Office Manager with Fair Food Network, allows her the opportunity to assist the Double Up Food Buck (DUFB) program, which matches EBT/Bridge Card or food stamp dollars spent on fruits and vegetables. The DUFB program ensures families in vulnerable communities have access to healthy foods, which means more business for local farmers and a boost for local economies. Melanie holds a bachelor’s degree in Literature from Eastern Michigan University, and you can often find her at the local library, perusing the non-fiction shelves. Melanie enjoys vacations with her family, playing tennis, practicing yoga, swimming laps, and bird watching. Melanie is also an avid cook, who feels most comfortable in the kitchen preparing meals.
Francisco “Paco” Ollervides, PhD
Francisco “Paco” Ollervides, PhD has worked directly with individual leaders and organizations in diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice initiatives in the environmental sector for over 20 years. He assists strategic planning as well as conceptualizing, innovating, and driving forward initiatives that allow individuals to learn and act equitably and as stewards to our planet. His focus is on building the power of the environmental movement by facilitating opportunities for People of Color to excel in the sector through client and sponsor relationship management, customer satisfaction and retention, and staff management.
He leads the Green Leadership Trust as Executive Director. He leverages the knowledge, networks, and resources of People of Color and Indigenous people serving Boards of environmental organizations to build and diversify the environmental movement’s power. Prior (2013-2019) he acted as Leadership Development Manager and consultant in the Great Lakes region for River Network. Here he coordinated and provided organizational development services to dozens of Partner non profit organizations. From August 2006 – December 2010 he served as Senior Field Coordinator for Latin American programs within Waterkeeper Alliance. He connected, supported, and enhanced the activities of several dozens of non-profit member organizations.
He has trainings from the Watershed Coordinator Course from Ohio State University and served as lecturer to the Michigan Water Stewards program from Michigan State University. He was part of the Leading from Within Leadership course from Institute for Conservation Leaders and is a certified coach in Open Standards of Conservation from Conservation International. He is a Great Lakes Network Weaver and a National Senior Fellow with the Environmental Leaders Program. He received Racial Justice training from Race Forward; Civic Discourse training from Knoll Farm; Community Organizing and Family Issues Facilitation Training from the COFI Institute; Story telling for Social Change from Environmental Leaders Program; internal inclusivity training from Raben Group; completed the Arm in Arm 4 Climate Campaign and the BIPOC Climate Leadership Program.
He is a biochemical engineer and a bio-acoustician. His field work included assessing the impacts of boat noise on gray whale behavior. He holds both M.S and PhD degrees from the Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences Department at Texas A&M University.
Scott Dierks
Scott Dierks, PE is a civil engineer, hydrologist and ecological engineer. He has spent the last twenty plus years trying to apply the lessons of natural systems to urban and landscape design. This work includes hydrologic, water quality and sediment transport monitoring and modeling on the East Coast and Midwest. The monitoring and modeling has been used to inform, test and refine stormwater, wastewater and stream planning/design projects. His design work has included treatment wetlands for sanitary and leachate wastewaters; urban and rural BMPs, and stream, wetland and shoreline restoration. Scott has facilitated and written watershed management plans and is known, locally at least, as an avid collaborator with public agencies, non-profits and other design firms. Scott has undergraduate degrees from Colgate University (BA – psychology) and the University of Rhode Island (BS – Civil Engineering) and a ME in Ecological Engineering from the University of Florida.
Shawn Johnson
Shawn Johnson is Managing Director of the Center for Natural Resources & Environmental Policy at the University of Montana and co-director of the Center’s graduate certificate program in Natural Resources Conflict Resolution. Shawn organizes and leads strategic planning and capacity building workshops for a wide variety of organizations focused on natural resource policy and management and has served as a facilitator and mediator on issues ranging from land use planning and forest management to conservation priority setting and regional collaboration. For the past ten years, he has helped advance a joint effort between the Center and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy on regional collaboration and large landscape conservation. The joint effort explores questions of policy, leadership, and governance at regional or landscape scales, where there is often a mismatch between the scale of an existing challenge or opportunity and that of existing organizations and jurisdictions. In May 2011, Shawn helped organize and convene a group of large landscape conservation practitioners that led to a new network of practitioners throughout North America who are working to improve community and conservation outcomes at the large landscape scale — the Practitioners’ Network for Large Landscape Conservation. Shawn is co-author, with Matthew McKinney, of Working Across Boundaries: People, Nature, and Regions (Lincoln Institute, 2009). He also contributed to Large Landscape Conservation, A Strategic Framework for Policy and Action (Lincoln Institute, 2010) and Remarkable Beyond Borders: People and Landscapes in the Crown of the Continent (Sonoran Institute, 2010). Prior to his work at the Center, Shawn earned a Master’s degree in Public Affairs from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and spent three years as a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Max Baucus.
3C Coordinators:
C.A.K.E. CISMA – Kirk Acharya (kirk.acharya@macd.org)
Southwest Cluster – Paul MacNellis (swcc@stewardshipnetwork.org)
Duluth CISMA – Lori Seele (lori@stewardshipnetwork.org)
Grand-Raisin Conservation Community – Bob Kellum & Sybil Kolon (GRCC@stewardshipnetwork.org)
Great Lakes Islands Alliance – Matt Preisser (517-256-5276)
Huron Arbor Cluster: Jason Frenzel & Michael Benham (HuronArbor@StewardshipNetwork.org)
Lake St. Clair CISMA: (cisma@macombgov.org)
Lakes Country Cluster: Beth Williams (lcc@stewardshipnetwork.org)
Mid-Michigan Stewardship Initiative: Jim Hewitt (Midmich@StewardshipNetwork.org)
Oakland County CISMA: Erica Clites (eclites@sixriversrlc.org) & Emily Messick (emessick@sixriversrlc.org)
SW x SW CISMA: Eleanor Serocki (eleanor.serocki@macd.org)
West Michigan Conservation Network: Drew Rayner (wmconservationnetwork@gmail.com)
Western Lake Erie Cluster: Brittany Leick (wlec@stewardshipnetwork.org)