Carolyne Stayton is the Executive Director of Transition US. She is adept at aligning community activities towards unified goals, a skill honed from over thirty years of working with nonprofit organizations and educational institutions. She has successfully galvanized communities around various social issues and has particular expertise in program development, participative leadership and “learning” organizations. Her background includes serving as Director of New College’s North Bay Campus for Sustainable Living, an innovative educational institution that promoted advanced studies in leadership, community-building and developed the nation’s first “green” MBA program. Carolyne has a master’s degree in Nonprofit Administration, resides in Sebastopol, California and is passionate about stewardship and protection of the natural world.

David Johnson After completing a degree in Computer Sciences, David traveled the world, discovering Tibetan Buddhism on his journey and developing an interest in environmental issues. On his return to the UK, David became involved with a Tibetan Buddhist sangha and moved to their Retreat Center in South Wales. He later purchased and moved to neighboring piece of land and built an award-winning ecological house. David continued exploring the overlap of ecology and spirituality through a Masters Degree program in Transpersonal Psychology with a concentration in Ecopsychology at Naropa University. During this time he also trained with Joanna Macy. His training and work with a number of ecopsychologists informed his thinking around the Heart & Soul aspects of Transition. David was involved in a think tank set up by Rob Hopkins in the early days of Transition Town Totnes and resides in Portland, Oregon where he has been forming Transition Portland.

Asher Miller is the Executive Director of Post Carbon Institute and was the former Manager of the organization's Relocalization Network. He has thirteen years of nonprofit management experience, including as founder of Climate Changers, an organization that inspires people to reduce their impact on the climate by focusing on simple and achievable actions anyone can take. Previously, he was Partnership Director at Plugged In; International Production Coordinator at Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation; Youth Manager at the Volunteer Center of Sonoma County; a ghostwriter; and a consultant for a number of other nonprofit groups. Asher also serves on the board of Listening for a Change, and on the Advisory Board of ErthNxt. He also recently served as a member of Senator John Edwards' Cleantech / Green Business Advisory Committee. Asher received his B.A. in English, Creative Writing from The Colorado College.
 

Vicki Robin is well-known as the co-author with Joe Dominguez of the international best-seller, Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence. The Wall Street Journal, Money, Woman's Day, Newsweek, Utne Magazine and the New York Times, and newspapers around the world have reported on her work on lowering consumption in North America. Vicki served on the President's Council on Sustainable Development's Task Force on Population and Consumption. She is also co-founder of the New Road Map Foundation, the Center for a New American Dream, Sustainable Seattle, Conversation Cafes, the Simplicity Forum, the Turning Tide Coalition, Let’s Talk America, and currently Transition Whidbey which is seeking to catalyze the community on Whidbey Island to greater food, fuel, energy and economic self-reliance in light of predicted impacts of oil depletion and climate change.

Patricia Benson has been engaged in different aspects of environmental sustainability for over 20 years. Her experience includes market gardening, environmental education, curriculum/media development, and advocacy for environmental justice. She has lived on a family dairy farm in Minnesota, on national forest land in the wilderness, and in urban and rural communities. Benson works with congregations to raise awareness, network, and to engage people of faith in congregational and community work for sustainability, and provide opportunities for advocacy for effective and just public policy. She is a member of the leadership teams with Lutherans Restoring Creation and with the Minnesota Episcopal Environmental Stewardship Commission. Benson received a B.S. in education with the College of St. Catherine and graduate training through the Center for Global Environmental Education at Hamline University. Patricia is a member of the initiating group of Transition Northfield, and has made presentations across Minnesota to introduce Transition Initiatives.

Dave Room is black man of mixed origin born raised in Berkeley and living in Oakland. He has connected to several communities: the Bay Area, people of color, and eco-sustainability.  He enjoys and is really good at getting things started and handing them off as appropriate. His daughter is his inspiration, and the reason he is here.  Dave was a founding board member and helped build Post Carbon Institute from its infancy.  Dave went on to co-found Bay Localize, a public benefit organization focused on localization in the Bay Area and coordinates the Local Clean Energy Alliance. He founded the Hubbert Tribute, which educates policy makers about peak oil and researches energy policy history. Dave does solo performance theater (The Monkey Trap) and Green Pill Workshops to awaken and activate mainstream audiences, people of color, and youth.  He coined "Energy Preparedness" and was on the Oil Independent Oakland by 2020 task force.

Karen Lanphear is a co-founder of the Sandpoint Transition Initiative. She believes that the power of education and the strength of building strong community coalitions can really change the world. She has worked the entire spectrum of education from setting up early childhood education programs to helping design a community college system in the Middle East. Karen has worked to develop and coordinate community coalitions, co-authored 3 travel books and had the good fortune to travel most of the world. She knows there are many ways to do things and that each community has an enormous pool of talent and power that can be unleashed when people start working together on a common vision, and start harnessing their resources to move in a new direction. 

Alastair Lough, and Patricia Proulx-Lough, were the first two official Transition Trainers in the US, and are pioneers of the Transition Movement in the US. Early in his career, Alastair served as a professional facilitator for Corning, assisting small workgroups in problem solving problems of their choosing. More recently, he has worked as a professional Hydrogeologist, addressing issues of groundwater remediation and water supply. In 2008, Alastair completed a doctorate in Natural Resources, in which he addressed issues of long-term water-resource conservation for the benefit of future populations. Keenly aware of climate change, peak oil and the possibility of economic crisis, he has since chosen to promote the Transition Model in the US and abroad as an innovative approach for communities to directly tackle these issues. Alastair is a permaculturist, a facilitator for the Awakening the Dreamer Symposium and cofounder of the Transition Training Center in Portland ME.

Mark Lancaster Mark currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer for the Palm Drive Health Care Foundation in Sebastopol, Ca; a post he has held since April 2010. Prior to coming to the foundation, Mr. Lancaster was the director of strategic relationships for the Global Footprint Network in Oakland, Ca; the Executive Director for the Seva Foundation in Berkeley, Ca; the director of the Presbyterian Hunger Program in Louisville, Ky; the Mid-Atlantic Regional Director for the American Friends Service Committee in Baltimore, MD and the Executive Director for Ministry of Money in Washington, DC. Mark is an ordained United Methodist clergy person and has served three different parishes, been the chaplain at the American University in Washington, DC and McDaniel College in Westminster Maryland, where he also served as a faculty member and the director of the annual fund.Mr. Lancaster has worked throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe on issues of food security, sustainable development, education, housing, gender equity and health care. Mark has twice chaired the board of directors for Heifer International and served as a consultant for Habitat for Humanity and Interaction. He is married to Barbara Sayler and father to Joel and Emma Lancaster. The family resides on a small farm outside Santa Rosa and is working to create a fully sustainable farmstead, with the help of 4 year old Emma.

Supporting Team

Carl Shuller is excited to be supporting a movement that is so closely aligned with his vision and hope for our collective future.  His formal education culminated with a Master Degree in Human Environment Relations from Cornell University.   He is a trained facilitator of the Pachamama Alliance's Awakening The Dreamer Symposium and maintains that “together we can bring forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just human presence on this planet as a guiding principle of our times."  Carl is a member of the Sustainable Enterprise Conference organizing team in Sonoma County, and has participated in numerous programs at the the Regenerative Design Institute including the 'Permiculture Design Course' and 'Ecology of Leadership'.   He currently resides in Petaluma, CA where he is involved in the local Homegrown Guild and is eternally grateful to be a part of such an amazing, evolving, and resilient community.

Shelby Tay joined the Transition US team to assist with research, web content development and general project coordination. She began working with Post Carbon Institute in 2005 coordinating the Relocalization Network, an international network of citizen-driven initiatives working to address peak oil and climate change. A graduate of the University of British Columbia, she studied environmental sciences and interdisciplinary learning. She is interested the use of social media and social enterprise to strengthen communities and has helped launch programs and events for Vancouver's 30 Days of Sustainability, Dunbar Salmonberry Days, A Loving Spoonful and Global Habitat Festival. Shelby loves experimenting with all things handmade, and can often be found cycling the streets of Vancouver, BC, where she currently resides.

Scott McKeown is the founder and a continual core team member of Transition Sebastopol which in 2008 became the 9th official Transition initiative in the US and which continues to grow with now twelve active working groups. Scott has been a professional trainer and instructional designer for over fourteen years in both corporate high-tech environments such as Advance Fibre Communications (now Tellabs, Inc.) and also with non-profit organizations such as The Buckminster Fuller Institute. Scott has been a certified Training for Transition instructor since 2008 and has co-taught the "T4T" course in the California communities of San Rafael, Oakland, Los Angeles, Monterey, Willits, Lake County, and Sonoma, all which helped toward the formation of other Transition initiatives in California. For thirty-five years Scott has been deeply involved in movement building and social action issues. Scott founded several social action-focused organizations as diverse as the Mystic Beat Lounge art collective and the Los Angeles Guardian Angels volunteer safety patrol. Scott was Marketing Director for three high-tech companies including Surround Sound Inc. which produced the first Dolby-licensed home Surround Sound decoder, and mother.com, an Internet Service Provider (now Websoft Developers, Inc.). Scott has been an event producer for over three decades and has produced hundreds of events including conferences, speaking tours, eco fairs and music festivals. Scott has been a production consultant and technical director for many other events and organizations such as for the last five bi-annual conferences of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. From 2003 through 2007 Scott was the Executive Director and chief executive of the thirty-thousand person attended Harmony Festival in Santa Rosa, California, which during Scott's tenure more than doubled its attendance and revenue and has become one of the largest music and camping festivals on the West Coast.

Sarah Beth Lardie: For more than a decade, Sarah Beth has been successfully raising money and increasing visibility for a wide variety of non-profits and socially responsible ventures operating in the United States and around the world, including the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Youth for Understanding, and the Jane Goodall Institute.  Sarah Beth has also served as an Advisor to the United Nations Economic and Social Council’s Standing Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations. She has worked with a wide variety of individuals and corporations to establish and promote their charitable giving programs, including the world-wide 46664 Concert in support of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.   Sarah Beth has extensive experience expanding small fundraising operations into large, multi-faceted efforts with a varied portfolio of support. In addition to her extensive non-profit experience, Sarah Beth was a co-founder of Joshua Venture, a non-profit social venture fund for profit and non-profit entrepreneurship that operated successfully for 4 years, funding 16 projects.  Sarah Beth lives in New York with her husband, a teacher, where she spends her free time as an urban gardener and makes organic treats for her dog, Mazie.

Advisors

Raven Gray is the co-founder and past President of Transition US. She is a pioneer of the Transition Towns movement in the UK, having set up the world’s 2nd Transition Initiative after Totnes. Her professional background is diverse, ranging from ecovillage educator in India, to organic dairy farmer and community arts organizer in the UK, to software entrepreneur in California. Fundamentally, she is a permaculture educator and activist, with a strong commitment to environmental, social and economic sustainability. Jennifer has dedicated her life to restoring the earth’s balance, and is a frequent speaker and writer on this topic and the urgent need for transition. She received a BA in Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community from New College, California, and an MSc in Holistic Science: Ecological Education from Schumacher College in the UK.

Richard Heinberg is the award-winning author of eight books including The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies; Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World; The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism, and Economic Collapse; and Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. He is a Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators. His monthly MuseLetter has been published since 1992 and his essays and articles have appeared widely and in many languages. Richard writes a monthly column for The Ecologist magazine, and has been featured in many film documentaries, including Leonardo DiCaprio's 11th Hour. Since 2002, he has given over three hundred lectures on oil depletion to a wide variety of audiences around the world.

Rob Hopkins is the originator of the Transition concepts and co-founder of the Transition Network. He spent many years teaching permaculture and cob building, mostly when living in Ireland. Now based in Totnes, he is a member of Transition Town Totnes, works part time for Transition Network, publishes www.transitionculture.org, is author of the just published ‘Transition Handbook’ and generally spends far too much time thinking about Transition stuff. He is also a Trustee of the Soil Association. Rob is a family man with 4 sons, Rowan, Finn, Cian and Arlo, and is deeply in love with the raised beds he just finished building.

Peter Lipman  is policy director at sustainable transport charity Sustrans and is particularly proud of their DIY Streets project. He’s also a part time lawyer and chair of trustees of the Centre for Sustainable Energy.