Board of directors

betsy taylor

Betsy Taylor is a consultant focused on climate solutions. She is a philanthropic advisor, campaigner, and writer. She helped found numerous donor networks and non-profit groups including Environmental Grantmakers Association, Funders for Regenerative Agriculture, and 1Sky – a three-year campaign involving over 200 organizations pressing for science-based federal climate policy. She wrote Healthy Soils to Cool the Planet, a guide to philanthropic investment in regenerative agriculture and her primary focus is nature-based solutions to climate. She has worked on climate solutions and related issues of sustainable consumption, regenerative agriculture, and clean energy for three decades. Most recently as a consultant to the Volgenau Foundation she helped launch and serves as President of the Volgenau Climate Initiative which is building leadership networks in support of nature-based solutions to climate. Betsy served as executive director of the Merck Family Fund, Ottinger Foundation and Stern Family Fund. She helped launch and served as president of the Center for a New American Dream – an effort to address the root causes of ecological breakdown by addressing a global economy where human progress is defined by endless growth and consumption. She is an avid gardener and lives on a 20-acre homestead in New Haven, Vermont. She has a BA from Duke University and a MPA from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

bill mckibben

Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist who in 2014 was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel.’ His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages; he’s gone on to write a dozen more books. He is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized twenty thousand rallies around the world in every country save North Korea, spearheaded the resistance to the Keystone Pipeline, and launched the fast-growing fossil fuel divestment movement.

jay r. halfon

Jay R. Halfon is a practicing attorney and public policy strategist. He represents tax-exempt organizations, including public charities, private foundations, advocacy groups and political entities. He has a broad range of experience influencing public policy in both Congress and state legislatures. Mr. Halfon served as executive director and general counsel of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association from May 1998 to December 2001. Previously he was executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) for a decade ending in 1997.

Larry Travis

Larry Travis was Associate Chief of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in the Earth Sciences Division of the Science and Exploration Directorate of the Goddard Space Flight Center until his retirement in 2015 and is currently visiting scientific collaborator at GISS. Having joined GISS as a civil servant in 1978, his research has emphasized remote sensing of clouds and aerosols in planetary atmospheres and analysis and interpretation of such observations. He served as Principal Investigator for the Cloud Photopolarimeter Instrument on the Pioneer Venus Orbiter Mission and as Co-Investigator for the Photopolarimeter/Radiometer Instrument on the Galileo Orbiter Mission. He received B.A. and M.S. degrees in Astronomy at the University of Iowa and Ph.D. in Astronomy at The Pennsylvania State University.

Jim Miller

Jim Miller is CEO of RxMapper, a precision drug information platform that empowers health insurance providers, health care professionals, PBMs and patients to quickly and accurately make safe and effective drug decisions that are tailored to the unique DNA of each individual patient. RxMapper was developed and beta tested at Mayo Clinic and is preparing for its commercial release. Jim is a serial entrepreneur with over twenty-five (25) years of founding and leading a succession of companies: Matrix Communications (1991-2000); Tenor Communications (2000-2007); Online Convergence (2007-2016); and 1588 Advisors (2016-present). Jim donates a considerable amount of his time and resources to improving the educational opportunities of poor and at-risk children and advocating for solutions to the problem of global climate change. Jim is on the Board of Directors of Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions, where he works with renowned Climate Scientist Dr. Jim Hansen to advocate for a market driven, carbon-fee and dividend approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions; on the Board of Directors of Our Children’s Trust, where he supports OCT’s Atmospheric Trust Litigation; and is the author of the Clean Energy and Shared Prosperity Act. Jim is a member of Boston College’s Board of Regents; was a founding trustee of the Boston College Lab School at St. Columbkille, and previously served under Peter Lynch as Vice President and trustee of Boston’s Inner-City Scholarship Fund and the Catholic Schools Foundation. Jim lives in the Boston area with his wife and their three children.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned professor of economics, leader in sustainable development, senior UN advisor, bestselling author, and syndicated columnist whose monthly newspaper columns appear in more than 100 countries. He is the co-recipient of the 2015 Blue Planet Prize, the leading global prize for environmental leadership, and many other international awards and honors. He has twice been named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders. He was called by the New York Times, “probably the most important economist in the world,” and by Time magazine, “the world’s best known economist.” A survey by The Economist in 2011 ranked Professor Sachs as amongst the world’s three most influential living economists of the first decade of the 21st century. Professor Sachs serves as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is University Professor at Columbia University, the university’s highest academic rank. From 2002 to 2016 he served as the Director of the Earth Institute. Sachs is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on the Sustainable Development Goals, and previously advised UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on both the Sustainable Development Goals and Millennium Development Goals and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. Sachs is currently Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network under the auspices of UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and a Commissioner of the ITU/UNESCO Broadband Commission for Development. He is Chair and Founder of SDG USA, a non-governmental initiative to promote the Sustainable Development Goal concepts in the United States. Sachs is also co-founder and Chief Strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and was director of the Millennium Villages Project (2005-2015).