Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation

Don Brackett
Administrative Officer

Don is currently the Administrative Officer at the Switzer Foundation. He has been with the Foundation since January, 2004 and previously worked at Unity College, a small environmental undergraduate college in Unity, Maine. Since 1991 Don has been a trustee and administrator for the John Sage Foundation, a small family foundation which gives grants to environmental organizations in Maine.

Erin Lloyd
Program Officer

Erin has been with the Switzer Foundation since September, 2003. She joined the Foundation after working in the land conservation field for various land trust organizations in northern New England. Erin received her master’s degree in Conservation Biology from Antioch New England Graduate School in 2001, and subsequently worked as a conservation planner for Maine Coast Heritage Trust in Topsham, Maine, and as Director of Lands and Stewardship for the Damariscotta River Association in Damariscotta, Maine. In addition to her work with the Switzer Foundation, she continues to work as a consultant to land conservation organizations throughout New England.

Lissa Widoff
Executive Director, Switzer Fellow 1992

Lissa Widoff is currently Executive Director of the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation, an environmental foundation based in Belfast, Maine that supports graduate Fellowships in New England and California and a Leadership Grant Program supporting NGO partnerships with Switzer Fellows to work on critical environmental issues in the US. Lissa began as Executive Director in 1999 and has overseen the growth of the organization in its program development, governance structure engaging family and non-family trustees and financial management. Ms. Widoff has extensive experience in managing philanthropic initiatives. One such initiative was the Collaboration of Community Foundations for the Gulf of Maine that helped 6 New England and maritime Canada community foundations increase their grantmaking on coastal and marine issues, including marine resource conservation, management and economic development to support fishing communities. She has also led a Maine Community Foundation initiative promoting community arts and cultural development. Prior to this, she co-directed The Land for Maine’s Future Program, a public land acquisition program in Maine through which she oversaw the protection of over 50,000 acres of wildlands and recreation areas for public use and enjoyment and helped craft the first state purchases of conservation easements on forestland. Ms. Widoff is trained as an ecologist and has worked for the State of Maine, The Nature Conservancy, the University of Maine and as a consultant in that capacity and has served on the Boards of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, the Maine Chapter of the Nature Conservancy and other local organizations. She holds a B.S degree from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and an M.P.A from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Portia Switzer

Investor Relations
Blue Practice
Los Angles, CA

Portia Switzer is an investor relations consultant with her sister Jessica’s firm Blue Practice, a marketing/communications firm devoted to clean tech and sustainable companies and causes. She has worked in the investor relations field for 15 years, serving in senior level management roles for small, mid and large cap companies located both in the US and Europe. Prior to Blue Practice, Portia was Vice President, Investor Relations for International Rectifier, a global $1 billion power management semiconductor company in El Segundo, California focused on energy efficiency. She managed the investor relations program for six years, including navigating the Company through a multi-year restatement, Executive Management and Board of Directors changes, proxy battle, and hostile bid. Prior to this, she spent three years managing the US investor relations efforts with STMicroelectronics, a $6 billion Franco-Italian semiconductor supplier located in Geneva, Switzerland. Previously, she worked for FORE Systems, a data networking company in Pennsylvania, where she served in both investor relations and corporate communications roles, seeing the Company through its acquisition by Marconi PLC in 1996. Before FORE, she worked at Switzer Communications, a marketing communications firm founded by her sister Jessica in Corte Madera, California. She received her bachelor’s in English Literature from Portland State University.

Steve Parry,

Managing Director
NGEN Partners LLC
Santa Barbara, CA

Steve is a professional geologist with an international resource industry background. For the past eight years he has been a Managing Director with NGEN Partners, a Santa Barbara CA based venture capital firm with a diverse group of investments centered on sustainability, climate change and other “cleantech” issues. He is Chairman of the Board of Powerspan Corporation ( carbon capture), Lead Director of EPS Corporation (industrial energy efficiency) and a director of Fallbrook Technologies (transportation energy efficiency), SolFocus Inc.,(concentrator photovoltaics), Tioga Energy (solar finance), and Envirotower (physical water treatment). He is Treasurer and a director of the Santa Barbara-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). Steve is a graduate of Queen’s University and the University of Western Ontario and is a recipient of the Canada 125 medal for his work involving sustainability of Canadian resource communities.

Ashley Boren
Executive Director
Sustainable Conservation
San Francisco, CA

Ashley has been directing the strategy, growth, and operations of Sustainable Conservation since 1997. Sustainable Conservation is a nonprofit environmental organization that proactively engages businesses and private landowners in developing and implementing solutions to environmental problems. She came to Sustainable Conservation from Smith & Hawken, a mail order and retail gardening company, where she spent 7½ years in the areas of new business development, inventory planning, and retail merchandising. Ashley received a BA in Human Biology (with concentrations in plant ecology and environmental policy) from Stanford University. She began her career at The Nature Conservancy’s International Program in 1983 working in program development and fundraising. She left The Nature Conservancy in 1987 to attend Stanford Business School where she received her MBA and Certificate in Public Management, as well as an MA in Applied Economics. Ashley also chairs the board of Stanford Business School’s Alumni Consulting Team.

Margaret Rubega
Assistant Professor
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT

Margaret's research integrates experimental approaches to basic scientific questions with the conservation of wild birds. She currently focuses most closely on feeding in birds, with interests in the details of what they eat, why and how they eat it, and how that affects their ability to respond to environmental change by switching to other foods. Her early field research included population studies on endangered Roseate Terns, and work in the Antarctic that led to the documentation of indirect oil spill effects on seabirds. Her dissertation work integrated field and laboratory studies to answer basic questions about the evolutionary causes and ecological consequences of variation in foraging performance among red-necked phalaropes, unusually aquatic shorebirds, at Mono Lake, California. Her work documenting the ecological and digestive limitations on the ability of the birds to respond to the effects of large-scale water diversions contributed to an historical settlement of long-running litigation over water diversions there. Work at this saline lake stimulated her interest in the effects of widespread wetland and water salinization on bird populations. This interest led to postdoctoral studies addressing the development of salt tolerance, feeding mechanics, and excretory organs in juvenile shorebirds, all of which have implications for the conservation of aquatic birds in wetland systems salinized by water diversions and agricultural runoff. Along with other recent studies to examine how birds respond to environmental changes, Dr. Rubega's lab group has recently been studying how birds may themselves foster environmental change. This work is focused on how the feeding systems of some birds allow them to become invasive, and on the ways in which native and invasive birds function as seed dispersers for invasive plants.

Jennifer Sokolove
Program Director
Compton Foundation
Redwood City, CA

Jen is the Program Director at the Compton Foundation. Her Environment portfolio covers grantmaking in the fields of fresh water, climate change, and community-based conservation in the western United States. She also manages a family grants program in sustainable food systems, youth, the arts, and spirituality. Jen has been working on sustainability issues for the past decade, with a focus on natural resource-based economies and collaborative decision-making. Prior to joining Compton, Jen worked on a variety of community-led projects in California, Montana, and the Pacific Northwest. She conducted post-doctoral research on sustainable food systems in northern California, and completed her PhD at UC Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science,Policy and Management. Her academic research focused on contemporary collisions between environment and economy, particularly the processes of marketing, consumption, and investment that link natural resource industries to networks of urban capital. She received her BA from Stanford University in Human Biology (concentration in environmental policy) and English in 1994. She serves on the boards of the Switzer Foundation and the Pesticide Action Network North America, as well as on the advisory board for the Northern California Grassroots Fund.

Deborah Spalding
Investment Consultant
New Haven, CT

Deborah is a founder and Managing Partner at Working Lands Investment Partners, LLC which specializes in the investment and long term stewardship of sustainably managed working lands. She has worked in the financial industry for more than 16 years serving in senior executive positions in the US and overseas. Until 2007, Deborah was a Partner at Chaplin Global, LLC, an alternative asset management organization based in New York. Previously, she was Executive Director and Head of International Investments for Schroder Investment Management NA where she was lead portfolio manager of $6 billion in institutional client assets. Prior to this, she worked at Scudder Kemper Investments as Managing Director/Head of International Institutional Investments and lead portfolio manager for $10 billion in client assets. She began her career as a financial analyst at SKB & Associates responsible for the electric utilities, food, and building materials industries. She holds a Master of Forestry from Yale University, a MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, a MTS from Harvard University, and a BA from Tufts University. She has served on several boards including the National Wildlife Federation, where she is a member of the Executive Committee, the Connecticut Forest & Park Association, and the Guilford Land Conservation Trust. She is a trustee of the NWF Endowment and the Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation, where she chairs the investment committee.

Jessica Switzer
Partner
Blue Practice
San Francisco, CA

Jessica Switzer is a founding partner of Blue Practice, a marketing/communications firm devoted to clean tech and sustainable companies and causes. www.bluepractice.com. Prior to Blue Practice, Jessica was vice president of marketing for Tesla Motors, a zero-emission, plug-in electric sports car manufacturer. Before Tesla, she was Managing Director of Ruder Finn’s San Francisco office. Ruder Finn, the second-largest, independently owned PR agency in the world, acquired her firm, Switzer Communications in 2003. Switzer was president of Switzer Communications, a public relations and marketing firm which she founded in 1995 with annual billings of $3 million and 25 employees. For five years prior to founding her company, she ran corporate communications for Broderbund Software, a consumer software company, where she served as company spokesperson and assisted the company throughout its IPO and numerous acquisitions. She has been Executive Director for a nonprofit client, All-America Rose Selections. She received a bachelor's degree in politics from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Mark Switzer
Trustee
Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation
Point Reyes Station, CA

Mark Switzer is the nephew of Robert and Patricia Switzer and one of five sons of Joe Switzer, Bob’s brother and partner in the family business until Joe’s retirement in 1970. Mark graduated from Verde Valley School in Sedona, Arizona and attended the University of California at Berkeley between 1964 and 1966. Mark became an anti-war activist working with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, counseling youth. He refused induction into the military, was tried and acquitted, having been denied due process. Mark started a political polling company, Research Control, Inc. with his brother Lawrence and a friend in San Francisco in 1967, conducting focus groups and interpreting survey data. Mark and his brother Larry built a sailboat for San Francisco Bay and then purchased a fifty foot yawl, Kialoa, which Mark sailed to Central and South America and French Polynesia from 1969-1974. After four more years of cruising boats and living in New Zealand, Mark returned to reside permanently in the United States. Mark worked in environmental education with the Oceanic Society and the Fort Mason Foundation between 1978 and 1982 in San Francisco, managing and conducting programs, planning and implementing facility development, and fund raising. He then worked in the retail travel industry between 1982 and 1997. He currently is Production Manager for ANF, Inc. an herbal supplements manufacturing company owned by his brother Lawrence. Mark is also Property Manager for an Affordable housing complex in Point Reyes Station, California. Mark is personally interested in the social evolution of California and the development of a “Conservation Economy.”

Patricia Switzer
Donor and Trustee
Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation
Shaker Height, OH

Originally from Berkeley, California, Pat met and married Robert Switzer in 1936. From there they moved to Cleveland, Ohio where Bob developed the Day-Glo Company after its start-up in California. Upon the sale of the Company, Pat and Bob started the Foundation in 1986, and Pat has remained a Trustee since then.