Ana LaDou serves as the Chief Operating Officer for MAPS. Ana is a dynamic leader and creative strategist who nurtures leaders, mobilizes teams, and develops strategic processes that result in stronger, scalable organizations. Ana specializes in leadership: providing it, supporting it, and developing it. She has worked on projects with local, national and international reach where her ability to design straightforward strategies and gain consensus among the Board and outside stakeholders, consistently results in innovative solutions and meaningful community impact. She graduated from Columbia University in New York, and launched her career in marketing at Miramax Films and maintains her ties to the industry. Her strengths in relationship building and collaborative leadership ensure ongoing support for the organization and meaningful change in their community. She is committed to her vipassana mindfulness and Non Violent Communication (NVC) practices, and engaging Boards and executive leaders in deeper conversations that lead to conscious action.
Melecio Estrella is a choreographer director, choreographer and community facilitator based in Oakland CA. Artistic Director of BANDALOOP, he has made site specific works mixing rock climbing technology and contemporary dance globally. Recent directorial engagements with BANDALOOP include an international collaboration in Kuala Lumpur sponsored by the US State Dept and the NEA for the World Summit of Arts Councils and Cultural Agencies (2019), A Letter to PEI- Site specific work honoring architect IM PEI at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse New York (2019), a collaboration with pop artist P!NK for the American Music Awards (2017), and the JFK Centennial Celebration at the Kennedy Center (2017). Estrella is equally invested in site specific dance theater work with his company Fog Beast. In 2019 Fog Beast presented The Big Reveal at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, with funding support from the Gerbode Special Award in Dance Composition. As artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in 2019-2020, working on a commission dealing with California shoreline change in our age of climate chaos. Melecio was a Leadership Fellow for the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) 2016-18. He is a graduate of the Moving On Center School of Participatory Arts and Research, and has taught at universities, high schools, performing arts and community organizations in the US, Asia and Europe. Melecio believes dance and art making is for everyone, and that it is a key contributor to the health of individuals, communities and societies.
Bill Shireman brings together people and who love to hate each other, from capitalists and activists to hard-right conservatives and far-left progressives. As President and CEO of the non-profit consultancy Future 500, he has united the world’s largest companies and most impassioned eco-activists - think Greenpeace, Sierra Club, ExxonMobil, and Mitsubishi - to jointly transform supply chains and make a Circular Economy real. At Berkeley Haas Business School, he teaches leadership and negotiations to help enable business leaders to ”maximize the production of good and service.” And in his personal philanthropy, he helps sponsor groups like BridgeUSA put an end to endless political warfare. Bill believes that although the combative atmosphere in the early years of the environmental movement may have served a purpose, it has slowed our progress in the last several decades. “We need to graduate from the war mentality. The disputes we have are real but we are a family... healthy families don’t engage in warfare... they work out their differences, and we can too.” Through his ability to cultivate unlikely alliances, he worked with Coors, Safeway and the Sierra Club to create and pass the California Bottle Bill, one of the most successful and cost effective recycling and pollution reduction programs. “In my teens and twenties I was a warrior for the planet. As I reached my thirties I became a peacemaker for the planet and that is when I experienced the biggest steps forward.” Taking the firm stance that we can enjoy prosperity while still protecting the planet, he has worked to spread a message of collaboration through several influential books, most notably What We Learned In The Rainforest — Business Lessons from Nature, which shows how profitability and sustainability can be integrated. He and Trammell Crow are finishing a new book, “In This Together,” a secret conspiracy by renegade Republicans, Democrats, Capitalists, and Activists to save the planet, share prosperity, and depolarize democracy, while we (barely) have time.
Jim is founder of Climate Path, a cross-sector online directory and marketplace. It brings together 40-years experience in sustainable design and 15 in climate, with a deep background in science, technology and IT. Jim is CEO of JLINC –– a cryptographically signed data exchange layer on the Internet. JLINC powers Tru.net a networks-of-networks for organizations, with personal data control and verified ‘data provenance’ showing where information came from. In 2000, he cofounded the Planetwork conference on global ecology and information technology, which led to a 2-year initiative to create a social network for civil society – before Facebook – and founder’s shares in the LinkedIn IPO. In 2005, he cofounded the first US biochar company with the emeritus expert in biomass gasification at NREL and represented biochar at the UNIPCC for 3 years. BEC was a finalist for the Branson Prize to remove 1-billion tons of CO2, sold in 2011. By 2008 Jim recognized that we could not remove carbon fast enough to avoid runaway warming feedback. He raised non-profit support for Marine Cloud Brightening, worked with climate modeling scientists at NCAR and co-authored a paper in the pre-eminent scientific journal PhilTrans, before filing the patent on JLINC and retuning to tech in 2015.