Board

Corinne Dufka has over 35 years’ experience documenting the impact of conflict on civilians. From 1988 to 1999, she worked with Reuters as a photojournalist covering wars in El Salvador, Bosnia and Africa. In 1999, she left journalism and joined Human Rights Watch where, for the next two decades and from her base in West Africa, she worked as a senior researcher and advocate. As a photographer she was awarded the Capa Gold Medal, IWMF Courage in Journalism Award, and was a Pulitzer finalist. In 2003 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her work documenting war crimes in Sierra Leone. She left HRW in 2022, and now works as an independent researcher/ advisor, helping countries mitigate the risk of armed conflict.

Abdulahi Aliyu is the Global Program Director for Cocoa and Coffee at Rikolto International. With a robust background in sustainable cocoa, he previously led the Cocoa Rehabilitation and Intensification Program (CORIP) at Solidaridad West Africa. Abdulahi is adept in driving positive change in the coffee sector. Abdulahi is an accomplished agricultural development practitioner with over a decade of experience in delivering impact in Sustainable agriculture, Sustainable Food Systems, Climate Change, Inclusive Business, Access to Finance, Policy and regulatory framework, Strategy design and execution. He has wealth of experience in developing commodity value chains for a variety of products, including Cocoa, Coffee, Oil Palm, Maize, Cotton, Soy, fruits and vegetables. He has successfully led the design and implemented of many food security and livelihood programmes in several development countries in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. His extensive knowledge and expertise in agricultural development issues and concepts enable him to effectively address sector development needs with confidence and authority.

Von Hernandez is a multi-awarded Filipino environmental activist who has been campaigning on waste and toxics pollution for more than 25 years. He is the Global Coordinator of the global Break Free from Plastic Movement, consisting of close to 3,500 member organizations representing millions of supporters from around the world, which have come together to reverse the plastic pollution crisis. Previously, Von was Global Development Director of Greenpeace International where he oversaw the development and performance of Greenpeace’s national and regional offices worldwide. He also served as the Executive Director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia (GPSEA), where he led some of the group’s most successful campaigns in Southeast Asia. He co-founded and spearheaded various environmental coalitions and partnerships at the national, regional, and global levels including the Ecowaste Coalition in the Philippines, Waste Not Asia, and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA). In 2003, he was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for his work, which led to the first national ban on waste incineration. His work has been held up as a model for waste incineration activists throughout the world. Von also gained recognition from Time magazine as one of the Heroes for the Environment in 2007. He holds an MA from the National University of Singapore.

Marcel Gomes is a Goldman Award winner and the executive secretary at Repórter Brasil—a nonprofit media outlet working at the intersection of supply chains, human rights, slave labor, and environmental issues—where he leads the investigations and research teams. Marcel seeks to promote a more just society through journalism, which he considers a form of activism. He not only reports on environmental and human rights violations, but also mobilizes economic and political actors to solve problems in Brazilian society. In 2008, Marcel began building out Repórter Brasil’s investigative team, using a grassroots network of Indigenous communities, local NGOs, and agricultural labor unions to develop a supply chain tracking system for industrial agriculture. As cattle ranching became the largest driver of deforestation in Brazil, his team started to focus on the beef supply chain, undertaking sophisticated tracking systems of cattle and deforestation in Brazil. Marcel coordinated a complex, international campaign that directly linked beef from JBS, the world’s largest meatpacking company, to illegal deforestation in Brazil’s most threatened ecosystems. Marcel and his team have also extensively covered slavery in Brazilian coffee.

Kalyanee Mam is an award-winning filmmaker, lawyer, and born storyteller. Born in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge Regime and forced to flee her homeland, Kalyanee has always been inspired by the story of home. She worked on films about war and refugees, about families threatened or displaced by destruction of their land, about forests and rivers, cultures and traditions, myths and stories, including: A River Changes Course, Fight for Areng Valley, and Lost World. Her debut documentary feature A River Changes Course, earned several top awards, including the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and the Golden Gate Award for Best Feature Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Kalyanee explored cultural and environmental changes facing the Cambodian people in the New York Times Op-Doc, A Threat to Cambodia’s Sacred Forests. Her latest work, Lost World, received The Eric Moe Award for Best Short on Sustainability. Kalyanee also worked as Cinematographer, Associate Producer, and Researcher on the Oscar-winning and Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job, which premiered at Cannes. She is a graduate of Yale University and UCLA Law School.

Randy Hayes is Executive Director at Foundation Earth, an organization rethinking a human order that works within the planet’s life support systems. As a former filmmaker and the founder of the activist NGO ‘Rainforest Action Network’ (RAN), Randy is a veteran of many high-visibility corporate accountability campaigns and has long advocated for the rights of Indigenous peoples. On his watch, RAN successfully campaigned to halt or curb deforestation by many major corporations, and Randy was described in the Wall Street Journal as “an environmental pit bull.” He served seven years as President of The City of San Francisco Commission on the Environment, and as Director of Sustainability in the office of Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown (former governor). He is a special advisor to the World Future Council. Hayes sits on six non-profit Boards of Directors and numerous Boards of Advisors. Randy holds a master’s degree in Environmental Planning and an honorary PhD from San Francisco State University (Inducted in Alumni Hall of Fame in 2010).

Eduardo Somarriba has a PhD in Biology (agroecology) by the University of Michigan, he is Professor of Tropical Agroforestry at CATIE, Costa Rica since 1989. His research focuses on the optimal design and management of the shade canopy of multi-strata agroforestry systems with coffee and cacao. He has developed an open-access, web-based software (www.shademotion.net) to evaluate the spatial and temporal patterns of tree shading in agroforestry systems. Eduardo has been a top manager at various positions at CATIE, has led many rural development projects in various Latin American countries, has worked as a consultant for both government and private sector, and has published nearly 300 publications, including scientific articles, technical manuals, books, and educational materials for university students and farmers. He has recently been a visiting scientist of The Montpellier Advanced Knowledge Institute on Transitions (MAK’IT) of the University of Montpellier and CIRAD in Montpellier, France.

Amourlaye Touré is an international development professional with 20 years of experience on human rights, elections, good governance, and the environment. He worked as a Country Director for the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), Freedom House, and Verité in Niger, Togo, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, and Rwanda.  He is a founding member and past president of the Ivorian Human Rights Movement (MIDH), which is a leading rights-based NGO in Cote d’Ivoire. Amourlaye also founded the first Human Rights NGO coalition in Cote d’Ivoire: RAIDH (Coalition of the Ivorian Human rights defenders). As a consultant, Amourlaye has worked for Mighty Earth, Open Society Initiative, Amnesty International, the UNDP, NDI, IFES, Rights and Democracy, etc. in countries like Djibouti, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Benin, Kenya, Mali, Burkina Faso. Amourlaye holds degrees from the University of Cocody, the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Cote d’Ivoire, and the University of Montreal. He is fluent in Bambara, French, and English, and conversational Spanish.

Matt Daggett is an accomplished philanthropic and non-profit leader with an expertise on environmental issues, strategic communications, global campaigns, and organizational governance. Mr. Daggett brings extensive experience managing teams and working with partners in Latin America, SE Asia, Europe, the US and Central & East Africa with a focus on catalyzing change towards more just, sustainable food, forest, and land use systems. He is the founding Director of the Strategic Communications Initiative for the Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA). Prior to joining CLUA, Matt was the Global Campaign Leader for Forests at Greenpeace International. In this role, he guided global teams advocating for forest conservation and Indigenous Rights protection in the Amazon, Congo Basin, Indonesia, and Northern Boreal forests. Previously, Matt served as the Strategy Director for Greenpeace USA, an Associate Partner at Dalberg Global Development Advisors, and a Consultant at the Boston Consulting Group in London. Matt earned an MBA at Oxford University in the UK and a BA in Government from Harvard University in the USA. 

Aminta Ossom is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and a Clinical Instructor in the Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, where she supervises projects focused on human rights and the global economy. Ossom’s recent work focused on the rights of workers in the informal economy, the relationship between climate change and socio-economic inequality, and accountability for human rights abuses in global supply chains. Previously, Ossom was a human rights officer at the United Nations, where she supported the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture and the special rapporteurs of the Human Rights Council in fact-finding, advocacy, and training in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Europe. She returned to the United Nations in the summer of 2022 to staff the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent in advance of its inaugural session. Before that, Ossom taught at Fordham Law School as a Crowley Fellow in International Human Rights and Adjunct Professor of Law. She also worked in the field of international criminal justice, including as a legal researcher for Amnesty International.

Jade Saunders is Executive Director at World Forest ID, leading the way in forest-connected supply-chain transparency. In her role, she focuses on building the organization’s analytical and scientific capacity, optimizing the power of data to confirm a product's origin with precision. Jade has significant experience in forest governance, trade and environmental crime, having served as senior policy analyst at Forest Trends and strategy advisor to The Satellite Catapult on the European Space Agency-funded ForestMind project. At Forest Trends she established the Timber Regulation Enforcement Exchange (TREE) program and oversaw its expansion into the Asia Pacific Region. Prior to this, she was associate fellow of the Energy, Environment and Resources programme at Chatham House, tackling deforestation through trade law and supply chain regulation. She also served at the European Forest Institute, working on Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT), in support of DG Environment of the European Commission. She currently manages the international World Forest ID consortium from her base in the UK.

Michael Greenberg is the founder and executive director of Climate Defiance. His work focuses on resisting new fossil fuel infrastructure and making climate change a top issue in American politics. Michael and the team’s work has been profiled in the New Republic, New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, and hundreds of other sources. In just one year, Climate Defiance garnered over 76 million organic social media impressions and is credited with playing a crucial role in halting drilling in ANWR and stopping new gas export infrastructure, which, if built out fully, would have had emissions equal to those of all of Europe. Michael brings over a decade of experience in disruptive direct action. In 2014 he organized 400 college students to face arrest in protest of Keystone. In 2021, Michael started the Treaty People Gathering, mobilizing 2000 people to the Line 3 pipeline route and drawing coverage in sources like the New York Times and PBS. Michael previously worked at Mighty Earth, where he led actions for campaigns to change the agriculture sector and decarbonize heavy industry. Michael graduated from Columbia University with a degree in economics.

John Wright is the founder and managing partner of Rollins Capital, a private investment partnership dedicated to investing in growing companies. Prior to establishing Rollins Capital he served as a Principal at Silver Lake, the world’s largest technology investment firm, and before that as a Goldman Sachs analyst. John also serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri. In addition, John founded The Rollins Reading Company, a non-profit dedicated to supporting kindergarten readiness and literacy achievement. John served a term in the House of Representatives in his home state of Missouri, where he was Ranking Minority Member of the Higher Education Committee and Vice Chair of the House Ethics Committee. He authored and co-sponsored landmark early childhood education legislation that has, since, improved access to preschool for tens of thousands of children from low-income families. John earned a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a B.A. from Yale College, where he graduated with the highest grade point average in his class and won a number of academic prizes.