Terry Axelrod, founder and CEO of Benevon®, has worked in the fund development field for over 30 years. In the early 1990s, she served as development consultant to an inner-city school in Seattle, where she designed and implemented the fundraising and marketing programs which raised over $7 million in 2½ years, including a one-hour breakfast event which raised over $1 million. This program was featured as a cover story in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
A dynamic, sought-after speaker both nationally and internationally, Terry’s high-energy trainings take the fear out of individual fundraising and give participants a practical, do-able system for long-term financial sustainability. Benevon trains and coaches nonprofit organizations to implement a mission-based system for raising sustainable funding from individual donors. This system ends the suffering about fundraising and builds passionate and committed lifelong donors. www.benevon.com
CAMERON DAVIS, SENIOR ADVISOR TO THE ADMINISTRATOR
Cameron Davis is Senior Advisor to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator. In that capacity he provides counsel to Administrator Lisa Jackson on the Obama Administration’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. His job includes coordinating Great Lakes policy and funding initiatives with more than one dozen federal agencies and with state, municipal, tribal, business and civic stakeholders. The focus of this work involves restoring habitat, reducing pollution, preventing the introduction of invasive species, reducing runoff and enhancing coastal health for people, fish and wildlife.
For more than two decades, Mr. Davis has worked to develop and implement water quality and quantity policy. Starting as a volunteer, he served as a litigating attorney and law teacher at the University of Michigan Law School before serving as president and CEO of the Alliance for the Great Lakes. Under his leadership, the organization won the American Bar Association’s Distinguished Award in Environmental Law & Policy, the first time for a public interest organization in the honor’s history. He earned his law degree, including certification in environmental and energy law, from the Chicago-Kent College of Law and a B.A. from Boston University in International Relations. He is the author of Confluence (BookSurge 2009), the first of a new genre, the “genoir.”
While working in Washington, D.C., Chicago and throughout the eight Great Lakes states, Cam lives across the street from Lake Michigan with his wife, Dr. Katelyn Varhely, and son, where they try to swim in the lake several times a week, but only when it’s warm enough.
WADE DAVIS
Wade Davis has been described as a “ rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University.
Currently an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, his recent work has taken him from the Amazon to Tibet, from the Arctic to Africa, from Australia to Mongolia, from Polynesia to New Guinea, living for extended periods among indigenous communities, learning and recording their complex rituals and customs, and their uses of plants as food, medicine and psychotropic agents.
Davis is the author of 14 books including The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), One River (1996), The Clouded Leopard (1999), Light at the Edge of the World (2001), and The Lost Amazon (2004). In 2009 he delivered the CBC Massey Lectures, Canada’s most prestigious intellectual forum, which were published as The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World (2009).
His many film credits include Light at the Edge of the World, an eight-hour documentary series produced for the National Geographic Channel. He is one of 20 Honorary Members of the Explorer's Club, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and an Honorary Member and Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. In 2009 he received the Gold Medal from the RCGS for his contributions to the fields of anthropology and conservation, and he is the 2011 recipient of the Explorers Medal, the highest award of the Explorers’ Club. In 2012 he will receive the David Fairchild Medal for Plant Exploration. In fall 2011 Knopf will publish his latest book, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest. Also appearing in the fall of 2011 will be The Sacred Headwaters: The Fight to Save the Stikine, Skeena and Nass Rivers.
TIMOTHY FEDDERSEN, KELLOGG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
Professor Timothy Feddersen joined the faculty at the Kellogg School of Management in 1995. He is the Wendell Hobbs Professor of Managerial Politics and Director of the Social Enterprise at Kellogg Program (SEEK). Professor Feddersen’s research centers on the manner in which elections aggregate dispersed information; the linkage between information and participation in elections; modeling ethically motivated agents in games; bargaining in legislatures; and the informal role of activists in the economy. He is currently investigating models of whistle-blowing and the way in which the need to rationalize choice constrains decision making. Professor Feddersen also teaches several classes at Kellogg including Strategy in the Nonmarket Environment, Values-Based Leadership and Values and Strategic Crisis Management. All of these classes focus on the way leaders must anticipate the reaction of stakeholder groups within the firm, in the media, in legislatures, courts and in public opinion broadly.
MICHAEL KOBORI, VICE-PRESIDENT, SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY, LEVI STRAUSS & CO.
Michael Kobori leads social and environmental sustainability at Levi Strauss & Co. Under his tenure, the company has pioneered industry efforts to establish a more sustainable and transparent end-to-end supply chain; engage consumers with more sustainably designed products; and improve the lives of people making its products.
Michael has 25 years of experience in sustainability and human rights. He previously served as Vice-President at Business for Social Responsibility and spent nearly a decade at The Asia Foundation, supporting human rights and economic development in Bangladesh, Thailand, and Vietnam. Michael serves on the boards of the Levi Strauss Foundation and the Better Cotton Initiative, and on the ILO Better Work program advisory committee. He has his Masters in Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley, where he also received his undergraduate education.
Kevin McMahon, writer/director/producer
Kevin McMahon began his career as a newspaper journalist at the St. Catharines Standard before shifting his focus to documentary film in the mid-1980s. His films have been described as “visually stunning and brilliantly conceived” (The Globe and Mail); “poetic and ironic, they deal with important topics and never shirk the difficulties inherent in complex issues” (Take One Magazine).
Kevin is currently producing Canadian Made, a 14-part television series exploring the national psyche through technological innovation. He is also at work directing Planet Zero, an interactive web-based documentary about nuclear weapons.
Recent films Kevin has directed include Standing Wave, part of Primitive’s National Parks Project, a 26-part television, music and film series, and Waterlife, an exploration of the Great Lakes which produced a feature documentary (Earth Prize, Tokyo Film Festival 2010; Hot Docs Special Jury Prize, 2009) and an online interactive experience (http://waterlife.nfb.ca; Webby Award 2010).
Feature documentaries that Kevin has written and directed include: The Face of Victory, Stolen Spirits of Haida Gwaii, An Idea of Canada, McLuhan’s Wake, In The Reign of Twilight and The Falls. Kevin’s documentaries for television include Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach: The Music Garden, Lifting The Shadow, Truth Merchants and the three-part series Cod: The Fish That Changed The World, a collaboration with comedian Mary Walsh. As a producer, Kevin oversaw the 50-episode series Things That Move, about the history and science of motion, and Working Over Time, a four-hour history of Canada, as seen through manual labour. Kevin is the author of Arctic Twilight, about the impact of the Cold War on the Inuit, and a contributor to POV Magazine, The Toronto Star and CBC Radio’s Ideas.
Kevin’s work has garnered a variety of awards, including several Geminis, a top prize from the Canadian Centre for Investigative Journalism, a nomination for a Governor General’s Award in public service journalism and honors from film festivals around the world. The Canadian Film Institute and Hot Docs have both held retrospectives of Kevin’s work. In 2006 Kevin served as the first Official Mentor at the Hot Docs festival; in 2009 he was asked to mentor Canadian actor and director Sarah Polley’s first foray into documentary in a program sponsored by the Canadian Film Centre and the National Film Board of Canada.
Kevin holds degrees from Brock and Carleton universities and the University of Bristol in England. He is a partner in Primitive Entertainment, a Toronto production company specializing in high quality documentary. Kevin lives in Toronto with his three teenaged children.
