Carl Hammerdorfer, MBA (Chairperson)
Carl joined Village Earth’s Board in 2008. Carl Hammerdorfer is Director of the GSSE program at Colorado State University. An entrepreneur with twenty years of experience internationally and domestically, Carl has worked both at the grassroots level as a Peace Corps Volunteer and as Country Director for ACDI/VOCA and Peace Corps. He has extensive experience forming and launching cooperatives domestically and internationally, and co-founded America’s first co-op incubator, Mainstreet Cooperative Group. His current passion is in developing and applying enterprise solutions that produce triple bottom-line results in base of pyramid markets. Fluent in German, French and Bulgarian and conversant in Bambara and Polish, Carl holds an MBA from Colorado State University.
Richard Sherman, M.S.
Born and raised on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, Richard is a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. He has worked most of his life on all aspects of fisheries, wildlife, and buffalo management, ethnobotany and indigenous stewardship methods. He drafted the first comprehensive fish and wildlife code for the Oglala Sioux Tribe and created methods of inventory for wildlife Reservation-wide. As Wildlife Biologist, Executive Director and Board member of Oglala Sioux Parks and Recreation, he actively managed the trial buffalo herd for more that 30 years, using the values and philosophies of the Lakota people to maintain them in a wild state. He conducted several studies on the Pine Ridge Reservation focused on subsistence practices and wildlife management, including a study of the importance of home-based micro-enterprise activity for the Reservation economy and a study of small-scale native bison operations on Pine Ridge, Rosebud and Yankton. He studied wildlife management at Utah State University and has a Master’s degree in regional planning from University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Edwin F. Shinn, Ph.D.
Ed has worked in the field of community development for 30 years. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology, a master’s degree in group dynamics and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. His expertise includes organizational development, planning and management methods, training design and implementation, technology generation, project monitoring and survey research.
His work as an organizer and trainer has taken him to the villages of India, Kenya, Peru, Guatemala, Wounded Knee, rural California, Pakistan, Indonesia and Egypt. He developed and managed a mobile school for community development where indigenous people in each area in which it was held were trained to be faculty. In Egypt he helped to develop an Irrigation Advisory Service and trained its personnel to work with farmers in setting up water user organizations to improve irrigated agriculture.
Miriam Shinn, M.S.
Miriam (Mimi) has worked in the field of community and village development for 30 years. She received her master’s in agricultural economics. She has worked has worked with and lived as a community developer in India, Australia and Africa. Her specialty is group facilitation, women in development, communication for development and micro-finance.
Dave Stewart, Ph.D.
David Stewart, president and CEO of Stewart Environmental Consultants Inc., is the College of Engineering Honor Alumnus. In addition to the three degrees he received from Colorado State University, he received a master of science degree in environmental engineering from the University of Arizona. Stewart is a recognized expert in the field of environmental engineering, especially in innovative water and wastewater treatment technologies. He currently holds several patents and patent pending applications in the field of inorganic membranes and the treatment of produced water from the oil and gas industry.
Okechukwu (Okey) Ukaga, MBA, PhD
Dr. Okechukwu Ukaga is the Executive Director of Northeast Minnesota Sustainable Development Partnership, University of Minnesota (NMSDP). In this capacity, he provides programmatic leadership for integrated, education, research and outreach projects/programs that promote sustainable development in northeastern Minnesota by utilizing university resources to meet community identified needs. Under his leadership, over the past 7 years, NMSDP has engaged in a variety of partnerships projects involving over 64,000 community members; 379 community organizations and businesses; 300 university faculty connections, 418 students from 42 university programs and departments.
Dr. Ukaga is also a Full Extension Professor with the University of Minnesota Extension. Before coming to Minnesota, he served as Managing Director of the International Institute for Sustainable Development at Colorado State University for five years. In that capacity, he managed a variety of sustainable community development projects and worked with organizations and people from countries in Africa, South America, Asia and the Middle East on such projects. He received a Ph.D. in agricultural and extension education, from Penn State University, an M.S. in education and an M.B.A. from Florida A&M University, a Post Graduate Diploma in agricultural economics from the University of Nigeria, and a Higher National Diploma in fisheries from Imo State College of Agriculture. He has previously worked/taught at Colorado State University, Penn State University and Florida A & M University.
Dr. Ukaga has served and continues to serve on many important boards and international project teams. Examples include Executive Board of the Minnesota Evaluation Association, Minnesota Sea Grant College, and Renewing the Countryside, Inc to name a few. He also served as a member of a Kettering Foundation funded national (USA) task force on the practice of public scholarship in land-grant institutions, a member of a European Union funded international task force on evaluation of sustainable development, and a consultant for the Florida A & M University -United States Agency for International Development Agribusiness Development Program (ADP) training in South Africa. His work has been applied and adapted in many parts of the world including various countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. Examples include evaluation of Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships in Minnesota, USA; planning and evaluation of extension service program of several universities in Indonesia, HELPO Foundation’s rural development project in India, and development of indicators for Sustainable Urban Brownfield Regeneration Integrated Management (SUBR:IM) consortium case study sites located in Manchester and Barking in Essex, United Kingdom.
Dr. Ukaga has written and/or coauthored over 50 publications including books, book chapters, special edition of a scholarly journal, journal articles, conference papers, and project reports. His book Renewing the Countryside (2001, co-edited with Jan Joannides, Sara Bergan, Mark Ritchie, and Beth Waterhouse) highlights the success stories of people across Minnesota’s diverse and beautiful landscapes who are conserving and enhancing the state’s natural and cultural resources while spurring local economic and community development. His book Evaluating Sustainable Development (2004, co-authored with Chris Maser) presents the principles and tools for participatory evaluation of sustainable development. His latest book Sustainable Development in Africa (2005, co-edited with Osita Afoaku) examines factors limiting sustainable development in Africa and offers reasoned suggestions on practical strategies for achieving development in Africa that is anchored on the values of sustainability, appropriateness and equity. His forthcoming book Sustainable Development: Principles, Frameworks and Cases (2008, co-edited with Chris Maser and Mike Reichenbach) summarizes selected key sustainable development models, including salient case examples that illustrate each model or framework.
Marcela Velasco, Ph.D.
Marcela is assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University where she specializes in Latin America, and in ethnic and environmental politics. Before coming to Fort Collins in 2008, she taught at various universities in Colombia and was an active member of Jenzera, a Bogota-based interethnic and multidisciplinary working group that supports peasant, indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities.
Bryan Willson, Ph.D.
Dr. Bryan Willson is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU) and has worked for over 25 years to develop large scale solutions for global energy needs. He is also a co-founder and Chief Technology Strategist of Solix Biofuels (www.SolixBiofuels.com), a developer of large-scale production systems for algae-based biofuels. In June 2009, Scientific American named him to its inaugural list of the “Scientific American 10” – ten individuals who have made significant contributions to “guiding science to serve humanity” on a global basis; in August 2009, he was awarded the Maurice Albertson Medal for Sustainable Development. Dr. Willson is founding Director of CSU’s Clean Energy Supercluster (www.Energy.ColoState.edu), Founder and Director of CSU’s Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory (www.EECL.ColoState.edu); and co-Founder of Envirofit International (www.Envirofit.org). Dr. Willson received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1988, the same year he joined the CSU faculty. He teaches in the areas of design, energy, and sustainable development. He is the Principal or Co-Principal Investigator on over $30 million in funded research; has funded over 350 graduate and undergraduate students; and is author or co-author of over 200 journal papers, conference proceedings, or technical reports.
Robert Youngberg
Robert is the President and CEO of Sustainable Development / International where he provides U.S. and international sustainable development consulting services. He also sits on the Board of the Trailblazer Foundation.
