Our People
The AAC Board
Vivienne Simon is an international coach/consultant/trainer who has been working all her life to foster a just and sustainable world. Among the areas she has worked on are Amazonian rainforest protection, international anti-nuclear campaigns, famine relief and peace efforts in Africa, women’s empowerment programs, directing the Center for Psychology and Social Change at Harvard, developing the field of ecopsychology, designing a university of the wild, and holistic approaches to healing cancer.
Her coaching, training and writings support evolving leaders to grow beyond the narrow reactive ways of modern leadership, and to respond with engaged co-creativity to the unique challenges and opportunities of the 21st century and beyond. A long time Buddhist meditator and an ex-lawyer, her work draws heavily on both Eastern and Western practices and teachings, and promotes the sacredness of all life. She is a contributing essayist to Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World.
Since his teenage years, Alejandro has founded and led organizations spanning activism, entrepreneurship, and finance. Raised by an ecologist and a poet, his life has sought to weave connections between the conduct of humans and ways of nature. A seasoned entrepreneur, he has founded or supported dozens of startup enterprises in a variety of industries and sectors over the last 35 years. He has served as chief financial officer, chief technology officer, and chief operating officer roles, both in-house and as a consultant. He has an interest in regenerative agriculture and in evolving the culture and structure of business and finance to be of greater service to the aliveness of life on the planet.
Past projects include
• SF Interactive, one of the first digital marketing agencies in the world
• Mediate Your Life, a conflict mediation training company centered on the technology of Nonviolent Communication (NVC)
• Carbon War Room, Sir Richard Branson’s non-profit initiative to curb carbon emissions
• Australis Aquaculture, the world’s largest commercial farmer of Barramundi, also known as Asian sea bass
• Regenerative Real Estate, with a mission of regenerating ecosystem function on degraded land through agricultural and land-management approaches
Alejandro is co-founder and currently serves as managing partner of JJBP Investments, a private real estate investment firm.
Judy has had a 50-year lifework of activism on behalf of children, people who are enslaved, and the environment. She is the founder of the Children’s Law Center of Connecticut. (1993) She has served on many boards, including Woolman Hill, a Quaker retreat center, a Unitarian church, and Connecticut Choral Artists. During her tenure with Free the Slaves in Washington, DC, she conducted research on the rehabilitation of children rescued from slavery in Togo, Cote D’Ivoire, India and Haiti, published by the US Department of Labor.
AAC Staff
In 1989 Adam graduated from Northeastern University and then studied ethno-ecology in Thailand thru San Francisco State University. After watching the failure of tribal relief projects led by the Thai and German governments he started Cultural Intrigue, a business buying tribal handicrafts as a way to give local peoples more financial freedom while honoring their cultural identity.
Over 20 years the business scaled to 25 employees, moved digital and sold a diversity of ethnic hand-made goods from all over South East Asia. Offerings include home spun textiles, ceramics, wood carvings and hand-blown glass. With the rise of giant internet retailers and the resulting reduced margins of ecommerce the business closed in 2017.
During the same period, Adam led numerous environmental projects in Vermont. As chairman of the Marlboro Vermont Conservation commission for 10 years, he directed wildlife migration studies in the 30,000-acre town. That work led to one of the most comprehensive municipal-level ecological zoning ordinances in the history of Vermont. He then founded Green Mountain Conservancy which took on a diversity of environmental projects, including the extension of migration studies throughout Windham County and the Green Mountain National Forest of Vermont, an area of over 800,000 acres. Detailed movements of coyotes, fox, bob cat, fisher, porcupine and other mammals were studied between the Connecticut River Valley and the Green Mountains of Vermont. These studies brought about a deep understanding of bio- corridors and migration in the area and received great reviews from the Nature Conservancy and other conservation organizations.
An avid navigator, backpacker, kayaker and back country skier, Adam has been leading deep wilderness adventures around the world for over 30 years. His extensive expeditions in all kinds of large wild landscapes along with his knowledge of migration and tracking have led to an ability to pinpoint areas of high conservation value in the larger ecological matrix. Adam is deeply committed to re-establishing ecological connectivity between the Andes and the Amazon which is essential to maintaining the great diversity of the region. He currently lives with his wife and son in northern Vermont.
Becca’s professional and volunteer life has been in service to reconnection, within the self with inner healing work, among humans with community development and between humans and the land, with non-profit organizations that support the connection between nature and human culture.
As a Focusing practitioner for 20 years, she has supported clients to reconnect with their deepest selves, especially those parts that have been denied, abandoned, shamed and hidden. By welcoming and learning to love all aspects of ourselves, a wholeness emerges that allows for greater flourishing in life.
As a community organizer, she has created opportunities for people to do things together, working with hands and hearts in service to a more beautiful world. Neighborhood potlucks, wood stacking parties, ceremony and ritual, community food processing of garden harvest, and community medicine making for covid are some of the activities. She has also been supporting an important neighborhood farm called Brook’s Bend to transition from single-family ownership to a collective “commons” structure.
As Board Chair of the Vermont Wilderness school (2005-15), she supported its mission of restoring our relationships with nature, ourselves, and each other. It has been a natural progression to support the work of the AAC, working on large-scale ecosystem reconnection in the critically biodiverse Amazon basin.
An Ecuadorian native of Kichwa descent, and immigrant to the US as a child, Gabriela provides an essential bridging for our work between North and South America. With both undergraduate and Masters degrees in Political Science specializing in international relations, policy and affairs, and experience in both business development and educational curriculum creation, Gabriela designs the processes needed to bridge between our Indigenous collaborators and the western non-profit paradigm.