Marlboro College Graduate School

MBA Faculty

Program Director - Ralph Meima

Ralph Meima joined Marlboro College Graduate School in 2006 to direct the startup of the MBA in Managing for Sustainability, and continues as its director.  He was previously Assistant Professor of Organizational Management at the School for International Training, where he taught courses in management, organization, strategy, marketing, and research methods, and advised master's projects.  Before coming to Vermont, Meima spent 14 years in Sweden, where he worked for LM Ericsson, completed a doctorate in management at Lund University, and carried out research and consulting projects around Europe in environmental economics, corporate environmental management, and CSR.  He operated a communication agency, Meima Associates, in Lund.  He has written books and articles on environmental management and policy.  Other interests include simulation and experiential education, speculative fiction, futurism, and renewable energy.  Meima has served on the boards of among other organizations the Vermont Environmental Consortium and Brattleboro Thermal Utility.  A U.S. native, he speaks Swedish, French, and German, and has spent nearly half of his life living outside the U.S. (or longer if you include Vermont in that distinction). Meima began his career as an IT industry engineer, with positions at IBM, SPOT Image Corp., and Accenture.  He is married with three children, and lives in Vermont.

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Bill Baue

Bill Baue has advanced sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) through communication for more than a decade. He’s currently consulting with Addison as Interactive CSR Media Strategist for the GE Citizenship Website and Report; serving as a Senior Research Fellow at AccountAbility, a UK-based corporate sustainability and responsibility standards organization; and teaching communications in the Marlboro MBA in Managing for Sustainability in Vermont. Recently, he worked with Bob Massie managing The Transition Group, a sustainability consultancy, and edited its blog, The Murninghan Post.

Bill co-founded Sea Change Media and served as its executive director, as well as executive producer/host of Sea Change Radio, a nationally syndicated show and podcast with a global audience.  As a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative, he co-wrote The Accountability Web, a report on the intersection of Web 2.0 and corporate accountability that is being republished in two parts in The Journal of Corporate Citizenship. He’s presented the findings for the Global Reporting Initiative, Ceres, Issue Management Council, and Addison.

Bill has produced and presented multimedia content for organizations across the sustainability ecosystem: United Nations, Worldwatch Institute, Ceres, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, Investor Environmental Health Network, The Economist, Audubon and Audubon Magazine, SocialFunds, CSRwire, 3BL Media, and Wal-Mart's inaugural Sustainability Report.

Bill lives in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts with his wife Jiyanna and daughters Clara, Emma, and Aoife.

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Barbara Charkey

Barbara Charkey

Barbara Charkey has been a Professor of Management at Keene State College, Keene, N.H. for more than 20 years. Her primarily academic focus is in Accounting and Finance, but she also has extensive professional experience in International Management, Entrepreneurship and Strategic Management. Prior to joining the Management faculty at Keene State, Charkey developed and managed her own small business and was employed as an auditor for a regional public accounting firm. Charkey has been involved in a wide range of innovative curriculum development projects related to financial and managerial accounting topics, international accounting issues and women’s entrepreneurship. Over the years her research and professional development projects have been funded by institutional and private grants and awards and have resulted in conference presentations and published case studies and papers. Most recently she has focused her research and curriculum development efforts on measurement and accountability issues relative to organizational sustainability initiatives. Charkey has taught Accounting and Finance courses as a visiting lecturer in M.B.A. programs both regionally and abroad. She enjoys tennis, hiking and fine dining, especially in conjunction with international travel.

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Peter Crowell

Peter Crowell

Peter Crowell is the founder of Context 360, Inc. Prior to founding the company Peter held senior positions in various Fortune 500 companies. He was the Senior Vice President of Technology for the McGraw-Hill media companies, the CIO of CBS, Inc., the President of Chase Access Services, a Chase Manhattan Bank, NA subsidiary, the Technology Architect for Chase Manhattan Bank, NA, and a Partner in CSC Consulting. He started his career as a computer programmer and moved into his first CIO position in 1976. In 1998, after working on Web strategies at McGraw-Hill and CBS, he moved completely into the Web world when he founded and ran an Internet Systems Integration firm, Spider Partners, LLC. During that time he also acted as the President of an Internet community building company, UniverseONE, Inc.

An aggressive adopter of new technology to drive business results, Peter’s work is currently working as a consultant focused on leading corporate performance transformations by applying his broad experience. He typically does this utilizing the roles of strategist, mentor, coach, teacher, advisor, program designer and implementer. He has held Chairman and President positions for the New York Chapter of the International Society for Information Management. He has taught courses in Information Technology Management, Business Strategy, Information Technology Strategy, eCommerce, Corporate Finance, and Process Reengineering in the MBA programs at Fordham University in New York City, Stevens Institute in New Jersey, and Metropolitan College in New York City.

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Cheryl L. Conner

Cheryl Connor

 

Cheryl Conner is a change agent, lawyer, economist, composer and integrative thinker.  As a young girl and daughter of a corporate CEO, she was drawn to address issues of poverty and controlling corporate America. In college and grad school, she offered relentless critiques of economic thinking, which she had hoped would address, rather than assume away, these concerns. As an economist/researcher, she saw that most economists worked to support rather than change the system, so she pursued law to find a more “practical” way to promote economic justice. At law school, and then later as an attorney in both the private and public sectors, and at the state and federal levels, through litigation, legislation and policy making, she brought her humanistic and integrative thinking to bear. After study and practice under a Tibetan yogi for 15 years, she came to realize that these economic and legal tools would only bring the lasting benefits she sought, if they were generated from a deeper consciousness. As a law professor and thought leader, she led others to integrate holistic and spiritual perspectives within legal education and practice. A health issue interrupted this work, and during recuperation she began composing, painting and re-imagining new systems for the future. Her current consulting work at New Prospects Collaborative benefits individuals, non-profits and social entrepreneurs on legal, organizational and spiritual concerns. Her book-in-progress, The New Cosmeconomy, explores how new legal, economic and business systems will arise from a deeper social consciousness. Sustainability is an important piece of the puzzle.

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Pat Daniel

Dr. Pat Daniel works as a consultant and trainer, supporting corporations and non-profits on organization development, executive coaching, human resource development, strategic planning, communications, and sustainability.  She also provides career and life coaching services for individuals.

Prior to her independent practice, Pat served as the associate director of Ceres, a national network of investors and environmental groups working with corporations to address sustainability challenges. She interfaced with Ceres companies, investors and stakeholder groups, and directed the annual Ceres Conference. She played a key role in the development and launch of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and represented Ceres at the U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. As the chief operating officer, Dr. Daniel managed operations, human resources, board relations, and strategic planning during a period when the organization more than doubled in size.

Before joining Ceres, Pat spent 11 years at Polaroid Corporation, where she served as worldwide training manager for Total Quality Management and corporate ethics and compliance. She led a re-engineering effort to enhance and streamline design for the environment and product stewardship, and managed the company’s environmental training. As an internal consultant and coach, she advised executives and employees on organizational and team development.

As a certified professional level Kripalu yoga teacher, Pat has taught yoga and meditation for over 20 years. She has a particular interest in yoga and the natural world, and has written about outdoor meditation for Yoga Journal.  She was the founding editor of the Green Yoga Association newsletter. 

She is the co-founder and managing editor of Engaging Peace, and blogs at WizardofEase.com.

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Cheryl Eaton

Cheryl is a Partner and the Director of Strategy at Kelliher Samets Volk, a marketing firm with offices in Burlington, Boston, and New York. Cheryl has been building sharp marketing, branding and communications strategies and efforts for organizations for more than a decade. She particularly enjoys leveraging brand strategy to inspire business innovation inside organizations, and unleashing the "genius" inside of people and teams.  She has helped do this for clients like New Balance, Seventh Generation, Efficiency Vermont, National Grid, and Time Warner.  A member of Marlboro College's pioneer cohort graduating with an MBA in Sustainable Business, Cheryl is particularly inspired by microfinance, systems thinking, how gender relates to issues of sustainability, and tapping into all of our many dimensions as humans to unleash innovative solutions.

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John Ehrenfeld

John Ehrenfeld

Dr. Ehrenfeld maintains a website and blog devoted to the subject of sustainability. In June 2009 he stepped down as Executive Director of the International Society for Industrial Ecology, after guiding its development since it was founded in 2000. He retired in 2000 as the Director of the MIT Program on Technology, Business, and Environment, an interdisciplinary educational, research, and policy program. Prior to joining the team at Marlboro, he served as an adjunct faculty member at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute. In October 1999, the World Resources Institute honored him with a lifetime achievement award for his academic accomplishments in the field of business and environment. He received the Founders Award for Distinguished Service from the Academy of Management's Organization and Natural Environment Division in August 2000. He spent part of the 1998-1999 academic year at the Technical University of Lisbon as a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar and was Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Delft during the 2000-2001 academic year. He serves on several boards. He is an editor of the Journal of Industrial Ecology, and is author or co-author of over 200 papers, books, reports, and other publications.

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John Fabel

John Fabel

John Fabel's core work focuses on the practice and teaching of technology innovation and commercialization, with a particular interest in clean technology and sustainable development. He was originally trained as a climate scientist, and this perspective drives his work as an entrepreneur and educator. As an entrepreneur, he has started or assisted in the start-up of numerous entrepreneurial ventures in both for- and not-for-profit sectors including Sunethanol, Jattra Ventures, LLC, and InnovationPath, LLC. Among his many successes is the The Ecotrek Company, Amherst, MA. As Founder and President, John developed the concept, product line and marketing for this landmark line of outdoor equipment integrating high-performance, cutting-edge design with recycled and environmentally responsible materials and domestic manufacturing. The Ecotrek "Seed" model backpack is now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American History. His current venture, Sylvan Cycles, LLC, makes bicycles and other high-performance products from sustainable wood laminate materials.

 

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Thomas Grasso

Thomas Grasso

Tom Grasso is currently Senior Advisor with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) where he focuses on reforming the economics and management structures of ocean fisheries. Prior to joining EDF, from 1999-2008, he was Director of Marine Conservation and Acting Managing Director of Fisheries for the World Wildlife Fund. While there he led a team that worked in fisheries around the globe, especially Africa, Europe, and Asia. In 2006, Tom was selected as a Fellow with the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management's "Emerging Leaders for Innovations Across Sectors" Program, where he studied with Professors Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer. From 1995-1999, Tom served as Executive Director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's Maryland office and from 1993-95 as their staff attorney. He has also held positions with the Union of Concerned Scientists, where he focused on national policy reform efforts on climate and energy, the National Wildlife Federation where he worked on reforming national transportation and energy policy, and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (now known as EarthJustice), where he served as Project Attorney.

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Lori Hanau

Lori Hanau

 

Lori Hanau grew up in New England in an entrepreneurial family that taught her the value of love, balance, and integrity in fostering strong leadership and healthy collaborative relationships.  Even at a young age, she carried these values and expanded them beyond the human realm into the realm of an intangible universal spirit that continues to strengthen and inspire her work and life. She draws on both these essential components of herself to guide her commitment to be of service to the world.

Lori’s early career in business, including presidency of a manufacturing company, offered opportunities to observe and engage in diverse leadership styles and organizational systems. During this time, she began to differentiate between the qualities that support vibrant, sustainable organizations and social ecosystems, and those that lead to dysfunction. In a break from the corporate world, Lori pursued these qualities through an exploration of the service sectors of society, including health, science, philanthropy, spirituality and mission-driven business. Here, she found herself among innovators who were working for all aspects of whole systems change.

In 2002, Lori founded Global Round Table Leadership (GRTL) whose mission is to steward the emergence of a thriving, harmonious world through the strengthening of the positive, essential qualities of our humanity. GRTL’s envisions a world in which individuals and communities come together through the best of our collective humanity. To this end, GRTL engages people across all sectors in the spiritual work of building flourishing relationships with the self, one another and the systems of which we are a part. She does this as an advisor, facilitator and community builder.

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Will Keyser

Will Keyser

 

Will Keyser is a veteran entrepreneur and business startup counselor, as well as a writer and blogger on entrepreneurship. After a career in public relations and advertising he became a management consultant with a major French-based consulting firm, working in the socio-economic field--particularly in public enterprise and employment policy. He later established his own firm and ran it for 11 years before selling it to its 30 staff members for a nominal sum. The company specialized in employment and HR strategy, as well as management development and training. He worked with clients in banking, finance, oil and power generation and distribution, electronics, engineering and food manufacturing.

His recent US startup clients have included a green fashion retailing chain in the Southeast, an online fitness business, a Texas-based group of green cemeteries, a low-tech communication company for the speech impaired and a number of one-person enterprises. His website is a wealth of free material on sustainable startup strategies. With a partner, he is involved (as President) with a startup in the field of health and wellness.

Will has also been a UK government adviser in economic development, on the board of a regional venture capital company, a management association president, and a council member of an employers' federation.  He is currently on the board of the Brattleboro Food Coop (a $16m, 2-store grocery business) and is a panel member at the Brattleboro Community Justice Center. He is the author of several books on public enterprise in Europe. Will brings an international perspective having lived and worked in the UK, US and France. He attended the University of Westminster and the London College of Communication in UK, as well as the Universities of Besançon and Lille in France. As a teenager he went to Outward Bound Mountain School and as a 69 year-old went on Outward Bound again, sailing off the coast of Maine. He served as an officer in the British Army Intelligence Corps during military service.

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Cecilia McMillen

Cecilla Mcmillen

M. Cecilia McMillen has been working as an organizational consultant in the United States and Latin America for over twenty years. She combines her independent practice with management education, and has taught MBA courses and executive seminars, in business schools in the United States and Latin America. She is fluent in English and Spanish, and uses both languages in teaching and consulting. An important ingredient in her work is cultural awareness: understanding and making explicit the culturally-based assumptions that underlie organizational issues in different societies.

Cecilia's organizational consulting practice specializes in organizational development and change management. She has worked with international organizations in the private sector as well as in the non-profit and public sector. Lately, her clients have also included family owned and operated enterprises in Latin America. Typical assignments have included organizational change programs to align organizational design and practices with organizational strategy; organizational assessment and diagnosis through survey research and feedback; design and delivery of leadership and management assessment and development programs, as well as development of governance structures for family firms. As a trained experiential learning facilitator,  the programs she designs and delivers use highly participative metholodologies, including simulations, questionnaires and exercises,  as well as case study analysis and discussion.

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Jeffery Saari

Jeff Saari

Jeffrey Saari has been a life coach at Inner Connections since October 2006.  He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Holistic Studies from Vermont College in January of 2005 where his main focus was modern spiritual philosophy and meditation.  After school he took a year off to pursue music performance.  Then, while searching for a way to bring his interests of psychology and spirituality together Jeff found life coaching, and at the end of 2005 he enrolled at the Coach Training Alliance, a life coaching school where he obtained his degree in June of 2006.  Jeff then started his own company, called Visionary Coaching, which led him to dialogues with Chris Cotton.  Chris’s work with young adults and families inspired Jeff so much that he agreed to become part of the Inner Connections mission and family.  Jeff’s training in and love of meditation continually supports his development of one of the most crucial aspects of coaching:  deep listening.  He enjoys drumming, reading, and sports of all kinds.  He lives in Keene, NH with his wife Melissa and daughter Sophie.

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Elizabeth Schmidt

 

 

Elizabeth Schmidt teaches Nonprofit Law and Property at Vermont Law School, and runs a reading group on Social Enterprise Law there. Previously, she taught Nonprofit Law, Family Law, Juvenile Law, Employment Discrimination, Legal Writing, and Legal Skills at the College of William and Mary.

In addition to being a law professor, Professor Schmidt has been a corporate litigator, legal counsel for GuideStar, a manager of educational outreach at Colonial Williamsburg, and a management consultant for nonprofit organizations. At both Colonial Williamsburg and GuideStar, she developed mission-related and revenue-producing programs. As a management consultant, she wrote strategic plans, helped organizations improve governance, guided organizations through transitions, and led seminars on legal and managerial issues facing nonprofits. She also authored several community assessments and helped communities determine how best to meet their goals.

Professor Schmidt has authored articles related to nonprofit governance, accountability, policies, and ethics, as well as a casebook on nonprofit law, Nonprofit Law: The Life Cycle of a Charitable Organization. She has also written about the emerging area of social enterprise.

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Roma Sidortsov

In Russia, Roma worked as an in-house counsel for an American non-profit organization, specializing in corporate, labor and tax matters. In the U.S. Roma continued his legal career as a paralegal at Meckler Bulger and Tilson, in Chicago, where he worked on a variety of insurance coverage cases including a large number of cases involving environmental claims. Upon relocation to Phoenix, Arizona, Roma joined the immigration division of Littler Mendelson, one of the largest employment and labor firms in the United States. As a member of the firm's global group, Roma specialized in Eastern-European and Canadian immigration matters, including policy analysis, as well as in overall immigration process improvement with emphasis on information technology and other business efficiency tools.

Roma received a J.D. degree, magna cum laude, from Vermont Law School in 2008. In law school, Roma concentrated on environmental and energy law and served as an editorial staff member at Vermont Journal of Environmental Law. Upon graduation, Roma joined Gravel and Shea, a law firm based in Burlington, Vermont. At Gravel and Shea, Roma focused on a variety of transactional matters, including energy-related financing, permitting, tax and real estate issues. Roma also helped to organize the firm's energy practice. Roma is currently pursuing an LLM degree. He is interested in global carbon mitigation governance and relationship between carbon mitigation mechanisms and corruption, accountability and transparency of public institutions.

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Tracy Sloan

Tracy Sloan started her professional career at Coopers and Lybrand as an auditor with a concentration on financial institutions, as well as non-profits.  Her current work is focused on tax and financial consulting for individuals and small business.  She is also interested in applying an entrepreneurial approach to non-profits.

 

 

 

David S. Timmons

David Timmons

Dave is on the faculty of the Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate environmental economics courses. He is particularly interested in energy issues. His recent dissertation research looked at the potential for biomass energy crops in Massachusetts. Dave helped to develop, and for three summers led, SIT Study Abroad's undergraduate summer program, Iceland: Renewable Energy, Technology, and Resource Economics. Dave has also done research on local food systems. Current research interests include building energy conservation, and economic potential for deep-energy retrofit of existing building stock.

 

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Marianne Tyrrell

marianne tyrrell

Marianne Tyrrell is a Global Energy Fellow in the Institute for Energy and the Environment (IEE). Before joining the IEE, Marianne worked as a consultant serving such clients as the British Consulate General, Boston, working on a transportation efficiency innovation project; ICF International, serving as a project manager to U.S. EPA's Smart Growth Implementation Assistance projects; and the Center for Climate Strategies, managing projects and facilitating stakeholder-based state climate action planning processes. Since 2004, Marianne has served as a Vice Chair for the American Bar Association Committee on Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Ecosystems.

Marianne served a judicial clerkship with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Hampshire, and served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review at Widener University School of Law.

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Valerie Voorheis

Valerie Voorheis

Valerie Voorheis is a Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in the Department of Economics and a Visiting Professor at Marlboro College. Val has also held positions at the School for International Training, the Labor Studies Masters Program at UMass, as well as other undergraduate institutions. Her research interests includes household production, gender, labor and discrimination. She has recently been focused on the history of industrial organization and comparative industrial policy. Val lives in Franklin County with her two young daughters and her partner.

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Beverly Winterscheid

Beverley Winterscheid

Beverly C. Winterscheid, Ph.D., is Founder and Executive Director of The Institute for Nature and Leadership, a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC that promotes the sustaining effects of nature on human interaction and achievement. She holds a Ph.D. in Strategic Management, and has done post-doctoral work in ecopsychology. Her career has included international and U.S. postings in both the private sector, where she focused on strategy and human resources, and academia. Her publications focus on the development of core competencies, and organizational learning processes.


Beverly was co-developer of an innovative Master’s degree in Mission-Driven Organizations at the School for International Training in Vermont, and has taught Strategic Management, Social Accountability in Organizations, Management of Innovation and Technology, International Management and Human Resources Management. She has been on the faculties of The European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, Baldwin-Wallace College, Vrije Universiteit – Brussel, and Boston University – Brussels. Beverly assisted in the creation of the Cleveland World Trade Center and was a founding member of the Board of the Sustainable Business Network of Washington DC.

Managing for Sustainability

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    1. Managing for Sustainability
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