Joseph B. Uehlein, Board President, Takoma Park, MD. Founding President and Executive Director of the Labor Network for Sustainability, and Voices for a Sustainable Future. Joe Uehlein is the former secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Department and former director of the AFL-CIO Center for Strategic Campaigns. Joe spent over 30 years doing organizing, bargaining, and strategic campaign work in the labor movement. Joe also served as the Secretary to the North American Coordinating Committee of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, and Mine Workers unions (ICEM). He is a founding board member of Ceres, a member of the National Advisory Board of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and served as a senior strategic advisor to the Blue Green Alliance for five years.   He also served on the United Nations commission on global warming in the 1990’s.  He also serves on the advisory board of the Future of Music Coalition. In the early 1970’s he worked in an aluminum mill as a member of the United Steelworkers of America, and on heavy and highway construction projects as a member of the Laborer’s International Union of North America.  Joe is a musician, and a member of the American Federation of Musicians.

Barbara Byrd, Board Treasurer and Chairperson of Compensation Committee, Portland, OR. Barbara Byrd is the Secretary-Treasurer of the Oregon AFL-CIO and a member of the American Federation of Teachers Local #2277.  Her AFL-CIO responsibilities include overseeing economic development, workforce training and green jobs/climate change issues. She coordinates the activities of the Oregon Apollo Alliance, which is housed at the Oregon AFL-CIO. Barbara also teaches in the AFL-CIO’s Leadership Institute. She worked with community groups and unions to help craft a Community Workforce Agreement for the City of Portland’s pilot residential weatherization program, Clean Energy Works, and she was involved in the effort to have Portland designated a pilot site for the Emerald Cities program.  About two years ago, Barbara helped to organize a Western regional labor group, including heads of the labor federations from the Western US and British Columbia, to push labor’s agenda with the Western Climate Initiative.  In December, 2010, Barbara attended the United Nations Climate Change Convention in Copenhagen, Denmark, Indonesia, as part of the official US labor delegation. Barbara also serves as a faculty member of the Labor Education and Research Center (LERC) at the University of Oregon in Portland, where she teaches workshops and classes for union activists and leaders, including grievance handling, leadership skills, and internal organizing.  She also oversees LERC’s green jobs and climate change work. Recently, she and her colleagues have been conducting labor and climate training sessions around the state, attempting to mobilize greater labor participation in the state climate policy arena Barbara has a Masters Degree in Labor Studies and a Ph.D. in Adult Education.

Lisa Hoyos, Board Secretary and Secretary of Compensation Committee, San Francisco, CA. Lisa Hoyos is National Director of Field Initiatives and California Director for the Apollo Alliance. Lisa has two decades of experience working on labor and environmental issues as a campaigner and policy staffer. She has worked for the national AFL-CIO as a California Senior Field Representative, as the Political Director of the South Bay Labor Council, and as an organizer of Latino immigrant workers with SEIU’s Justice for Janitors. She served, under state Senator Tom Hayden, as an analyst to the CA Senate Natural Resources Committee and has worked with environmental organizations including Greenpeace and the Environmental Project on Central America. In addition to her many years of US-based work, Lisa worked for two years leading a globalization project with the Congress of South African Trade Unions in Johannesburg and has coordinated the prominent global fair trade network “Our World Is Not For Sale.”  Lisa serves or has served on boards of organizations including the California Fair Trade Coalition, Working Partnerships USA, United for a Fair Economy and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Lisa is fluent in Spanish. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and their two joy inducing young boys.

Dr. Elaine Bernard, Board Member, Cambridge, MA. Dr. Elaine Bernard serves as the Executive Director, Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard University.  She has a BA from the University of Alberta, a MA from the University of British Columbia and a Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University. Bernard has conducted courses on a wide variety of topics for unions, community groups, universities and government departments. Her current research and teaching interests are in the areas of international comparative labor movements and the role of unions in promoting civil society, democracy and economic growth. Some of her more recent talks and publications include: “The Changing Workplace and Building A Union’s Organizational Capacity,” “Organizing in a Cold Climate,” “How to Get Momentum to Change the Structure,” “Why Unions Matter,” “Labor Rights as Human Rights,” “Why Health Care Should Not Be a Business,” “Social Unionism: Labor as a Political Force,” “Public Sector Workers and the Creation of Public Value,” and “The Way to the Future: Setting a Social Agenda for Labor.”

Jennifer Krill, Board Member, Washington DC and San Francisco, CA. Jennifer Krill serves as the Executive Director of EARTHWORKS based in Washington, DC. Extracting social and environmental justice from corporate boardrooms since 1995, Jennifer Krill joined EARTHWORKS in January 2010, where she supports the organization’s national and international programs on mining and fossil fuel extraction. Prior to EARTHWORKS, Jennifer directed campaigns at Rainforest Action Network (RAN), where she helped negotiate a landmark policy from Boise Cascade to protect old growth forests, managed RAN’s program to convince Japanese paper companies to stop buying old growth pulp from Tasmania, led the grassroots organizing campaign resulting in Home Depot ending its purchases of endangered wood products, directed the successful campaign to jump-start Ford Motor Company, co-designed RAN’s innovative effort to spur the nation’s largest banks to stop financing climate change-causing industries, and helped found RAN’s ambitious Rainforest Agribusiness Campaign working to get big agribusiness out of rainforest regions. Jennifer currently serves on the board of Plug-in America, the Advisory Council of the Business Ethics Network and is a former board member of Dogwood Alliance. She holds a B.A. and a B.L.A. from Ball State University.

John Brown Childs, Board Member, Santa Cruz, CA is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Childs is a popular teacher and expert on contemporary urban issues whose research on social action and populist social movements is enriched by his volunteer participation in community groups. He has been involved for many years in the urban youth antiviolence movement in the U.S. He is a member of the board of directors of Barrios Unidos/United Neighborhoods, a Santa Cruz-based national organization that is dedicated to creating peaceful alternatives to gang and youth violence. Childs also works with Stop the Violence in Los Angeles and the Institute for Violence Reduction in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1998, in recognition of his academic achievement and his community work, John Brown Childs received the prestigious Fulbright Thomas Jefferson Chair award. He spent a portion of the 1997-98 academic year at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands where, as a visiting scholar, he was an “academic ambassador” to universities and community organizations in the Netherlands, lecturing about issues of urban community and the state of race and ethnic relations in the United States. Childs is also the is author of several books, including: Transcommunality: From the Politics of Conversion to the Ethics of Respect; Leadership, Conflict, and Cooperation in Afro-American Social Thought; The political Black minister: A study in Afro-American politics and religion; and Hurricane Katrina: Response and Responsibilities(editor).