Seanna Ashburn has spent over 30 years in a variety of education contexts – in teaching, curriculum design, research management, and project administration – at both local and national levels. With a Ph.D. in educational psychology, her experience includes coordinating and supporting multiple collaborative work teams in education and community contexts. Beginning in 1993, her study at Genesis Farm of the New Story of the Universe, as told by cultural historian and geologian Thomas Berry and mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, led her to focus on facilitating collaboration for innovation within the framework of David Bohm’s work on dialogue. She sees developing skills in communication through dialogue – a shared exploration towards greater understanding, connection, and possibility – as key to building and sustaining community, and to moving us collectively beyond our habitual patterns of thinking and behavior, toward reinventing the human to live in alignment with all of life.

Seanna is currently on the staff of Genesis Farm, an ecological learning center in NJ focused on the new cosmology, bioregionalism, and sustainability (www.genesisfarm.org). Genesis Farm was an early innovator in the community-supported agriculture movement, renewable energy, strawbale building construction, and in exploring the New Cosmology.

Tina Clarke has been an advocate, educator, consultant, and director of nonprofit programs since 1985. She is currently a consultant with Bill McKibben's global 350.org initiative and the Sustainability Institute. She has been providing professional training and support for community leaders and environmental campaigns for over 20 years.  In Washington, D.C. she directed national citizen advocacy training programs for faith communities, and directed Greenpeace USA's citizen activist network. She has consulted with over 400 NGOs on citizen campaigns and environmental issues.  In Massachusetts she directed a regional nonprofit assistance center, training NGO leaders in strategic planning and organizational development. As a Campaign Director for Clean Water Action, she initiated and helped lead coalitions on environmental justice, toxins and energy. Tina has an M.A. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago, a B.A. in urban studies from Macalester College, and is certified for consensus process facilitation and mediation. She is popular speaker on energy and environmental issues, creative frugality, and developing coalitions and strategic campaigns.  Currently she advises leaders in a half-dozen communities launching Transition Initiatives. Tina lives in a below-zero energy, passive solar-heated, Platiunm LEED, low-toxic "Power House" that she helped design and build. In 2009 the home won the Massachusetts utility company-sponsored competition, the Zero Energy Challenge.