Sustainable Tompkins is governed by a Board of Directors and supported by staff and volunteers.

Board of Directors

Gay Nicholson, President
Tom Shelley, Chair
Miranda Phillips, Secretary
Marian Brown, Treasurer
Don Barber
Shira Evergreen
Dick Franke
Maryann Friend

Staff Support

Gay Nicholson, Director of Programs
Karen Jewett, Director of Operations
Nancy Robbins, Bookkeeper

Board and Staff Bios

Gay Nicholson

Since 2004, Gay Nicholson has led Sustainable Tompkins in designing and implementing an integrated program to advance the creation of a more sustainable regional community. Gay emphasizes a systems approach to working with partners to build the infrastructure and social capacity for more sustainable ways of living and working. She has also been instrumental in the founding and development of the Green Resource Hub and its SEEN (Sustainable Enterprise & Entrepreneur Network), which focuses on expanding the regional marketplace for sustainable living. Gay participates in a number of local partnerships related to energy and climate, local investing, equity as an economic driver, and green tourism.

Gay left a career in sustainable agriculture to work in environmental advocacy and education with Cornell’s Program on Ethics and Public Life, and as executive director of the Finger Lakes Land Trust before leading the creation of Sustainable Tompkins. She has been an active volunteer in numerous community and environmental organizations, providing leadership from the local to the national level. Her B.S. in Environmental Science is from University of Virginia, and her M.S. and Ph.D. are in horticulture from Cornell University.  She currently serves on the boards of Center for a New American Dream, Green Resource Hub, and the Tompkins County Planning Advisory Board.

Miranda Phillips

Miranda Phillips graduated from Cornell (1997) with a BA in English. Another core interest at that time was Jewish education. In 2000, Miranda received a Masters in Jewish Education (Hebrew College, Boston) with a focus on environmental issues. After eight wonderful years at a congregation in Newton, MA, Miranda took a break from synagogue teaching to explore more deeply her interest in sustainability. She spent a delicious sabbatical year shadowing garden teachers in Berkeley, CA. On returning to Ithaca with her husband in 2006, she enjoyed volunteering and organizing volunteers with Sustainable Tompkins, and joined Interfaith Action for Healing Earth – a local group exploring the overlap between sustainability and congregational life. Miranda was also excited to study permaculture design at the Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute, and continues to enjoy redesigning her house and garden with these principles in mind. When her baby daughter Julia is old enough, she also looks forward to returning to synagogue education and school gardens.

Thomas Shelley

Thomas Shelley attended Bowling Green University (Ohio) majoring in geology and chemistry. Most of Tom’s early working career was as a chemist doing analytical work in industrial labs.  He worked at Cornell University Environmental Health and Safety for 13.5 years, and held the position of Chemical Hygiene Officer for the last nine years of his career there.  Tom then worked part time for Cornell University Environmental Health and Safety and held other consulting and training positions for four years before his full retirement at the end of 2007.

In the ensuing years, Tom has become increasingly involved in the sustainability movement in Ithaca and Tompkins County.  He volunteers in various capacities for 12 different sustainability-related organizations including the Board of Directors of Sustainable Tompkins.

Alex Colket

Alex Colket first came to Tompkins County in 1996 as a student and quickly fell in love with the place. After graduating from Cornell in 2001 with a degree in neurobiology, he took a job teaching children at a local Montessori school. After three years there, he left that job to build his own business, A Playground for the Mind, which offers online games and exercises to sharpen your mind. Five years later, this is still his main professional focus.

Alex first started working with ST in 2008 as a volunteer cook, preparing meals for ST’s Equity & Sustainability events. He is the newest member of the board, having just joined in Fall ’09 and is very excited for the opportunity to work with the other board members and the community towards a more sustainable Tompkins County. Some of Alex’s other interests include dancing, cooking, plants, permaculture, photography, science, games, yoga, meditation and the natural world. Around town, you’re likely to encounter him at the Farmer’s Market, Greenstar, Castaways, Grassroots, or just walking down a road, trail or creek.

Richard Franke, Ph.D.

Richard W. Franke is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Montclair State University in New Jersey where he taught from 1972 to 2009. He received his B. A., M. A. and Ph. D. from Harvard University. Franke has done research in Surinam, France, The Netherlands, Indonesia, West Africa and Kerala, India on social aspects of economic development, social inequality, social justice, social movements and environmental sustainability. He is author or co-author of six books and numerous journal articles and reviews.

Franke taught courses on globalization and sustainability, nutritional anthropology, the anthropology of conflict and violence, development anthropology, research methods and nonwestern contributions to the Western world. In 2009 Franke and his wife, Dr. Barbara H. Chasin, moved to the Ecovillage at Ithaca where they have been participating in local area activities in support of the already advanced work on sustainability and social justice in Tompkins County. Along with Sustainable Tompkins, Franke has been actively involved with the Tompkins County Workers Center and the Martin Luther King Community Build.

Maryann Friend

In 1982, Maryann Friend began her career in the marketing department of FLI Environmental Testing Laboratory in Waverly, New York. FLI tested industry effluents, monitored county landfills for toxic discharge, as well as examined contaminants from individual wells. Maryann designed macro and micro projects to inform government, industry and the general public about environmental stress caused by various industrial, agricultural and residential discharge. During her tenure there, FLI tripled in size and became one of the largest private laboratories in New York State.

Immediately following the birth of her first child, Maryann left the laboratory in 1990 and began a small medical manufacturing products company. She developed a base of oral and cosmetic surgeons who purchased cold packs for post-surgical use. Maryann sold the company to a distributor in 1996.

Ithaca’s energy, beauty and sustainable base drew Maryann to the area. After a stint of free-lance writing, Maryann opened Smart Monkey Café in 2006, an organic and natural restaurant in Ithaca. She enjoyed bringing in local products of all kinds – ingredients, art and music. She closed the restaurant in 2010 and writes fiction and operates a catering business that specializes in organic dishes.

Karen Jewett

Karen Jewett is excited to join Sustainable Tompkins as the new Director of Operations. In May she relocated to the Ithaca area (Dryden) after 20 plus years in San Francisco where she happily lived in the Haight Ashbury district. She has a broad and deep experience in community building, non-profit management and fundraising including running a touring circus in California; coordinating neighborhood performing arts events and community celebrations in Pittsburgh, PA; organizing citizens in New York City in support of their neighborhood parks; and training and supporting peace activists to help soldiers during the first war with Iraq. From 1999 to 2007 Karen worked for Cornell’s Western Regional Office: connecting Cornell alumni in the seven western states to each other and to the University. For the last few years she has been honing her horticultural skills at the San Francisco Botanical Garden, and as a residential gardener in 25 San Francisco gardens. Karen grew up in Ithaca in the Northeast neighborhood and left after graduating from Cornell’s College of Human Ecology in 1979.

Shira Golding Evergreen

Shira Golding Evergreen is a queer multimedia artist and activist living in Dryden. She runs Shirari Industries with her partner Ari, providing creative and consulting services to nonprofits and others who share their vision of social and environmental justice. Shira studied documentary filmmaking at Cornell University and the British American Film Academy in London and worked in the independent film industry in New York City for six years where she directed the Media That Matters Film Festival and served as Director of Education and Outreach at Arts Engine, traveling to India to help launch Adobe Youth Voices, a global youth media initiative. She also served on the board of MIX NYC, a queer experimental film festival.

Since moving back to Ithaca in 2008, Shira has plugged in to the local scene, becoming an organizer with Ithaca Freeskool and co-founding Share Tompkins, a volunteer-based group that helps people share and barter goods and services through events and online community-building. She wrote and co-directed Frac Attack: Dawn of the Watershed, a short environmental zombie thriller that explores the dark side of natural gas drilling. Her first feature film, Empowered: Power from the People, tells the story of Tompkins County residents who are meeting their energy needs through totally renewable resources, from solar and wind to veggie oil and geothermal. The film is being screened around the region and country to inspire people to take concrete steps towards a fossil fuel free future.

Don Barber

Don Barber grew up on a 300-acre family dairy farm in Danby, NY. He received a BS and MS in engineering from Alfred University. After working as an engineer in Corning for 10 years and earning a US patent, he returned to his farming roots on 65 acres in Brooktondale. He also owned and operated a residential construction business for 25 years, purchasing only from locally-owned businesses and is a living wage employer. His early efforts in reuse and recycling were features in a tutorial for home builders in the early 1990′s. He is currently in his 8th term serving as Town Supervisor in Caroline, NY.

Don has always been conscious of his carbon footprint. He operates his farm with draft horses, bikes 3 miles to work at his Town office, and 13 years ago installed a 2KW photovoltaic system at his farm. He and his wife Rita currently operate an agri-tourism business acquainting guests with the wonder of right-off-the-vine fresh garden vegetables and sustainable agriculture.

During Don’s tenure, the Town of Caroline was one of the initial consortium of local governments to purchase their municipal electricity from renewable sources; and the second municipality in NYS to purchase 100% of its electricity from renewable sources. Caroline’s new super-insulated office building is heated by the earth (geothermal) and powered by the sun (PV).