Staff & Board of Advisors

Stacey Schmader

Co-Founder and Chief Financial Officer

Stacey is a co-founder of CELDF. She leads Human Resources and is responsible for planning, organization, and direction of the organization’s operations and programs. She has been with CELDF throughout its many twists and turns, and brings degrees in Biology and Accounting to the group. Her passion for this work has been a driving force since the beginning, “We started out small and knew that it was a big task, but we kept moving toward our goal. I never dreamed that we would have all of the staff members that we currently have. It was a dream, one that you hope others will take on and now they have.” Contact: stacey@celdf.org or 717-498-0054.

Kai Huschke

Executive Director and Development Director

Since 2008, Kai has been working with community rights groups in the Western United States including Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. He was a principal member of Envision Spokane which proposed the very first Community Bill of Rights in 2009 and subsequent Worker Bill of Rights and Voter Bill of Rights campaigns. Kai is a lecturer for CELDF’s Democracy School and a board member of the Oregon Community Rights Network. Kai lives with his family near the confluence of Hangman Creek and the Spokane River, home and traditional fishing grounds of first peoples for over 11,000 years including bands of the Spokane as well as the Coeur d’Alene, Nez Perce, and Palouse tribes. Contact: kai@celdf.org, keybase.io/kaihuschke (encrypted), or 509-607-5034 (encrypted through signal.org).

Michelle (Sanborn) Beatty

Communications Director

Michelle co-led an effort to successfully protect the Newfound Lake communities of New Hampshire through a Right to Sustainable Energy Ordinance in 2014. She joined CELDF in 2014 to nurture relationships with state representatives, helping New Hampshire to become the first state in the nation to move Community Rights amendments three times. She has continued to expand the Community Rights Movement throughout New England by assisting local lawmaking efforts, including the first New Hampshire Right to a Healthy Climate law in Exeter, and Barnstead’s first-in-the-nation law securing freedom from religious identification. Michelle is also a lecturer for CELDF’s Democracy School and spends her free time creating music, gardening, and communing with Nature. Contact: michelle@celdf.org or 603-387-7996 (encrypted through signal.org).

Chad Nicholson

Community Resilience Director

Chad has been engaged in community rights work since 2009, initially working with Envision Spokane on a Bill of Rights protecting neighborhoods, workers, and the environment. He then moved on to assist in New England, working with communities in Maine and New Hampshire to protect their environment. He now lives and organizes in Pennsylvania, assisting communities to engage in rights-based organizing on issues ranging from environmental protection to prisoners’ rights. Recently, Chad worked directly with state legislators to introduce a PA state constitutional amendment to guarantee community self-government. Contact: chad@celdf.org, keybase.io/ctnicholson (encrypted) or 207-541-3649 (encrypted through signal.org).

Terry Lodge

Legal Director

Terry brings 42 years of experience as an antiwar activist and civil and environmental rights litigator. He has filled much of his past seven years with CELDF bringing challenges in support of direct democracy, Community Rights, and the Rights of Nature in Ohio. He also supports efforts to resist the spread of nuclear power, weapons and waste nationwide and provides criminal and civil law representation to environmental and civil rights protesters. He supports the return to democratic roots in order to resist climate chaos and to create a truly equitable society. Terry lives on Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) traditional lands, from whence he counsels activists to walk with the power of a thousand generations Contact: lodgelaw@yahoo.com or 419-205-7084.

Tish O’Dell

Consulting Director

For the past 10 years, Tish has been involved in community rights and Rights of Nature work starting in her own community of Broadview Heights, Ohio, which led to the adoption of Ohio’s first Home Rule charter amendment creating a Community Bill of Rights banning fracking and recognizing Rights of Nature. She then went on to work with dozens of Ohio communities on anti-fracking, anti-pipeline, right to a livable climate, fair and free elections and water privatization issues. Today, Tish works with communities all over the country and internationally and most recently assisted the people of Toledo with their effort to pass the historic Lake Erie Bill of Rights, the first law on United States settler colonial land to recognize the rights of a specific ecosystem. Tish is a CELDF Democracy School lecturer and a founding member and current board member of the Ohio Community Rights Network. Her work has been featured globally, including by The Daily Show, the Ecologist and Mother Jones. Tish lives on the traditional lands of the Iroquois Confederacy or Haudenosaunee (The Five Nations). Contact: tish@celdf.org or 440-552-6774 (encrypted through signal.org).

Ben Price

Education Director

Ben was our first community rights organizer. He joined the staff in 2004, focusing on communities in Pennsylvania. Ben’s work has included assisting the first community on settler colonial-controlled land on Earth to recognize legal rights for ecosystems (Tamaqua, PA, 2006) and with the City Council of Pittsburgh to adopt a community bill of rights banning fracking, directly challenging state preemption of local control over oil and gas corporations and recognizing Rights of Nature. Today he works on municipal efforts nationwide. Ben participated in the founding of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (Ecuador, 2010), and authored the book “How Wealth Rules the World: Saving Our Communities and Freedoms from the Dictatorship of Property,” which won the Independent Publisher’s 2020 silver medal. He lives on ancestral lands of the Delaware/Lenape and Mohican people, in Pennsylvania. Contact: benprice@celdf.org, keybase.io/bengprice3gmail.com (encrypted), or 717-254-3233.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, and an independent consultant and educator in environmental justice policy planning. At CSUSM she teaches courses on environmentalism and American Indians, traditional ecological knowledge, religion and philosophy, Native women’s activism, American Indians and sports, and decolonization. She also works within the field of critical sports studies, examining the intersections of indigeneity and the sport of surfing. As a public intellectual, Dina brings her scholarship into focus as an award-winning journalist as well, contributing to numerous online outlets including Indian Country Today, the Los Angeles Times, High Country News and many more. Dina is co-author with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz of Beacon Press’s “All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans (2016), and her most recent book, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock, was released in 2019. A third book is scheduled for release in 2025, Who Gets to be Indian? Ethnic Fraud and Other Difficult Conversations about Native American Identity from Beacon Press.

Camila Vergara

Professor at the University of Essex in the UK; Dr. Camila Vergara is a critical legal theorist, historian, and journalist from Chile writing on the relation between inequality and the law, and the possible institutional solutions to systemic corruption. She is Editor of Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, Associate Editor of Critical Sociology, and organiser of the Venice Multidisciplinary World Conference on Republics and Republicanism. She is the author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic (Princeton University Press 2020), and her work on constitutional theory, republicanism, corruption, and populism has been featured in leading international journals such as the Journal of Political Philosophy, History of Political Thought, and REVUS: Journal for Constitutional Theory and Philosophy of Law. She is also a global public intellectual —with her articles and interviews featured in outlets such as New Left Review, Jacobin, Politico, Revista Plebeya, and Il Manifesto Inret— and an activist advising and collaborating with grassroots organizations on rights, deliberative democracy, and community-based forms of governance.

Lina Blount

Lina Blount is an organizer and writer working on environmental justice campaigns in the Philadelphia area since 2011. Lina currently works as the Director of Strategy and Partnerships for the Earth Quaker Action Team, a grassroots group including Quakers and people of diverse beliefs who use nonviolent direct action to work towards a just and sustainable economy by targeting corporate power. She previously worked as Education Coordinator at Pendle Hill, has worked with the Divestment Student Network Long Haul Initiative, managed work in an anti-fracking program and run two summer canvas offices for a statewide environmental advocacy group, and worked with author Mark Engler to promote his book This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-First Century.  Lina’s view of people power is most shaped by her experiences in the streets, in actions, in meetings, and in multi-year campaigns with everyday people fighting to make a better world for themselves and their communities.

Deborah Weistar

Program Director for Synergia Learning Ventures; Debra’s background in education began when she and Tom decided to homeschool their daughter. After co-founding a non-profit organization in 1986, she expanded on the community education classes she developed, and with Tom ran the Outdoor Education department of the organization, serving as a challenge ropes course trainer, wilderness teacher and guide. From 1990 to 2002 she served the organization as secretary of the Board of Directors. Debra has authored numerous articles on parenting and education, she is the co-author of the book Win-Win Games for All Ages, Cooperative Activities for Building Social Skills, and speaks on these topics at conferences. She was the creator and host of two long running radio programs Circle Around, celebrating children’s literature, and Those Damn Kids, a teen forum. As co-founder and program director, Debra brings to Synergia a diverse background in outdoor education, media literacy, and parenting/education.

Max Wilbert

Max Wilbert is a writer, community organizer, and wilderness guide. He is the author of several books, most recently “Bright Green Lies: How The Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It” (2021). He also writes the newsletter “Biocentric” on Substack. Max has been part of grassroots political movements for 20 years, most recently launching a protest camp and anti-mining campaign called Protect Thacker Pass. His work often appears in alternative media such as Counterpunch and Earth Island Journal, and has also been featured in corporate media such as CNN and The New York Times. He is currently splitting his time between studying for a Masters Degree in Degrowth, defending against a mining company lawsuit, running a mentorship program for young activists, and participating in several campaigns and global coalitions to protect nature.

Denzel Caldwell

Denzel Caldwell is a community organizer, economist, and popular educator dedicated to Black Liberation. Born, raised, and currently organizing in Nashville, Tennessee, Denzel graduated magna cum laude from Morehouse College in 2014 with a bachelor’s in economics, and from the University of Oklahoma in 2018 with a master’s in economics. For over 10 years, Denzel has been committed to local organizing work focused on prison and police abolition, establishing a local and state-wide guaranteed basic income, and building self-determined Black communities in Middle Tennessee. Currently, his political home and work is concentrated in the Black Nashville Assembly, a participatory democracy project he co-founded with several other comrades to build the self-determination capacity and political power of working-class Black people in Nashville. At Highlander, he is the Program Manager for the Economics and Governance team (aka the Electoral Justice Researcher and Educator), where he facilitates workshops that ground participants in the theory and practice of solidarity economy. His most recent work has been the People Practicing Power series, where he and his co-facilitators dive into civics from a radical lens to help participants builder sharper policy campaigns, direct actions, and strategies for building people power.

Blake Lavia

Co-Founder + Director of Talking Wings; I am a multimedia artist and community organizer. My art practice dances between writing, video, sculpture, animation and mixed media illustration. My work focuses on environmental issues, dismantling systemic violence and the Rights of Nature. I am an advocate for change, and I imbue my art and writing with calls for action. Blake’s short art and films have been exhibited in a number of venues including, The Wild Center, the Centro l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, The Richard F. Brush Gallery, the Blow Up Chicago Arthouse Film Festival and The ROAR, among others. 

Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo

Co-Founder + Director of Talking Wings; I am a Xicanex environmental storymaker and movement weaver, residing as a settler on Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) Territory striving to plant the seeds of a regenerative future. My ancestors are a rainbow of cultures, landscapes and waters; resisting, partaking in, and suffering the violence of colonization, migration, and the systemic injustices of an imperialistic global economy. In navigating this complex actuality, I strive to understand and live my history, honoring my Indigenous and settler grandmothers and grandfathers, while celebrating the land and water that made them one. We are all part of the living being of this Earth: the ecosystem of energy, waters and memories that weave/breathe through our lungs. We are their tapestry, and I create to honor all my ancestors (human and beyond). 

Together Blake and Tzintzun (both they/them)

Through their work with the environmental storytelling group Talking Wings, they have organized numerous conferences, curated in person and virtual art exhibitions, and produced visual storytelling pieces that share the voices of Land and Water. The story-making duo also helped found the nonprofit Talking Rivers, Inc., an organization that educates human communities about the Rights and Rites of rivers and their ecosystems. In collaboration with Talking Rivers, they are currently working with humans across the Adirondack Watersheds to create ecocentric governance systems that meet Nature’s needs.