Academy Instructors
Leadership Series Facilitators
Bob Berkebile
Bob Berkebile
Sustainable Vision Session and Sutainable Solutions Session
is a founding principal of BNIM Architects, a firm that is setting new design standards for resource efficiency at the building and community levels. He is a board member of the U.S. Green Building Council, the Nature Conservancy and the Center for Global Community. The recipient of many awards and accolades, Berkebile has conducted numerous sustainable design workshops for the White House, Department of Defense, Department of Energy and the National Park Service.
Bob Mann
Bob Mann
Bob Mann is the founder of Bridging the Gap and co-director of the Colorado Shadowcliff eco-friendly mountain sanctuary, where he presents multi-day workshops as part of Shadowcliff's Sustainability Series. He practiced law in Kansas City for 25 years prior to founding Bridging the Gap, one of the largest environmental education organizations in the Midwest. Mann has served as an environmental counselor to three Kansas City mayors, numerous elected officials and business leaders.
Neal Peirce
Neal Peirce
"Green" Agendas for America's Communities
Neal Peirce is the chairman of the Citistates Group, America's only journalist team focused first and foremost on metropolitan regions and how they position themselves to cope with the demanding economic, environmental, and social challenges of the 21st century. Peirce is a foremost writer on metropolitan regions — their political and economic dynamics, as well as their emerging national and global roles. Peirce's 10-book series on America's states and regions culminated in The Book of America: Inside 50 States Today.
Joe VanBelleghem
Joe VanBelleghem
Ethics and Development: a Conversation
Joe VanBelleghem is a founder of the Canada Green Building Council, has served on the board of directors for the United States Green Building Council and is the managing partner of Windmill West. With more than 20 years of development and financing experience, he was responsible for the first LEED Gold project in Canada. He is a recipient of the Province of BC 2007 Arbor Vitae Award for Environmental Leadership, is a member of the Province of British Columbia's Climate Action Team, and is a member of the Advisory Board for the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.
Margaret Wheatley
Margaret Wheatley
Margaret Wheatley writes, teaches and speaks about how we might organize and accomplish our work in chaotic times. She invites us to attend to the quality of our relationships to weather the increasing turbulence. She has written four books: Leadership and the New Science (in 20 languages and third edition), Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, A Simpler Way (with Myron Rogers) and, most recently, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time.
Michael Willis
Michael Willis
International Viewpoints on Sustainability
Michael Willis is a dual New Zealand and British citizen who has 28 years of experience as a local authority chief executive, in authorities ranging from small rural districts to provincial cities in New Zealand, Australia and the U.K. Those authorities have served from 1,600 to 75,000 citizens, with staffs of up to 700, and budgets of $100 million, consisting of service delivery and commercial activities. He has been president of two national local government professional management associations, and a director on four local authority-owned companies.
General Courses Instructors
Patti Banks
Banks is the president of Patti Banks Associates (PBA), a community and environmental planning and landscape architectural consulting firm whose work focuses on public participatory and ecologically based planning and design. PBA has assisted many communities in the Kansas City region to evaluate their natural resources and develop protection strategies that achieve important environmental goals while enhancing the quality of the built environment. PBA assisted MARC in the development of a regional Natural Resources Inventory (NRI), a series of GIS data layers providing information on the region's most important natural resources, and in the application of the NRI to update the region's greenway trails plan, MetroGreen.
Aron Borok
Aron Borok
Mr. Aron Borok, manager of the Portland office of Environment International, has more than nine years of experience in both the technical and policy aspects of the environmental field, much of it involving sustainability and mitigation issues in the transportation sector. In particular, he has assisted transportation agencies and other clients in developing policies and procedures to institutionalize decision-making on sustainability, thus avoiding or minimizing impacts for transportation projects. Mr. Borok has a Masters in Environmental Policy and Natural Resource Management from Indiana University and a Bachelors in Environmental Engineering from Northwestern University.
Cynthia Burbank
Burbank is a national planning and environment practice leader with Parsons Brinkerhoff, held a 32-year career with the U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT) that encompassed key roles in highway, transit, aviation, and national transportation policy and legislation. She more recently has been speaking on the relationship between climate change and transportation. She holds a degree in Economics from Georgetown University.
Steve Chinn
Chinn is chairman of Stinson Morrison Hecker LLP's Public Law/Finance Division. Focusing on land-use issues, Chinn has represented public sector entities for 30 years. He has chaired the International Municipal Lawyers Association Land Development, Zoning & Planning Section, and is a member of both the City Attorney Association of Kansas and the Missouri Municipal Attorneys Association. He currently serves as city attorney for Fairway and Mission Hills and advises the Roeland Park Planning Commission and Board of Zoning Appeals.
Marci DuPraw
DuPraw is a nationally known facilitator and mediator with 20 years of experience in public involvement, consensus-building, dispute resolution, training, and coaching. Currently a senior member of SRA International's Conflict Management and Dispute Resolution Practice, DuPraw served as director of RESOLVE's Washington, D.C. office.
DuPraw holds a Masters in Natural Resource Policy, Economics, and Management from the University of Michigan, as well as a Bachelor's in Environmental Studies from the University of California. She has worked all over the United States, as well as in Russia, Estonia, and Cyprus, and has worked on five cases involving Indian Nations. She is a member of the International Association for Public Participation and the Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR), and has recently been elected to the Leadership Council of ACR's Environment and Public Policy Sector.
Don Elliott
Don Elliott
Don Elliott is a Senior Consultant with Clarion Associates, a national land use consulting firm based in Denver, Colorado. Mr. Elliott's practice focuses on land planning, zoning, and international land and urban development issues.
Mr. Elliott has a bachelor's degree in Urban Planning and Policy Analysis from Yale University, a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School, and a Masters degree in City and Regional Planning from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners, a past national Chairman of the Planning and Law Division of the American Planning Association, a past president of the Colorado Chapter of the American Planning Association, a past member of the Amicus Curiae Committee and the National Policy Committee of the American Planning Association, and a member of the American, Colorado, and Denver Bar Associations.
Richard Gordon
Gordon, Clean Commute project manager for Bridging the Gap, has a Ph.D. in physics and was a founding member of the Risk Prediction Initiative of the Atlantic Global Change institute. A specialist in time-series analysis, Gordon has 20 peer-reviewed research publications including work on hurricanes, El Nino, climate change, intelligent systems and cyber security.
He has been quoted or profiled in Scientific American, Fortune magazine, The Scientist and The Journal of Commerce. Gordon's current research includes work on the predictability of climate change effects and the relationship between the Southern Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation and the Transpolar Oscillation pressure indices.
Maureen Hart
Maureen Hart
Hart is an internationally recognized expert on sustainability measurement and author of the Guide to Sustainable Community Indicators.
She consults on sustainability and measurement issues with communities, non-profit organizations, federal, state, regional, and local governments, foundations and the private sector. She is currently assisting ICMA in developing a Sustainability Management System, intended to establish a new standard for community management and governance based on measurable, results-oriented sustainable development practices.
Hal Kassoff
Hal Kassoff
Hal Kassoff is a Senior Vice President and Principal Professional Associate with Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB) responsible for providing leadership in emerging highway-related practice areas. Hal has guided the development of seminars and workshops on Context Sensitive Solutions and Sustainable Highways which he has delivered to clients and PB Professionals worldwide. Hal led the development of a "Highway Sustainability Checklist" application which was selected by AASHTO as the winning entry in a national competition on Sustainable Development and was asked by AASHTO to chair its panel on Sustainable Transportation for an Industry Summit in 2007. Hal also led the team that produced PB's reference guide for Concepts in Contextual Highway Design and is delivering training to PB staff and clients across the country.
Prior to joining PB, Hal spent 25 years with the Maryland Department of Transportation, including 6 years as Director of Planning and Preliminary Engineering and 12 years as State Highway Administrator.
Helene B. Kornblatt
Kornblatt, principal of Environment International in Seattle, Washington, has nearly 30 years of experience conducting environmental and mitigation analyses for transportation projects. She has been involved in environmental analysis and sustainability strategy implementation as both a private sector consultant, and as a manager in public sector transit agencies and the California Department of Transportation (CALTRANS). She holds an M.A. in Architecture and Urban Planning from UCLA, with an emphasis in Environmental Management, and a B.A. in Liberal Arts from the University of Pennsylvania.
Chris Leinberger
Leinberger; developer, professor, author, and consultant; is one of America's leading voices on making progressive development profitable. His latest book is The Option of Urbanism; a history of the drivable suburb and the walkable neighborhood and how we are transitioning from the former to the latter.
Leinberger is director of the Graduate Real Estate Program at the University of Michigan, founding partner of the Acadia Company, a real estate development company, and a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Amy Malick
Malick opened the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives' (ICLEI) Midwest Regional Capacity Center in Chicago in November 2007. She is responsible for supporting all ICLEI members and participants in the Cities for Climate Protection® Campaign within the Midwest and furthering the momentum of greenhouse gas emission reductions within this region.
Formerly with the Chicago Transit Authority, Malick worked on a wide variety of transportation planning and environmental initiatives for nearly six years. Prior to her work in Chicago, she served with the Seattle's Strategic Planning Office to integrate land use and urban design with SoundTransit's Link Light Rail. Malick earned a master's degree in urban planning from the University of Washington at Seattle, with specializations in environmental design and community development.
Kristin Riott
Riott, director of outreach for Bridging the Gap, has been trained as a facilitator for Al Gore's Climate Project. She is also the chairperson of Johnson County Climate Protectors, a member of the related Prairie Village Environmental Committee and a member of True Blue Women's environmental committee.
Riott came to Kansas City to work for Hallmark Cards, spending twenty years there in product management and creative writing. Recently Riott and her family spent two years in Asia witnessing the dramatic increase in pollution which has ignited her commitment to environmental issues.
Andy Sauer
Sauer, P.E., is a senior project manager and water resources group leader for CDM in Kansas City. He has over ten years of experience in water resources engineering with over eight years in private consulting and two years in public service with Johnson County, Kan. He has been the chair of the water resource committee of the KC Metro Chapter of APWA from 2004-2007. His water resources experience has included stormwater projects from watershed studies to wetland design and all stages of BMPs including planning, design, review, and standards.
