Our Team
Sarah Pacyna
Sarah has spent her professional career balancing the needs of wildlife, wild spaces, and people. Over the last 20 years, Sarah has gained significant experience in regenerative enterprise development with indigenous communities, conservation strategy, and practical boots-on-the-ground fundraising capabilities. Prior to joining RF, she led fundraising efforts for the Native Conservancy which was established in 2003 to empower Alaska Native peoples to permanently protect and preserve endangered habitats on their ancestral homelands. Native Conservancy is the very first Native-led, Native-owned land conservancy in the United States. Its kelp program serves Alaskan Native communities and native kelp farmers to be the rightful stakeholders of their ancestral waters for the value it can bring as a food source, to support habitat for forage fish such as pacific herring and salmon and as gainful employment. Kelp has long been a traditional food source and a mainstay of culinary practices, cultural identity, and traditional knowledge embedded in native ways and the genesis of regenerative thinking. Sarah also supported fundraising and development for Alaska Wildlife Alliance, and the Audubon Mississippi Coastal Bird Stewardship Program, in a program she initiated on behalf of National Audubon Society, where she raised $3 M in dedicated conservation funds. Earlier in her career, Sarah worked for the Wildlife Conservation Society managing multiple programs addressing threats to large and complex seascapes as well as long-distant ocean migrants over the globe. Sarah studied at Fordham University and Columbia University. When Sarah is not working, she can be found wildlife watching with her young daughter or spending time with her motley crew of rescue and foster dogs and their ring leader, the sole cat, Tony Baloney.
JD Rockefeller JD MPH DrPH
JD “Jack” Rockefeller retired as Associate Dean, Global Health Solutions at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College. He was chief architect of a centralized innovation funding and program development model for environmental health projects at the Medical School and in cooperation with all environmental health programming at Dartmouth College. While at Dartmouth, he also engaged with The Dartmouth Institute (TDI) convening researchers, educators, and practitioners from multiple disciplines across Dartmouth to work toward the mission of improving environmental health, reducing health disparities, and creating high-performing, sustainable health systems. While at Dartmouth he also engaged with Bloomberg Philanthropies, William Randolph Hearst Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Marin Community Foundation, Silicon Valley Foundation, Hewlett and Packard related foundations, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Jack holds degrees in Science from Arizona State University, Stanford University, and Johns Hopkins University. He also earned his Juris Doctorate with honors from the John F Kennedy School of Law followed by a post-graduate research fellowship in law from Trinity College, Dublin, where he headed up the Northern Ireland Negotiation Project. Jack worked under Kader Asmal, who directed the Law Department at Trinity, and where he was chief counsel for Nelson Mandela, while incarcerated. He is also a Wharton School Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a member of Wharton's Advanced Management Program. Environmental life supports and economy have been his strategic interface at each step in his education, fund development and model building globally. Prior to his tenure at Dartmouth, Jack was Senior Advisor to the President's office at Johns Hopkins University. He was engaged primarily to assist with the Rising to the Challenge Campaign, which was constructed and implemented with his assistance - raising more than $6.0 Billion over 5 years in this role. Throughout the past 15 years he was engaged by the Clinton Health Access Initiative where he worked on innovative funding approaches in Environmental Global Health.
