Our Team

Beetcoin Advisors

Daniel Boese

Daniel Boese, Hamburg, Germany. Daniel is a Senior Media Campaigner at Avaaz, a global activist network that has 65 million members in 192 countries. He has extensive experience working in the climate movement and on a variety of issues from the global wildlife trade to fake news and elections across Europe to battling Bayer and Monsanto on the re-approval of the glyphosate in Europe.

Zoë Bradbury

Zoë grew up on the southern Oregon coast, birthing lambs in the spring, watching salmon spawn in the fall, and canning plums and tomatoes all summer. After Stanford University and a stint in the nonprofit world, she returned. Since 2008, she has run a diversified fresh-market farm on land shared with her mother and sister. Zoë cultivates a couple hundred varieties of vegetable, berry, fruit, herb, and flower crops for 115 CSA shares, supplies local restaurants, grocery stores, and food banks, and runs a farm stand and u-pick. She cultivates with horse power whenever possible. She has a master’s degree in Community Change and Food Systems, is a Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow, and coedited Greenhorns: 50 Dispatches from the New Farmers’ Movement.

Ben Burkett

Ben Burkett is a fourth-generation farmer in Petal, Mississippi. His family has been growing food on the same plot of land since 1889, when his great-grandfather received a homestead from the U.S. government just 24 years after the end of the Civil War. It was one of the first African American-owned farms in the state. In 2014, he won a James Beard Foundation award for his work to support family farming. He is former director of the Mississippi Association of Cooperatives. He is a board member of Crescent City Farmer’s Market in New Orleans.

Winona LaDuke

Winona LaDuke (White Earth reservation, Minnesota) is an American environmentalist, economist, writer and industrial hemp grower, known for her work on tribal land claims and preservation, as well as sustainable development. In 1996 and 2000, she ran for Vice President of the United States as the nominee of the Green Party of the United States, on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader. She is the executive director and a co-founder (along with the Indigo Girls) of Honor the Earth, a Native environmental advocacy organization that played an active role in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

Tim Leslie

Tim Leslie (Seattle, WA) spent 20 years as an Amazon executive before leaving in 2019. He has led start-ups to multi-billion dollar businesses and has served as a board member and advisor to many companies. He holds a Doctor of Law and Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Yale.

Roberto Meza

Roberto cofounded Emerald Gardens, in Bennett, Colorado, which grows microgreens using geothermal and passive-solar energy. He is also cofounder of the East Denver Food Hub, a board member of the National Young Farmers Coalition and High Plains Food Co-op, and chair of Membership and Outreach for Mile High Farmers. He is a graduate of the MIT program in Art, Culture, and Technology.

Yimi Sun

Yimi grew up in China and then studied and worked in the U.S. and Israel, before returning home to Yantai. She is currently Founder and CEO of Fulfillanthropy, a consulting firm for CSR and impact investment. She previously started a fintech company and worked in the risk management department of Huaneng Power International. She graduated from Shandong University with a degree in Financial Engineering, has a Masters in Nonprofit Management and Leadership from Hebrew University and a degree in Studio Art from SUNY/Buffalo. She is a Yoga Acharya graduate from Sivananda Vedanta Center in India.

Woody Tasch

Woody Tasch is the author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Chelsea Green), SOIL: Notes Towards the Theory and Practice of Nurture Capital (Slow Money Institute), and AHA!: Fake Trillions, Real Billions, Beetcoin and the Great American Do-Over (Slow Money Institute). Tasch is former chairman of Investors’ Circle, a nonprofit angel network that has facilitated more than $200 million of investments in over 300 early-stage, sustainability-promoting companies. As treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation in the 1990s, he was a pioneer of mission-related investing. He was founding chairman of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance. Utne Reader named him “One Of 25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”

Marco Vangelisti

Marco is a founding member of Slow Money and has been on the leadership team of Slow Money Northern California from its inception to 2020. Prior to his shift in focus towards no-harm, impact and regenerative investing, he spent 20 years in the finance industry, where he managed investment equity portfolios on behalf of large foundations and endowments and developed statistical risk models for equity and fixed income markets around the world. Marco was a Fulbright scholar in Mathematics and Economics at the University of California in Berkeley, earned an MBA at the Milan-based “Enrico Mattei” school in his native Italy, and a Master of Fine Arts at the intersection of public art and ecology in the U.S. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and taught portfolio management, asset allocation, and performance and risk analysis at the San Francisco CFA Institute for 12 years.

Robin van Asperen

Robin van Asperen is a serial ecopreneur, KaosPilot Business School alumni, worked in Impact Investing for PYMWYMIC, before founding MijnStadstuin (MyUrbanGarden); a 4ha urban farm on the edge of Amsterdam, in 2014. From there he specialised in Permaculture, Analog Forestry and regenerative investing. Currently lives in Costa Rica where he continues his work in urban farming as
co-director of Huertas Donde Sea, the replication of NatureBasedSolutions through the development of bilili.org and coordination of ecological restoration projects with the IAFN (International Analog Forestry Network) and restore.earth.

Slow Money Institute Board

Tara Burkley

Tara Burkley is Director of Strategic Business Development at New Hope Natural Media, which created and manages Natural Product Expo, the world’s largest natural and organic products tradeshow. Prior to joining New Hope, Tara was a Research Strategist for Radar Communications guiding clients such as General Mills, Nike, Toyota, Unilever (Axe), and Hershey to bring the consumer voice to life in a highly experiential manner.

Brian Coppom

Brian Coppom, Executive Director of the Boulder County Farmers Markets (BCFM), came to local agriculture as a refugee from a life of pursuing material success. He has applied his previous business experience to the nonprofit mission of promoting local growers and supporting the connections with their community. Three years after embracing the simple importance of local farming, Brian has experienced the unexpected, but not unpleasant, irony of being awarded CEO of the Year by Colorado Biz Magazine.

Amy Dickie

Amy Dickie is Principal at California Environmental Associates where she provides strategic planning for environmental foundations and nonprofits. Much of her work has focused on sustainable food and agriculture; the links between agriculture, climate, and land use; sustainable supply chains; conservation; and climate change adaptation. Current and recent clients include the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund, The Rockefeller Foundation, the Climate and Land Use Alliance, World Wildlife Fund, and Sustainable Conservation. Amy is the lead author of Local Foods: A Guide for Investors and Philanthropists, Strategies for Mitigating Climate Change in Agriculture and Slow Money’s 2014 State of the Sector report. Amy has a bachelor’s degree in history from Stanford University and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

Daniela Ibarra-Howell

Daniela Ibarra-Howell is CEO of Savory Institute, whose mission is to promote large-scale restoration of the world’s grasslands through holistic management. A native Argentinean, Daniela is an agronomist by profession specialized in natural resource management and economics. With over 25 years of international experience in the field of regenerative resource management and policy, coupled with her hands-on land management experience in a variety of ecological and cultural environments, Daniela co founded with Allan Savory and other colleagues the Savory Institute in 2009.

Walt Pounds

Walt Pounds consults with social enterprise entrepreneurs on strategy, operations, finance, leadership and organizational development. He had an extensive career in high tech working with Fortune 500 and early stage companies. Most recently Walt was Founder/President of Solbourne, an IT services company which was sold to Deloitte Consulting. He has active roles in Social Venture Partners, Investors’ Circle, Slow Money, Social Venture Network and Unreasonable Institute. Walt serves on several boards including California Safe Soils, Imagine Foundation and Presidio Graduate School.

Tana Schultz

Tana Schultz, a former public high school teacher, owns Lighthearted Ranch where she raises goats, chickens and grows organic vegetables in Boulder County. She was a trustee of the University of Colorado Foundation. She was previously co-owner of Lighthearted Entertainment Inc., a television development and production company in Los Angeles.

Soraya Smith

Soraya Smith is President of American Outdoor Products, the parent company of food brands Backpacker’s Pantry, Astronaut Ice Cream, Colorado Spice Blending Co and Chef Soraya. Soraya is licensed through the Colorado Bar Association and has completed an accredited professional Culinary program. Her expertise in food innovation and passion for the planet’s sustainability have now joined forces to make a regenerative and sustainable supply chain and addressing food insecurity professional and personal goals.