The Gaiafield Project is governed by the Gaiafield Council, whose current members are listed below.
David Nicol, PhD
(Co-Founder, Project Director)
David is co-founder and Director of the Project. His book Subtle Activism: The Inner Dimension of Social and Planetary Transformation is the first comprehensive academic treatment of the topic. He is also co-founder of EarthRising, a growing global movement to support the transition to the new era of life on Earth through harnessing the power of coherent group consciousness for personal and collective transformation. He has taught on subtle activism in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies and for the Shift Network. A former environmental lawyer from Australia, he now lives in Mendocino, California with his wife Kate and dog Peaches.
Leslie Meehan, MSEE, PhD
(Co-Founder)
Leslie is an interspiritual minister, leadership consultant and co-creator of collaborative networks committed to community healing and transformation. She has over 25 years experience in strategic planning, intuitive process, systems architecture, and management in business and non-profits. As a subtle activist, Leslie’s practice spans the spiritual, consciousness, and indigenous spectrum. As an ecosocial activist, Leslie founded the Thriving Resilient Communities Collaboratory whose network leaders fund and build sustainable local community systems in hundreds of North American communities. Leslie is grateful to be working with these wonderful people and other projects like Earth Treasure Vase Global Healing Project and Compassion Games.
Avon Mattison
Avon Mattison is a Peacebuilding and Inter-Organisational Consultant, Advisor and Mentor with over three decades’ experience. She works with innovative leaders, groups and organisations on the “frontline” building Cultures of Peace inter-generationally and inter-culturally for the children of this and future generations.
She is Founder and President of Pathways To Peace (PTP), an international peacebuilding, educational and consulting organisation.PTP has Consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council and is an official Peace Messenger of the United Nations (UN).
Through Pathways To Peace, she created the “WE THE PEOPLES” INITIATIVE, now “CULTURE OF PEACE INITIATIVE,” in 1983 with the approval of former UN Assistant Secretary-General Robert Muller. This local/global Peacebuilding initiative unites the strengths of over 300 international organizations and focuses co-operative activities annually on the UN International Day of Peace.
Claudia Welss
Claudia is a board member of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, on the Steering Committee of the Global Coherence Initiative (Institute of HeartMath) as director of strategic partnerships, external research faculty for the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and is currently founding the Center for Causal Coherence at Wisdom University. She is also founder/executive director of NextNow Collaboratory whose mission is making the invisible visible through information-visualization technologies that raise awareness about the relationship between human activity, states of being, and Earth changes, and collaboration tools to mobilize effective collective action in response. She’s a founding director of Techne Verde (a project of the Buckminster Fuller Institute) and advisor to projects including the Plastic Pollution Coalition and TEDxMarin; she is also a co-producer of three films on consciousness. Previously, Claudia was director of the Center for Executive Development at the Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, developing and delivering programs on strategy for client corporations in over 30 countries with a personal passion for innovating curriculum that reflected new paradigm policies and practices advancing corporate social responsibility (CSR). Prior to UC Berkeley Claudia worked with Business for Social Responsibility in San Francisco.
Philip M. Hellmich
Phillip is Director of Peace at The Shift Network, an international social enterprise mobilizing educational tools and cultivating alliances worldwide. He is director of The Summer of Peace, a collaborative global celebration of and call to action for inner and outer Peace. Summer of Peace is a groundbreaking series of events that bring together some of the world’s foremost Peacebuilders and Social Architects while serving to illuminate practical actions for both personal and planetary peace. Philip has dedicated most of his life to global and local peacebuilding initiatives, including 14 years with Search for Common Ground. He also served for four years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone where he lived and worked in small remote bush villages. A published writer, Philip is author of God and Conflict: A Search for Peace in a Time of Crisis with a Foreword by Lama Surya Das. He serves as adviser to The Global Peace Initiative of Women.
Jeff Vander Clute
Jeff is a developer-practitioner of spiritual technologies for transforming consciousness. Jeff has a passion for unifying the individual with the superorganism of humanity and with planetary being. He is especially called to support the healing of humanity’s relationship with the planet.
Jeff co-founded Sourcing the Way to accelerate the realization of higher levels of awareness, especially among organizations, in which there is natural alignment with Earth systems and with life as a whole.
Previously, as an entrepreneur and software engineer, Jeff co-created an online publishing platform that amplified the voices of over 30 million people, followed by software for revealing the wisdom of communities and “connecting the global heart.”
His organizational affiliations include Alliance for the Earth, Charter for Compassion International, Compassionate Action Network, DreamRider Productions, Evolutionary Leaders, Gaiafield Project, In Claritas, New Stories, and Pathways To Peace.
Cynthia Jurs
Cynthia is a Buddhist teacher who received Dharmacharya transmission to teach from Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh in 1994. Also a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, she has studied with many great masters and has spent much time in retreat practicing in both the Vajrayana and Zen Buddhist traditions for the last 30 years. She directs the Open Way Sangha, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, teaching retreats and leading groups in meditation, “engaged buddhism” and spiritual activism.In 1990 Cynthia undertook a pilgrimage to meet a 106 year-old Tibetan lama living in a cave high in the Himalayas that transformed her life. She asked the old man in the cave, Charok Rinpoche,, ‘What can we do to bring healing and protection to the Earth?’ He instructed her in the practice of the earth treasure vases; a practice dedicated to bringing healing and protection to the Earth by filling consecrated clay vessels with prayers and offerings and burying them in places of need around the world. She was given 30 of these consecrated clay vessels and told to fill them with sacred offerings and prayers, take them to places in need of healing and bury them according to the tradition.
Inspired by her travels with this practice, in 2008 she founded Alliance for the Earth, to support the emergence of a global community committed to the healing and renewal of the Earth. As director of the Earth Treasure Vase Global Healing Project, Cynthia has facilitated collaborations with young activists and indigenous elders in communities all around the world in this unique ritual that strengthens community, invites prayers from everyone and catalyzes unpredictable solutions.