Board of Directors
Councilors elected to the Board of Directors set League policy and approve the budget and all land purchases.
Councilors elected to the Board of Directors set League policy and approve the budget and all land purchases.
Matt graduated from Cornell University (A.B. in History) and Harvard Business School (M.B.A.).
Matt currently serves as Chairman of the Investment Committee, and Trustee, of the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation; Chairman of the Investment Committee, and Trustee, of the Contemporary Jewish Museum; and Trustee of the Shalom Hartman Institute; and he is a member of the California Advisory Board of The Trust for Public Land and the Investment Committee for the Shimon ben Joseph Foundation.
During his 14 years (2003-2016) at Osterweis Capital Management Matt served in a number of capacities, starting as an investment analyst and ending up as a lead Portfolio Manager, President and CEO. Prior to joining Osterweis in early 2003, he was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley in the Equity Research Division. He served as the Senior Analyst covering the North American Paper and Forest Products industries and as Team Leader of both the Global Forest Products Research Team and the North American Basic Materials Team at Morgan Stanley. He joined Morgan Stanley in 1994 as a Principal and he was elected Managing Director in 1998. Prior to Morgan Stanley, he worked from 1987 to early 1994 in research at Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, where he was a Vice President.
Rosemary Cameron’s career has been in the public sector with management experience in regional and municipal parks and recreation, city management, and legislative affairs.
Rosemary holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Government from Mills College and a master’s degree in Public Administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Her volunteer involvement includes serving on the boards of the San Francisco Parks Alliance, National Association of Park Foundations Advisory Council, and the California Parks and Recreation Society’s PAC. She currently serves as Chair of the League’s Education Committee and serves on the Finance and Investment Committee, and she was active on the 2012-2013 Strategic Plan Refresh Work Group and with the League’s Centennial Visioning process.
Andy Vought is a retired CEO for multiple start-up companies.
Blake Williams is a Managing Director in the Investment Banking division at Oppenheimer & Co. and serves as head of its Hardware and Emerging Technology practice.
Blake received his bachelor’s degree (AB) from Harvard University and received his Juris Doctorate degree (J.D.) from Columbia University School of Law.
Blake has a passion for redwood conservation, re-forestation, ecosystem protection and exploring the science around climate change. As a young boy, his inspiration was heavily influenced by admiration for his father, Dr. Carroll B. Williams, Jr., who is a retired scientist for the U.S. Forest Service, was an Adjunct Professor Emeritus in the College of Natural Resources at the University of California at Berkeley, and served on the Board of the East Bay Regional Park District. His father is also among the first African-American men to receive both a Masters and a Ph.D. in forestry and entomology in the U.S. A key part of Blake’s personal mission is to inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs, conservationists and youth to environmental sciences through education and by providing access to diverse communities.
Mike Wyatt is Head of Global Technology Mergers & Acquisitions at Morgan Stanley, where he has worked for the last twenty-four years.
Mike has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for most of his life. He serves as Chairman of the Board of Trustees at Phillips Brooks School in Menlo Park, where his children attended elementary school. Mike attended Stanford University for his BS in Industrial Engineering, and then again later for his MBA in Business Administration. Mike currently lives in Atherton with his wife, Gretchen, and their three teenage children. He is an avid hiker and enjoys wine, golf, snow skiing, duck hunting, travel, poker and bridge.
Abe Tarapani is a Principal at Incandescent LLC, a New York- and San Francisco-based advisory firm.
A League Councilor since 2016, Abe has served on the Finance and Investment Committee and Governance Committee. He lives in Marin with his wife Kelly and their daughter and spends as much time in the redwoods as possible.
Sara Clark is a partner at Shute Mihaly & Weinberger LLP, a public interest environmental firm in San Francisco.
Between 2011 and 2017, Sara served on the Board of Directors of Bay Area Wilderness Training, including as Board Chair. The organization is a leader in providing equitable access to the outdoors for low-income youth and youth of color. Between 2014 and 2018, she also served on the NextGen Committee at the Peninsula Open Space Trust, which helped the organization evaluate and implement mechanisms for increasing the diversity of its supporters.
Sara graduated from the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, where she earned a certificate in environmental law. During law school, she served as Editor in Chief of the Ecology Law Quarterly and was a member of the Environmental Law Society’s Environmental Justice Symposium steering committee. She spent a year as a legal intern at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Prior to attending law school, she worked in land conservation. She was part of the land acquisition team at POST, and was part of the conservation research program at the Open Space Institute in NYC. Sara graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, where her senior thesis focused on forest restoration efforts and prescribed burning in the urban-wildland interface.
Sara joined the Board in September 2019, having served on the League’s Council since June of 2018. She has been active on the League’s Land Protection Committee, the Governance Committee, and the Strategic Planning Team.
Bill Croft is Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico.
Bill was elected to the League’s Council in 1987, contributed to the sequoia grove section of Sequoia National Forest Mediated Settlement Agreement in the 1980s, and has served on the League’s Master Plan Task Force and chairs the Science Committee. He and his wife Carol Toffaleti have hiked in most of the redwood parks and sequoia groves, and love hiking in the forests of California and in the deserts of the Southwest where they presently live.
Melissa Harris graduated from Temple University, with an AD in Horticulture, and has a BA and MA in English Literature from the University of Maine, where she taught briefly as an adjunct.
From 2010 to 2017, Caryl Hart was Director of Sonoma County Regional Parks, a system of more than 50 parks and regional trails.
Caryl graduated from Cornell University (A.B.-Economics), University of San Francisco (J.D.) and University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.-Environmental Science, Policy and Management). At UC Berkeley, her focus was on the role of California State Parks and other public land systems in addressing the challenges of climate change. She returned to UC, Berkeley, as Visiting Professor in 2010 to teach a course on the history and challenges confronting the state parks. Caryl serves on a number of boards including the UC, Berkeley School of Natural Resources Advisory Board, the UC Natural Reserve System Board of Councilors, and the National Parks Conservation Association-Western Regional Board. Elected to the Board of Directors in 2017, Caryl has been a League Councilor for more than ten years. She, her husband, Mickey Hart, and their daughter, Reya, reside in Sebastopol.
Peggy Light is Vice President of Rite Engineering & Manufacturing Corporation.
Peggy is passionate about the natural world and spends as much time as possible in nature – hiking, fishing and travelling. She is a 3rd generation supporter of Save the Redwoods League, and has served on the Audit and Nominating Committees, the 2012-13 Strategic Plan Refresh Work Group, and as chair of the Redwoods 2018 (Centennial) Task Force. She currently serves as Chair of the Development Committee.
John Montague currently owns Scope Dog, a film production company that specializes in film financing and story production.
John wears many hats as a leadership volunteer at the League. He has served on the League’s Council since 2015. He spends a great deal of time deep in the forest, collecting data to aid redwood conservation planning by locating residual old-growth redwoods, identifying field sites for the next phase of the League’s Redwoods and Climate Change Initiative research, and measuring sword ferns for the League’s Fern Watch project. John also serves on the Education Committee. Independently, John is currently assisting researchers Chris Atkins and Steve Sillett with the re-measurement of every redwood over 350’ tall. He is also building the first-ever complete inventory of every redwood over 18’ dbh (diameter at breast height). In his spare time, John enjoys performing stand-up comedy at open mics, writing music on his guitar, and running. He resides in Arcata with his wife, Jessica, and their two daughters, Holly and Lucy.
John Scharffenberger has spent his career in the world of food, forests, and farming.
He serves on the advisory boards of the UC, Berkeley College of Natural Resources and the UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley (now emeritus), and on the Council and Science Committee of Save the Redwoods League. He is also involved in many community activities near his home in Anderson Valley, California. In developing vineyards on ranch property, John was able to work on the restoration of forestlands adjacent to these lands. Oak woodland, Douglas fir, and his favorite, the redwood forest, have been included in this work. Planting, thinning, pruning and soil restoration on over several hundred acres in the past 40 years has given him great satisfaction. Having experienced this restoration has allowed him to see what practices seem to work in helping the forest return to a more “virgin” state.
John continues to work with small food producers, Hodo Soy, Farmhouse Culture, CoCo Terra, California Caviar Company, and a new venture to provide housing for Anderson Valley farmworkers.
Michael Woo has had a long and diverse career in public service, academia, and place-making. For the last 10 years, he was Dean of the College of Environmental Design at Cal Poly, Pomona, overseeing degree programs in architecture, art history, landscape architecture, regenerative studies, urban and regional planning, and visual communication design.
Michael’s interest in redwoods dates back to his undergraduate days at UC, Santa Cruz. In the aftermath of the crisis in the California state park system, he was asked to join the Parks Forward Commission, an independent, blue-ribbon panel that proposed new directions for state parks. Michael specialized in diversifying the public constituency for state parks, explored transportation and cultural obstacles to park access, and launched a pilot project in which architecture students produced innovative designs for new cabins to attract millennials and urban residents to state parks. More recently, he was invited by REI to participate in a “Race and Place” initiative highlighting outdoor locations that have significance for underrepresented groups.
Michael joined the League’s Council in October of 2018, was elected to the Board effective September of 2019, and serves on the League’s Parks and Public Engagement Committee.