To create a sustainable & regenerative, equitable & just, thriving world for all, we need "all hands on deck."
Co-Founders
Anna McGrath is the Chief People Officer for Godfrey Dadich Partners. She also has expertise in conscious leadership and dynamic governance and was the first Holacracy licensee in the United States. While she continues to honor Holacracy, she has learned or developed numerous other models for governance. One of her signature pieces of complex work is the development and implementation of dynamic governance across the Bay Area Regional Energy Network (BayREN), a coalition of the San Francisco Bay Area’s nine counties — a network of local governments partnering to promote resource efficiency at the regional level, focusing on energy, water, and greenhouse gas reduction.
Lawrence Ellis is a complex-systems consultant, executive coach, and spiritual activist. His consulting engagements have helped produce 25 landmark national anti-pollution demonstration projects, dramatically strengthened the language of EPA legislation, and more. He is currently Lead Sustainability Advisor with a)plan coaching; Faculty in Mindfulness & Sustainability with American Leadership Forum-Silicon Valley; and Founding Board President of Breathe nonprofit, supporting climate, environmental, and racial justice. He founded One Thriving Planet to dramatically accelerate equitable and just solutioning on the climate crisis and mass extinction before we pass the thresholds of irreversible cataclysm. The wisdom traditions and communities of his Indigenous and Buddhist heritages, which seek to live with the Earth as sacred, and all beings as relatives, provide him with unquenchable inspiration and balming medicine during these times.
Mark Beam is a serial social entrepreneur who cofounded SOCAP, the world’s largest impact investing community, and Impact Hub Oaxaca; served as Executive Producer of the ¡CATAPULTA! Social Innovation Festival in Oaxaca, Mexico; serves on the Board of Directors of and as a Member of the Guild of Future Architects; is a former Board Member of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and the Leonardo Journal; and was a Maverick in Residence at the Kauffman Foundation. With a passion for understanding the world broadly and deeply, and for architecting viable futures, he has worked closely for 25+ years with top researchers and innovators across disciplines of art, science, technology & business. After an early career on Wall Street as an executive VP, risk manager, and bond trader, he found a permanent home in social entrepreneurship & impact investing, and regenerative systems, innovation & design. Kansas City and Oaxaca are home.
Dr. Mathis Wackernagel created the footprint concept in the early 1990s (with Bill Rees) to compare human demand against planetary or regional ecosystem regeneration. This tool allows researchers to track global overshoot and countries’ ecological deficits. The carbon footprint portion has become the most popular footprint variant. In 2003, he founded Global Footprint Network, a sustainability think-tank, making planetary constraints relevant to decision-making. Its largest engagement campaign is its annual Earth Overshoot Day. Mathis’s honors include the 2018 World Sustainability Award, the 2015 IAIA Global Environment Award, and the 2012 Blue Planet Prize.
Mercedes Martin is a trailblazer at the crossroads of sustainability & regeneration and equity & justice. She is the Founder and CEO of Mercedes Martin and Company (“MMC”), focused on Change & Transformation Consulting. MMC is a home base from which she collaborates with like-spirited consultants, coaches and other visionaries on four continents. It also gives her the flexibility to be a mover-and-shaker within key high-impact initiatives, including as a thought leader with the COLD Zimbabwe Organizational Development Network; Cambridge University Institute for Sustainability Leadership; and the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), a platform to raise the profile of sustainability in business schools around the world, with over 880 signatory members and counting.
Taj James is the co-founder of the legendary nonprofit accelerator and incubator, Movement Strategy Center. He served as its Executive Director for 23 years and for the last five years has served as Chair of the Board. Taj is the co-founder of Full Spectrum Labs, an incubator-accelerator that brings people, ideas, and capital together to grow regenerative economies powered by impactful solutions. Of note is that in the first three months of 2023, he raised $10 million for stage one of an Indigenous-led, Indigenous-owned wind farm project, to deliver 235 MW of clean energy on Standing Rock Reservation – and is on track to secure an additional $20 million by Dec. 2023.
Anchor Organizations
To create a sustainable & regenerative, equitable & just, thriving world for all, we need "all hands on deck": engagement from as many individuals, teams, organizations, communities, movements as possible — across all sectors, on every continent. To engage as much of society as possible, we are developing partnerships with some of the world’s top experts across a range of disciplines. These include activists and organizers, artists, coaches, consultants, Indigenous leaders, lawyers, measurement experts, scientists, and many more. One Thriving Planet officially launches in January 2024. Over the next weeks and months, as we solidify agreements with network partners, we’ll expand this list of anchor organizations and others.a)plan is renowned for providing coaching to change-makers. The a)plan method builds on a decades-old coaching approach that supported numerous world-changing leaders, such as Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, best-selling author, Jack Canfield, prominent nonprofit and corporate leaders, and others to achieve greatness. a)plan added a unique technology platform, a cadre of world-class coaches, online tracking of client progress, and more.
97% of a)plan’s clients identify important goals to improve their lives and careers. 94% view their coach as a trusted and valuable partner in their growth. 88% report significant progress toward goals. 99% would recommend a)plan to a friend or colleague.
a)plan was featured as one of HubSpot's Best Coaching Services for 2022.
Global Footprint Network (GFN) will anchor One Thriving Planet’s measurements function.
GFN is a sustainability think-tank that makes planetary constraints relevant to decision-making. It was founded by Mathis Wackernagel, who, along with Bill Rees, created the concept and metric of footprinting in the early 1990s. The ecological footprint allows individuals, organizations, communities, regions, nations, and continents to compare their resource demands against the capacity of a regional ecosystem, or the planet itself, to regenerate from those demands.
GFN’s largest engagement campaign is its annual Earth Overshoot Day. In 2020, the campaign, which started in 2006, reached more than 4 billion media impressions in more than 120 countries.
GFN or its employees have received numerous honors for their work, including 2021 Population Matters Change Champion, 2018 World Sustainability Award, 2015 International Association for Impact Assessment's Global Environment Award, 2015 RECYCLAPOLIS National Sustainability Award, 2014 ISSP Sustainability Hall of Fame Inductees, 2013 Prix Nature Swisscanto, 2012 Boulding Award, 2012 Blue Planet Prize, 2012 Binding Prize, 2011 Zayed International Prize for the Environment (jointly awarded with UNEP), 2007 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.