Kaarin Knudson is a licensed architect, educator, and leader with more than 20 years’ experience advancing sustainable design and community-led solutions. In 2017, she founded the housing advocacy organization Better Housing Together (BHT), to increase housing affordability, diversity and supply in Lane County, and was awarded the City of Eugene’s “Community Award” in 2018. Knudson advised on the implementation of Oregon’s landmark middle housing laws and advocated for the creation of Eugene’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund. She is a longtime member of the City Club of Eugene, and she served as its president in 2022-2023. She teaches a graduate urban design workshop at the University of Oregon and is coauthor of a new textbook, The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook (Routledge, April 2024).

Jena Hughes (she/her) is a Housing and Growth Management Analyst at the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD). Prior to joining DLCD, Hughes spent seven years in local government as a long-range planner working primarily on housing and land use issues. Having grown up in Oregon, Hughes has always felt a strong connection to trees and passion for climate action that eventually led her to study Sustainable Environmental Design and City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. In her current role, she aims to find creative solutions for addressing complex housing challenges while being guided by her values of equity and sustainability.

Ted Labbe (BA, MS) has served with Depave since 2008, as a founding board member, active volunteer, and most recently as Co-Director of Finance and Partnerships. He is a conservation biologist with 30 years professional experience in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors delivering conservation planning, habitat mapping and assessment, community organizing, urban greening, and policy analysis.

As Principal Consultant at Portland-based Nidus Consulting, arborist Ryan Gilpin is a contributing author of an International Society of Arboriculture-published book on best management practices for protecting trees during construction. He works with developers to identify the best trees on properties they plan to build on, design around those trees, and protect them during construction. Gilpin has also developed a process with Clean Water Services in Washington County to identify which ash trees are likely to be at the highest risk from emerald ash borer. He also has performed post-storm tree inspections for homeowners in neighborhoods hit by high winds and ice in January 2024. A North Portland resident, Gilpin gives numerous tree walks and tree-related classes and workshops.

Chris Neamtzu is the Community Development Director for the City of Wilsonville where he is responsible for overseeing Planning, Building, Engineering and Economic Development services. With 29 years at the City, Chris is intimately involved in all aspects of planning, public policy and development in the community. As the Planning Director for over a decade (2008-2018), he has planned and implemented many residential neighborhoods where preserved trees are the focal point. He served on the Oregon Community Trees board of director’s for 10-years and served as President of the organization for two-years. Chris was raised in Culver City, California and earned his degree in Natural Resources Planning from Humboldt State University. Chris is a current member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) and lives in Sherwood, Oregon with his wife of 25 years Margot and his 18 year old son Jonathan.

Dr. Nadina Galle is a Dutch-Canadian ecological engineer, TEDx and keynote speaker, and author of the forthcoming book "The Nature of Our Cities: Harnessing the Power of the Natural World to Survive a Changing Planet," slated for release by HarperCollins on June 18, 2024. Renowned for championing the concept of the "Internet of Nature," she leads a global movement of innovators leveraging emerging technologies to cultivate vibrant, nature-infused communities. Galle won the European Space Agency’s top prize for her groundbreaking work on individual tree crown delineation to combat urban deforestation and has garnered numerous academic and entrepreneurial accolades. Among these is a Fulbright scholarship for a fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Senseable City Lab, where she maintains a research affiliation. Recently named a 2024 National Geographic Explorer, she investigates how cities across Latin America are embracing the "Internet of Nature" to forge resilient ecosystems.

Laura Buhl was born in Oregon and raised in the Columbia Gorge and the Willamette Valley. She is the Community Green Infrastructure Program Administrator at the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development, where she was previously a land use and transportation planner for the Transportation and Growth Management Program and realized the power of trees to make cities more walkable. Laura has been a land use planner for the City of Detroit, Michigan, and for her home county of Wasco County, Oregon. She has volunteered as a Crew Leader with Friends of Trees since 2017. She holds a BA in American Studies from Mills College, a Master of Community and Regional Planning from the University of Oregon, and a Graduate Certificate in Urban Forestry from Oregon State University.

A native-born Oregonian, Jim Gersbach has been volunteering in all things trees in the Portland area for decades. For more than 30 years he has been a volunteer planting crew leader and senior pruning crew leader with the non-profit Friends of Trees, and at one time served as board president. He is a founder of the Ainsworth Linear Arboretum in NE Portland. For the past 14 years he and other volunteers in his NE Portland neighborhood have planted and nurtured a remarkable collection of trees on the grounds of a local school. This past April he helped secure accreditation from Arbnet for the collection as an official Level 1 Arboretum, only the fifth one to be accredited in Oregon. He occasionally gives guided tours at Hoyt Arboretum and educational tree walks around Portland, including of the Cully-Concordia International Grove, which he helped create. Jim is a longtime board member of Oregon Community Trees, and chaired last year’s sold-out urban forestry conference. He worked for Portland Urban Forestry helping on their first street tree inventory, and now works as a public affairs officer for the Oregon Dept. of Forestry supporting that agency’s urban forestry and forest health teams. He is a founding member of Trees for Life Oregon, which educates about urban tree issues and advocates for their preservation.

After moving to Portland in 1994 as a construction supervisor with Habitat for Humanity, Eli Spevak managed the finance and construction of over 250 units of affordable housing through work in the non-profit sector. He served on the board of Portland’s community land trust for its first 5 years and worked with residents of Dignity Village, a self-built homeless camp, during its first two. After taking a year off to work as a backcountry ranger, Eli launched a development and general contractor company, Orange Splot LLC, to pioneer new models of community-oriented housing, ideally within an easy bike ride of his house. Completed projects have been featured in the New York Times and Sunset Magazine – and his most recent community, Cully Grove, just received a 2016 AIA Housing Award. He’s led tiny house bike tours, advocated for regulatory changes to support accessory dwellings, and co-founded the www.accessorydwellings.org website. Eli was awarded a Loeb Fellowship in Advanced Environmental Studies at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in the 2013-2014 school year. Since then, he’s participated in Portland’s Residential Infill Project to reform zoning in single dwelling areas, co-founded an advocacy organization (Portland for Everyone) to support diverse, abundant and affordable housing, and he is past chair of Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission (and still serves). He continues to launch new communities and hopes they go well enough to fund his policy habit.