BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Megan Acevedo - Secretary
Megan Acevedo serves as General Counsel for the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority and Town Attorney for the Town of San Anselmo. Megan has significant experience advising and representing local public entities concerning a broad range of subjects, including the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), land use, and open meeting law requirements. Megan previously served as a Deputy Attorney General in the Environment Section of the California State Attorney General’s Office. Megan received her J.D. from the UCLA School of Law in 2003 as part of the Public Interest Law and Policy Program. In 1995, Megan received her B.A. in American Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz with highest honors.
Megan Gleason - Treasurer/Vice President
Megan Gleason is a 2015 graduate of the University of Oregon, where she received her Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Studies. Megan interned with Our Children’s Trust during college in our YouCAN program to help pass the successful Eugene Climate Recovery Ordinance. A dedicated environmentalist, Megan has also worked with Food & Water Watch and UO Climate Justice League to organize the UO Take Back the Tap campaign, and interned with the Congressional Research Service in Washington, D.C. to research federal green building programs. Additionally, she wrote her undergraduate thesis on our litigation, entitled "Atmospheric Trust Litigation: Prompting Climate Action Through the Courts." Megan brings an analytical and youth perspective to our governance and programming.
Diane Hazen - Past President
Diane Hazen is a licensed clinical social worker, and has worked most recently as Director of Community Partnerships and Care Transitions for PeaceHealth. She was Director of Medical Social Work at Sacred Heart Medical Center for eleven years. Diane is Past President and has served on the Board of the South Lane Family Relief Nursery for seventeen years. She is Past President of the Oregon Society for Social Work Leadership in Healthcare and was the recipient of the organization’s award, “Social Work Administrator of the Year”, for the state of Oregon. Her community memberships include serving on the Healthy Start Community Advisory Board, Lane County Harm Reduction Coalition and Latino Medical Access Coalition. She also worked on policy and legislative issues while serving on PeaceHealth’s Government Relations Task Force. Diane has presented nationally on topics addressing how to create collaborative community forums to effect change and improve health care across the continuum.
Patrick McGinley
Patrick McGinley is a graduate of Dickinson College and Duke University School of Law. He was law clerk for Justice Thomas W. Pomeroy Jr. of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court. McGinley served as Special Asst. Attorney General, Pennsylvania Environmental Strike Force. He is the Charles H. Haden II Professor of Law at West Virginia University where he teaches environmental, administrative, and natural resources law. Professor McGinley was co-editor of Coal Law & Regulation andthe Eastern Mineral Law Foundation’s Annual Proceedings. He has served as Chair, ALI-ABA Course of Study: Legal Issues in the Coal Industry; Chair, Assn. of American Law Schools, Environmental Law Section; member Advisory Board, W. Va, Department of Energy; member, W.Va. Governor’s Independent Investigation Panels of Sago and Upper Big Branch Mine Disasters. He is a member of the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide, a global network of human rights and environmental advocates. The Environmental Policy Institute has recognized him for Atireless efforts to promote and uphold the rights of the land, the people of America's coalfields and the law protecting them" and by the Public Justice Foundation for Awinning exceptional victories for the public interest. For more than three and a half decades Professor McGinley has represented and counseled Appalachian rural families and communities seeking to vindicate their rights to a healthy and safe environment.
Jim Miller
Jim Miller is CEO of RxMapper, a precision drug information platform that enables health insurance providers, health care professionals, PBMs and patients to quickly and accurately make safe and effective drug decisions that are tailored to the unique DNA of each individual patient. RxMapper was developed in collaboration with Mayo Clinic and exclusively licensed from Mayo Clinic. Jim is a serial entrepreneur with over twenty-five (25) years of founding and leading a succession of companies: Matrix Communications (1991-2000); Tenor Communications (2000-2007); Online Convergence (2007-2016); and 1588 Advisors (2016-present). Jim donates a considerable amount of his time and resources to improving the educational opportunities of poor and at-risk children and advocating for solutions to the problem of global climate change. Jim is on the Board of Directors of Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, where he works with renowned Climate Scientist Dr. Jim Hansen to advocate for a market driven, carbon-fee and dividend approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions; on the Board of Directors of Our Children’s Trust, where he supports OCT’s Atmospheric Trust Litigation; and is the author of the Clean Energy and Shared Prosperity Act. Jim is a member of Boston College’s Board of Regents; was a founding trustee of the Boston College Lab School at St. Columbkille; and previously served under Peter Lynch as Vice President and trustee of Boston’s Inner-City Scholarship Fund and the Catholic Schools Foundation. Jim lives in the Boston area with his wife and their three children.
Julia Olson
Julia Olson graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1993 with a B.A. in International Affairs and from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, with a J.D. in 1997. Julia worked for 15 years representing grassroots conservation groups in the West. She helped protect rivers, forests, parks, wilderness, wildlife, organic agriculture and human health. After becoming a mother, and realizing the greatest threat to her children and children everywhere was climate change, she began focusing her work in that field and founded Our Children's Trust. Her work has led her to the intersection of human rights and environmental protection and she is passionate about working for youth. Julia also teaches environmental courses as an adjunct instructor at the University of Oregon School of Law. To rejuvenate, Julia loves being high up in the mountains with her family and her dog or playing tunes on her ukulele with friends.
Lisa Patel
Lisa Patel is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford School of Medicine. She received her Master’s in Environmental Sciences from the Yale School of the Environment, her medical degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and completed her training in pediatrics at UCSF. She is a former Presidential Management Fellow for the Environmental Protection Agency where she coordinated the US Government’s efforts on clean air and safe drinking water projects in South Asia in collaboration with the World Health Organization. She is a faculty mentor for the Stanford Climate and Health group and mentors projects on climate-resilient schools, environmental justice, sustainable healthcare, and medical education curriculum reform. She is a member of the Executive Committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Environmental Health and Climate Change and the Deputy Executive Director for the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health.
Chris Winter - President
Chris Winter is the Executive Director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment at Colorado Law School. He is an attorney and advocate with 25 years of experience in the field of natural resources and environmental law. Over the course of his career, he has developed an expertise in public land management, environmental justice, climate change, and fossil fuel infrastructure projects, and he has extensive experience working with and representing Indigenous communities. He has litigated and won dozens of cases in federal and state courts on a wide range of issues. He has previously taught as an adjunct professor of law at Lewis and Clark Law School, and he is a frequent public speaker on environmental and natural resources issues. Chris received his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School and his B.A. from Cornell University.
BOARD MEMBER EMERITA
Maxine Burkett
Serving on our board until her June 2021 appointment as Senior Advisor to the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, John Kerry, Maxine Burkett is a Professor of Law at the William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai‘i (on leave), and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is also a Co-Founder and Senior Advisor at the non-profit Institute for Climate and Peace. Burkett is an expert in the law and policy of climate change, with a specific focus on climate justice, climate-induced migration, and climate change, peace, and conflict. From 2009-2012, Burkett also served as the inaugural director of the Center for Island Climate Adaptation and Policy. Her scholarly work has been cited in numerous news and policy outlets, including BBC Radio, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Nature Climate Change. Professor Burkett is a Co-Rapporteur for the International Law Association’s Committee on International Law and Sea Level Rise. She is also a member scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform, the Lancet Commission for Reparations and Redistributive Justice, and the American Law Institute. In addition to serving on the board of Our Children’s Trust, Maxine also served on the boards of the Blue Planet Foundation, The Climate Museum, ELAW, Elemental Excelerator, and the Global Greengrants Fund. Prof. Burkett received her B.A. from Williams College and Exeter College, Oxford University, and received her J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Kelly Matheson
Kelly Matheson is an attorney, filmmaker and human rights advocate with a specialty in environmental human rights and the use of video in criminal justice investigations and proceedings. As an attorney, she worked in East Africa researching citizens’ rights to bring suit against their governments when governments broke their own laws. She then practiced throughout the western United States working on issues where environmental and human rights converge. Her film career began in 2003. Her film projects focused on indigenous and environmental rights in Central America and the United States. This led to a year-long research project as a Fulbright Scholar in Congo-Brazzaville where she collaborated with a video-centered outreach project to determine the effectiveness of video to increase knowledge and, in turn, change behaviors to prevent the transmission of the Ebola virus. Currently, she is a Senior Attorney and Program Manager with WITNESS, an international human right organization that specializes in using video to support change in human rights practice, policy and law. At WITNESS, she launched the inaugural Video Advocacy Institute, began the North America program and now leads WITNESS’ Video as Evidence project which supports human rights lawyers and activists to enhance the evidentiary value of the video they collect in hopes that it can be used to hold perpetrators of human rights abuses accountable and free the wrongly accused. Having graduated from the University of Oregon School of Law and Montana State University’s MFA in Science and Natural History Filmmaking, Kelly’s passion is traveling to different corners of the world to support on-the-ground activists to use law and film to secure our basic human rights.
Anne Jennings - Founding Member
“I am deeply grateful to OCT and its ongoing commitment to empower young people to be recognized and heard as we face cataclysmic change from the human-caused climate crisis. We face irreversible harm if necessary action is not undertaken now. OCT’s expertise and legal strategy with younger generations is key, embracing core human rights principles, embedded in the United States Constitution, to secure a livable climate. Our courts, if they are to be accountable to these young people and future generations, must act to protect these rights. Our and their very survival depends on it.”
Sharon Duggan - Founding Member
“The climate crisis continues to intensify in the face of delay and lack of meaningful recognition and action. OCT stands out as a unique presence, giving voice to young people who are most deeply affected, yet often are placated with only words and not action. OCT’s dedicated efforts over the past decade are changing the course of this demise, ensuring that younger generations are guaranteed their right to a livable climate, now and into the future. Empowering younger generations to secure their rights is fundamental to a just and equitable society. OCT is doing what needs to be done, with skill, expertise, tremendous strategic advocacy and the moral character our world requires.”