George Basile came to The Natural Step in 1999. At The Natural Step George has been deeply involved in organizational strategy, consulting services and research, both in the US and internationally. He has overseen the creation of the Sustainability Research Group. George has also helped broaden the areas of relevance for sustainable enterprise at The Natural Step to include social science, organizational change theory, cognitive science and evolutionary design. Along with Catherine Gray (President) and Ruth Rominger (VP), George has expanded The Natural Step's Services Group and analytical tools development effort. In addition, he advises the management of Fortune 500 companies and large organizations on how to integrate sustainability strategies into their global corporate competitiveness initiatives. Recently George has worked directly with senior teams from the Home Depot, McDonald's, and the Bank of America. He also has presented to the National Research Council at the National Academy of Sciences.

George received his undergraduate training in Physics at the University of California, Irvine and his doctorate in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. He has served on the faculty at Stanford University, was a specialist in emerging technology and sustainability at University of California Berkeley and Vice President for Business Development at Neomorphic, a bioinformatics business. George publishes in the field of sustainability, including research articles such as "Strategic Sustainability" in the Journal of Cleaner Production and, for a broader audience, articles such as "Sustainability: It's All About The Beach" in Surfrider's Making Waves.

Ariane Bradley joined The Natural Step in October 2002. For the past three years she was employed as the personal writing projects coordinator to the former U.S. Ambassador to Austria, Swanee Hunt. In addition, she worked for Ambassador Hunt's philanthropic foundation, "Hunt Alternatives." There, she worked closely with Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Women and Public Policy Program to launch a new global initiative called Women Waging Peace. Ariane also participated in the 1997 San Francisco State University field study on reintroducing the wolf in Yellowstone National Park. Ariane received her BA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Amanda Dates joined The Natural Step staff in February 2002 with ten years experience in environmental organizing, education, research and fundraising. In addition to fulfilling various traditional development responsibilities, she focuses on building strategic philanthropic partnerships and cultivating and managing foundation relationships. She has been a Development Director for an environmental organization (SLUG) and a Fundraising Field Office Director for MASSPIRG. She has also served as a Research Assistant for the Center for Political Ecology. While in graduate school, Amanda ran a full-time AmeriCorps program in an inner city high school in Manhattan designed to integrate environmental education into all disciplines. Currently Amanda is producing two documentary films about the environment and sustainability: El Popo, a story about indigenous farmers' relationship with an active volcano in south central Mexico and another film about sustainable urban agriculture in Havana, Cuba. She also serves on the Community Advisory Council for the Crissy Field Center for Environmental Education. She received a BS in Communications and Journalism from the State University of New York at Fredonia. Amanda is in the process of writing her Thesis for a Master of Arts in Environmental Conservation Education with a concentration in Multicultural Environmental Education at New York University.

Catherine Gray has served as President of The Natural Step in the United States since September 1997. As President, Catherine oversees all programs, development and strategy in the United States and plays a critical role in expanding The Natural Step's international organization. In addition to managing the growth of the US office, she works with senior executives, primarily at Fortune 500 companies, to help them integrate sustainability principles into their core strategy and operations. Catherine has led watershed engagements with The Home Depot, McDonald's and Bank of America, all of which have on-going relationships with The Natural Step. Her work in the for-profit and non-profit settings figures prominently in the organization's growth. In the for-profit sector, Catherine wrote and produced programming for the Wall Street Journal and StoryFirst Communications, an international television and radio company. Over the last ten years, Catherine has focused on the non-profit environmental sector. For six years she worked with The Nature Conservancy. Her roles included fundraising, developing communications plans and establishing and directing a Nature Conservancy program in Russia. Catherine graduated from Brown University with a BA in Journalism and English.

Charlotte Mandeville joined The Natural Step in July 2003. She brings with her five years of non-profit management experience, three years of independent organizational development and consulting experience, an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a BA in Psychology from UC Berkeley. With a dual title, Director of Donor Relations and Advisory Services Associate, Charlotte’s responsibilities reflect the organization’s strategy to create a blended revenue model that merges fundraising efforts with business development strategies, emphasizing education and strategic relationships. Charlotte’s life long interest in combining the benefits of technology with the needs of people led her to work as a consultant for Accenture in the Strategic IT Effectiveness Group and to focus her studies at MIT on Business Transformation and Technology, where she completed a paper on Information Technology strategy and the use of corporate intranets. Prior to attending graduate school, as an independent consultant, Charlotte designed and delivered custom training programs and provided facilitation and strategic planning services for both corporate and non-profit clients. Charlotte is also an avid outdoorswoman. In addition to guiding whitewater rafting and kayaking trips throughout the West, she has directed outdoor adventure, environmental education, and recreation programs for the nonprofits Outdoors Unlimited and Environmental Traveling Companions. Her adventures have taken her around the world, and for a two-year period, Charlotte lived in Costa Rica managing a large hotel in Flamingo Beach.

Coming Soon...

Caroline McDowell has worked with The Natural Step as a part time employee since November 1999. She manages all administrative functions including finance, staff benefits and cross-departmental requests. Caroline leads an internal sustainability initiative known as the "walk the talk" team. Prior to The Natural Step she worked with other local non-profits focusing on sustainable agriculture and education. Caroline received a BA cum laude from Sonoma State University in Environmental Studies and Urban Planning as well as a BA cum laude in Theater Arts with a concentration in Dance.

As the Vice President of Transformation with The Natural Step, Ardeshir Mehran designs and delivers key organizational and operational effectiveness and change management solutions to support clients to achieve strong sustainability results.

Ardeshir has more than 20 years of experience consulting to major global organizations and senior executives in the areas of organizational transformation and performance turnarounds, most recently as a partner at Mercer Delta Consulting. He is a leading expert in managing enterprise-wide transformation projects, organizational assessments and redesign, performance measurement/scorecard systems, best practices studies, and the voice of constituents research (consumers, employees, leadership, suppliers, competitors.) Previously, Ardeshir served as a director of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Organizational Effectiveness Practice and held managerial positions at AT&T, Kaiser Permanente, and Allstate Insurance.

Ardeshir holds a Ph.D. in quantitative psychology and a M.Ed. in counseling psychology from Columbia University. He has authored numerous research papers, and presents his work regularly at national conferences.

Eric Olson is leading the formation of The Natural Step's Services Group. He is a senior management consultant who has worked with major corporations and non-profit organizations on issues of business strategy, performance improvement and organizational development. The current focus of Eric's work is to help corporations identify and execute opportunities to achieve competitive advantage through superior environmental and social performance. He has worked with leading companies on developing integrated environmental and business performance metrics; assessing business risks and opportunities related to global climate change; leveraging company investments in environmental/corporate social responsibility reporting to help them make better business decisions and creating innovative supply chain and marketing partnerships to address climate change and related issues. Eric was a founding member of Mitchell Madison Group in New York and a Vice President with Boston Consulting Group. Earlier in his career, he worked on US-Soviet trade development in Moscow and New York. Eric holds an M.Phil. from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and a BA in Chemistry and Russian from Macalester College.

Katherine Preston began working at The Natural Step in October 1998. Her role has diverse responsibilities including providing staff development, management coaching, fostering a sustainable work culture, overseeing of benefits and performance evaluations and recruiting. She has over fifteen years of non-profit administrative experience ranging from financial administration to social services. Katherine has an MA in social-clinical psychology from New College of California in San Francisco, is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and maintains a private practice in San Francisco. She received her undergraduate degree in philosophy, religion and psychology from Miami University's Western College of Interdisciplinary Studies in Ohio.

Bryant Rice joined The Natural Step’s Sustainable Design Program in February 2004. He brings over 20 years experience as an architect, interior designer and business consultant. His work has focused on planning, managing and implementing change on a corporate level. Past engagements include corporate communications strategies, real estate portfolio review, campus master planning, workplace analysis and strategy. By bringing a business perspective to design issues, Bryant has been able to increase efficiencies, reduce costs and improve utilization and productivity. He believes that looking at details and taking a holistic view are not mutually exclusive. Through combining strategy with tactics, he is able to communicate expectations to multiple audiences with an elegance and simplicity that attracts notice and gets results. Past clients include: Apple Computer, Inc. Bank of America, Hewlett Packard, BBC, Genentech, BP/Amoco, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Towers Perrin among others.

Bryant has taught at University of Illinois, Champaign, and CCA (California College of Art). He was president of the San Francisco Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2000. He is a licensed architect in California. He maintains NCARB certification. He holds an MBA and M.Arch from University of Illinois as well as a BS from Georgia Institute of Technology. He is fluent in French.

Ruth Rominger joined The Natural Step in 2000 to apply her expertise in strategic organizational development. Since then she has helped manage the organization and build key systems, processes and programs with a specific focus on the Services Group. Her work history includes an array of management and consulting engagements, in more than 25 companies and organizations. Some examples include technology start-ups, community and worker owned cooperatives, non-profit organizations, women's health center and Fortune 500 company, where she was an Editor of management, organizational behavior and information systems college textbooks, and later the Publisher and General Manager of a multimedia development division. Prior to joining The Natural Step, Ruth spent six years in e-learning and information commerce ventures for which she wrote strategic plans, designed product development processes, trained project teams and built content development systems. Ruth's life-time commitment to entrepreneurship and sustainability issues blossomed in childhood on her family's California farm, where she continues to learn from her family's experiments with sustainable and organic practices and policy advocacy. Ruth attended the University of California Davis studying applied behavioral sciences, and graduated from the University of California San Diego with a BA in World Literature and Creative Writing.

Heather Sarantis came to the Sustainability Research Group at The Natural Step in October 2002. She recently wrote The Business Guide to Paper Reduction for Forest Ethics. Heather brings a deep knowledge and strong analytical framework to several new research initiatives at The Natural Step. Heather's initial analysis will focus on taking a long-term systems perspective of the environmental and social concerns associated with the food, fiber and fisheries industries. She has worked with grassroots organizations such as Rainforest Action Network and Buddhist Peace Fellowship as well as corporate executives to envision and implement sustainability initiatives. Heather is a Doris Duke Fellow for Conservation Leadership. She holds an MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana and a BS in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of Maryland.

Sissel Waage launched and directs the R&D Program at The Natural Step. She develops the strategy and implements both research and strategic dialogue projects. In addition, Sissel works with the Services Group advising Fortune 500 companies on integration of sustainability into strategy, operations, and reporting. For the past twelve years, she has been working on sustainability issues in Africa, Europe, and North America. Her areas of focus have included business, international policymaking, community-based conservation and development, and consensus building processes. Prior to joining The Natural Step, she worked with Sustainable Northwest and the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) East and Southern Africa Program. Sissel has also served as a consultant to the Packard Foundation, the Biodiversity Support Program, a forest research station, and several other international conservation and development organizations. Her work has been published in a range of journals including Corporate Environmental Strategy, Society & Natural Resources, Political Geography, and the Journal of Sustainable Forestry. She has also edited a book entitled, Ants, Galileo, and Gandhi: Designing the Future of Business through Nature, Genius, and Compassion (Greenleaf Publications, 2003). Sissel completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, and received her BA degree magna cum laude from Amherst College, in Massachusetts. She has also studied at the University of Oslo, in Norway, as a Fulbright Scholar, and at the National University of Singapore.