Ciara Byrne
In March, 2013 Ciara Byrne and Kim MacQuarrie co-founded a non-profit called Green Our Planet based in Las Vegas that runs the largest and most comprehensive STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) school garden and hydroponics programs in the United States. The mission is to increase student academic performance in STEM through project-based education, which includes nutrition, financial literacy, and conservation education in PreK-12 schools. Green Our Planet has built more than 250 outdoor gardens and over 750 hydroponics laboratories in 46 states impacting more than 350,000 students across the United States. Green Our Planet has trained more than 14,000 teachers, helped organize over 1500 student-run farmers markets and more than 1200 chef demos. Before running Green Our Planet, Ciara ran a film production company called Lion Television with offices in New York and LA and made films all over the world for channels including PBS, BBC, TLC, Discovery Channel, National Geographic and more. Ciara was selected along with 19 other nonprofit leaders from around the world, from 5,000 applications to be a 2019 Obama Fellow.
Dr Lynne Reeder is a member of the Board of Directors of the Global Compassion Coalition and an Adjunct Research Fellow at Federation University Australia. She is also the National Lead of the Australian Compassion Council, the global coordinator of the Science and Research sector of the International Charter for Compassion, and a member of the Australian Women’s Climate Congress.
Dr Janet Salisbury has a background in medical research but in the early 1990s made a career change into science writing and communications . She founded the science information company Biotext Pty Ltd, which became an Australian leader in producing science content for government and other organisations. Through this work, she developed a strong interest in dialogue around contentious public policy issues. For the past 17 years, she has extended this interest and also explored the role of the arts in public discourse with a Canberra women’s group, A Chorus of Women. She was the initiator and facilitator of a series of 14 ‘Canberra Conversations’ from 2009–2014, which brought together citizens from across different professional and political perspectives for conversations about environmental and development issues, the arts, peace and human rights. She is a member of the international collaboration of practitioners in the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter and was active in bringing this practice to Australia and Canberra. In January 2020, with ‘Black Summer’ bushfires still raging, she called the women in her networks to meetings to discuss her ideas around amplifying women’s voices for a collaborative national approach for climate action. This led to the formation of the Women’s Climate Congress, which has since become a diverse national network of women — meeting with parliamentarians and community leaders, to promote the Congress vision for collaborative, nonpartisan action to secure the climate and create systems change for long-term human and planetary wellbeing. The WCC has hosted numerous online and inperson events, including the (Australian) National Congress of Women in September 2022, and through conversations with 100s of women, has developed a WCC Charter for Change.