Our Current Fellowship Cohort
The 2024 Fellowship Cohort has been selected! Wild Gift is thrilled to introduce this year's Fellows, chosen after a rigorous selection process from a diverse and inspiring pool of applicants. The leaders below distinguished themselves based on their exceptional leadership potential, commitment to social impact, innovative ventures, and eagerness to engage in the Wild Gift Fellowship journey. The upcoming 3-week deep wilderness trek in August-September 2024 will be guided by Francie St.Onge, Lead Guide, and Jacinta Gordon, Program Facilitator. To learn more, check out their bios below!
The 2024 Fellowship Cohort
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Simon Roca (he/him) is a changemaker with a passion for sustainability. Serving as a Business Development Advisor for the U.S. Peace Corps in Panama, he honed his project management skills. Driven by impact, Simon launched Neovida, an award winning superfood startup that pioneered the up-cycling of coffee fruit. He holds a BBA in Marketing from UW-Madison School of Business and graduated summa cum laude with an MBA from Thunderbird at Arizona State University.
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Ellen Oshinsky (she/her) is the Founder of Circle and Spoke, which focuses on women's empowerment through bike rides and retreats that emphasize rest, reflection, and community. She believes in the power of creating bridges between people, communities and nature to build a more just and compassionate world.
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Noemi Florea (she/her) is the founder of LÆRO, an independent design studio developing product-service systems in response to the challenges highlighted by the sustainable development goals. Since 2020, she has led the design and development of LÆRO's leading venture, Cycleau, which offers a compact greywater treatment system offering point-of-use water treatment and wastewater recycling to support marginalized communities impacted by water scarcity and contamination. In 2023, Noemi was selected as among the top 1% of youth innovators under 24 by MIT Solve, and was nominated by UNICEF as one of twenty climate youth innovators to be featured during COP28. She has presented Cycleau internationally in the U.S., Australia, the Netherlands, and the UAE.
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Gabe Tavas (he/him) is a biodesigner and explorer whose life mission is to empower others to protect their cultural and natural resources, particularly those related to wood, food, and rivers. In that effort, he currently works as co-founder and CEO of Symmetry Wood, the first company to create solid wood from bacterial nanocellulose that can replace increasingly endangered tropical hardwood in musical instruments, flooring, decking, and more. Gabe is also one of the first graduates to receive both a Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Design from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (UIUC) and a Master in Design for Distributed Innovation from the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC).
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Anna (she/her) is a wildlife biologist, co-founder and Education Director of Home Range Wildlife Research. She is a passionate scientist dedicated to bridging the gap between fieldwork and the lab, believing that impactful wildlife research starts and ends on the ground with high quality data collection and thoughtful outcome applications. Anna grew up in Michigan and now lives in Winthrop, Washington with her two cattle dogs, Roo and Yote.
Make a donation to Wild Gift
Support the 2024 Fellowship cohort by donating to Wild Gift today!