Lizabeth Kashinsky

For over 25 years, Lizabeth has been working in the field of conservation in the Hawaiian islands, a place often considered the endangered species capital of the world. Through her work, she has witnessed firsthand the negative consequences that human impacts have had on what were once pristine and unique marine and terrestrial ecosystems, as well as toward endangered and threatened plants and animals. Lizabeth has also had the great privilege of working for months at a time at remote field sites located within the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, a World Heritage Site. Her experience living and working in this place with very limited contact with the outside world was life-changing and provided opportunities to deepen her connections with wild nature. She was eventually inspired to pursue a Master’s degree in Ecopsychology at Naropa University with a focus on the topic of ecological grief and other feelings of loss of the natural world. It was at Naropa that she was first introduced to Radical Joy for Hard Times. She became a board member for RadJoy in 2018, and she stepped into the position of Executive Director on January1, 2025.

ANDREA NANDOSKAR
Andrea is a community activist and educator dedicated to creating collaborative experiences that inspire shifts in consciousness and ignite collective vision. She seeks a peaceful, just and thriving world for all (human and nonhuman beings alike), by working at the intersection of passion and possibility. Andrea co-created the Oahu Premier of the Fuel film, which brought together members of Hawaii’s environmental community for an evening of education and celebration. She has written about Hawaii visionaries, co-produced Oahu’s first Humane Education Week, and developed informational library displays on vegetarianism. For more than a decade Andrea has curated educational programming at Historic Hawaii Foundation, aligned with the nonprofit organization’s mission to “Help People Save (and steward) Historic Places”—places that hold deep meaning and the collective stories of Hawaii’s diverse past.

JENNIFER FENDYA, Ph.D.
Jennifer has lived along the Great Lakes most of her life and resides currently in Buffalo, NY, traditional territory of the Seneca Nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. As a Psychologist in private practice for more than 25 years and registered Sandplay practitioner, she works with adults primarily through depth-oriented approaches to healing. Jennifer is a certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide and student-teacher of Nalanda Miksang photography, contemplative practices that offer the somatic and relational gifts of slowing down, re-attuning the senses, and opening to the world’s inherent numinosity. Jennifer is a climate-aware therapist who serves on the Climate Café facilitator training and support team for the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America where she also is regional co-coordinator for upstate New York. She convenes gatherings regularly to counteract the destabilizing effects of the metacrisis on mental health and social cohesion through Healing Circles Global and the Western NY Environmental Alliance. Acting in reciprocity with the land is a generative pathway for the ecological self, and Jennifer seeks to inspire others to take up “good Earth-keeping” to bring care, beauty and harmony to hurt places (including our collective human heart).

MIKE NOVOTNY
Mike Novotny is a transdisciplinary artist, PhD candidate, and a U.S. Army veteran who is passionate about creative expression and storytelling. His work often centers around warriorhood, nature, and human becoming. Mike integrates knowledge and practices rooted in spiritual traditions, science, philosophy, mythology, and psychology. Terrapsychology is one of the primary disciplines that influences his artistic process. When he is not in his studio, he aspires to help others bring conscious awareness to their own creativity and ceremonial becoming process. He does so by facilitating the soulful exploration of visionary and regenerative practices.

JILL OLESKER
Jill has been a storyteller and educator as well as a gatherer of oral histories for over 35 years. She has worked in schools, nature centers, botanical gardens, libraries, Forests and beside Rivers. She also has worked collectively as a staff member at Central Park East School in NYC and collaborated with artists and teachers. She is passionate about helping people interact with and connect to nature and their imaginations through the arts and the ancient traditions of storytelling. She has worked with children and adults.

AMY TUTTLE (THUNDER)
Amy is a wilderness guide, artist, and non-profit leader based in Cincinnati, Ohio, who envisions a world animated by deep connection and authentic response. Her soulwork is expressed in a diversity of ways: she guides wilderness rites of passage programs, engages in collaborative art-making around the world (dance, film, visual art, poetry, and beyond!), and directs WordPlay Cincy: a youth-based NGO guided by transformational storytelling. She facilitates trauma-informed expressive arts in a variety of medical settings and serves as Faculty for the Global Arts in Medicine Fellowship, where she’s trained 2500+ practitioners around the world.

The Radical Joy Earth Council of Advisors is a group of people whose work has inspired, informed, and engaged Radical Joy for Hard Times, and who are as excited about the opportunities to learn, connect, and collaborate as we are.

	GLENN ALBRECHT
	Before Glenn Albrecht coined a word for it, few people gave much credence to the notion that ecological crises could cause psychological distress. But in 2003, Glenn, a professor of sustainability at Murdoch University, Perth, Australia, introduced the term solastalgia, meaning “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.” Glenn’s work branched into many forms, including a TED talk, articles in the New York Times Magazine and the Ceylon Daily News, art exhibits from Australia to Arkansas, and even an instrumental by the British musical duo Zero 7. Glenn also has also published articles in the field of animal ethics and is the co-author with Dr. Phillip McManus of the 2012 book, The Global Horseracing Industry: Social, Economic, Environmental and Ethical Perspectives. Recently, in a precedent-setting court case, he helped residents of Bulga, New South Wales prove to a judge that a proposed coal mine expansion would cause severe ecological and psychological harm.
	DANIEL DANCER
	Daniel Dancer is a visionary conceptual artist whose work focuses on beauty and destruction in the natural world. While traveling in South America in the 1980s he became fascinated the famous Nazca Lines of Peru, ancient images that can only be comprehended from the air. He began exploring how these works could be meaningful in a contemporary context, and now, with his Art for the Sky, he works with schools and communities worldwide to create images composed of the people themselves, which he then photographs from on high. He is the author of Desperate Prayers: Artistic Adventures in Spirit and Ecologyand Desperate Prayers: A Quest for Sense in a Senseless Time, in which he documents twelve years of creating “eco-sculptures” with found materials in endangered eco-systems. As a photographer, he has shown his images of beauty in the midst of devastation in numerous galleries and publications worldwide, including the Sierra Club book, Clearcut, depicting the destruction of forests in North America. Daniel is also a singer-songwriter; his music is featured on his first CD, Wild is the Way, recorded with his band, Skysight.
	MEREDITH LITTLE FOSTER
	Meredith Little and her husband Steven Foster brought the modern wilderness rites of passage movement into being. As co-founders of Rites of Passage, Inc. in 1976 and The School of Lost Borders in 1981, they pioneered new methods and dynamics of modern pan-cultural passage rites in the wilderness and created innovative practices of “field eco-therapy.” They have trained thousands of guides from southern California to South Africa. The essence of their work has been captured in articles, chapters of books, an award-winning documentary film, Lost Borders, and their own books, including The Book of the Vision Quest, The Roaring of the Sacred River, and The Four Shields: The Initiatory Seasons of Human Nature. Since Steven’s death in 2003, Meredith continues both nationally and internationally to guide and train others. Along with Dr. Scott Eberle, she founded a new branch of Lost Borders entitled The Practice of Living and Dying, to break the taboos and silence that pervade the subject of death and to help restore dying to its natural place in the cycle of life. Meredith is currently director of The Practice of Living and Dying, Lost Borders International, and Lost Borders Press. She lives in Big Pine, California.
	DAVID POWLESS
	With his perception of environmental waste as an orphan from the circle of life, David Powless was an early inspiration for Radical Joy for Hard Times. A member of the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin, David is dedicated both to sustaining tribal traditions and to encouraging Indian people, particularly young people, to become successful and productive professionally. He began his career as a football player with the New York Giants and later with the Washington Redskins. Among the business ventures he has founded or led are ORTEK, an Oneida-run environmental laboratory in Green Bay; Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, where he served as vice president; and Bear Paw, an insurance agency for tribal governments. Currently update. Among his awards and honors are the Small Business Administration’s National Innovation Advocate of the Year Award in 1981 and induction into the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame in Niagara Falls, NY in 2008. For many years he has taught tribal members a process he calls Rainbow Way Visioning Meditation, which bridges science, meditation and Indian Traditional Teachings. He lives in New Mexico.
	LILY YEH
	Lily Yeh is an internationally celebrated artist whose pioneering work has brought beauty to communities throughout the world. A native of Kueizhou, China, Lily studied traditional Chinese painting in Taiwan before immigrating to the United States in 1963 to attend art school in Philadelphia. In 1968 she founded Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia, launching a national model of community-building through the arts as she and her colleagues from the community transformed a neglected, rundown neighborhood into a place of visionary splendor. In 2004, Lily founded Barefoot Artists, Inc., to bring the transformative power of art to impoverished communities around the world. In 2005 she launched the Rwanda Healing Project, working with female-headed families to create a Genocide Memorial Park to honor victims of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Another recent project was with the Dandelion School Transformation Project, created by and for the children of a school located in a heavily polluted industrial area on the outskirts of Beijing. Lily’s work, which has won many prestigious awards, has also impacted people in Columbia, Ecuador, Ghana, Italy, Ivory Coast, Kenya, and the Republic of Georgia. Her new book is Awakening Creativity: Dandelion School Blossoms