Our Team

Jim Fruchterman is a leading social entrepreneur, a MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. His life’s work is applying technology to benefit the 95% of humanity typically neglected by for-profit tech companies. Jim’s first social enterprise idea was a machine that recognizes letters and words and reads those words aloud to people who are blind. He founded Benetech, now Silicon Valley’s leading nonprofit technology company, to build these reading machines and empower people with disabilities to read independently. He continued by creating Bookshare, which is now the largest library globally for people who are blind or dyslexic. Jim was on the original drafting team for the Treaty of Marrakesh, the first pro-consumer intellectual property treaty passed by the United Nations.

In 2018, Jim founded Tech Matters, a new nonprofit tech-for-good organization. Tech Matters builds the technology for the social good movement, helping social and systems entrepreneurs use tech to achieve impact at scale. Its first two social enterprises are Aselo, a shared modern contact center for the child helpline movement, and Terraso, a platform to bring better tools and more funding to locally-led sustainability initiatives to respond to climate change. Jim received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in applied physics from CalTech.

Scott Henderson is a conservation and marine management practitioner with field experience as a researcher and consultant, primarily in Latin America. He leads Conservation International’s Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape program out of Galapagos, Ecuador, where he is responsible for developing multi-country marine strategies, building teams to deliver on those strategies, fundraising and communicating results to build awareness of marine conservation issues.

Scott founded the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape program, which has been recognized by the United Nations as a global model for supporting nations in improving their regional marine management. He also was heavily involved in the creation of over 2.5 million hectares of marine protected areas in Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Ecuador. He has co-published several research articles regarding ocean conservation and threatened marine life. Prior to joining Conservation International in 2003, Scott worked as a naturalist guide and divemaster in the Galapagos Marine Reserve and as a graduate student with teaching responsibilities at the University of Oxford. He earned his MSc at Oxford with honors in environmental change and management and his undergraduate degree from Washington and Lee University with magna cum laude honors in biology and English.

Willem Ferwerda is the CEO and co-founder of Commonland, a system developer of large integrated, holistic landscape management and restoration projects, bringing solutions at a landscape scale on biodiversity, carbon, regenerative agriculture, and communities. He specializes in the interaction between tropical ecosystems and agriculture, and system change management. From 2000-2012 Ferwerda was the director of IUCN Netherlands, where he led large ecosystem grants programs, and initiated Leaders for Nature, an international network of CEOs and prominent people from the business community addressing biodiversity conservation. It led to several agreements and policy changes with industrial networks. In 2012, Ferwerda developed the 4 Returns Framework on Landscape Restoration which led to the founding of Commonland in 2013.

Ferwerda is involved as an advisor or board member with various international organizations in the fields of nature, biodiversity, agriculture, and sustainability. He is executive fellow at the Rotterdam School of Management – Erasmus University, and theme lead at the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management. In 2016, he was awarded first place in the Sustainable 100, the list of Dutch people with the most influence on the environment and sustainability. In 2019 Ferwerda received the Dutch sustainable landscape award. Ferwerda studied biology, tropical agriculture and environmental science at the Free University and University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands as well as the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá, Colombia.

Dr. Sara J. Scherr founded the nonprofit EcoAgriculture Partners in 2002 to promote locally-led agricultural landscape transformation for food security, rural livelihoods and ecosystem services. A leading innovator in agricultural landscape analysis, planning, policy and finance, she has supported landscape partnerships in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the U.S. and advised landscape programs worldwide.

In 2011, Scherr co-founded the global network “Landscapes for People, Food and Nature,” and in 2019 launched and now chairs the global collaborative “1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People” to accelerate landscape regeneration worldwide. Sara serves on the Boards of Bioversity International-USA and Solutions from the Land and is a Fellow of the Evergreening Alliance. She also serves on numerous editorial and advisory boards, including those of Commonland and Food Tank, and is a member of the UN Food Systems Summit Action Track on Nature-Positive Production and co-lead for its Governance Action Area. Her research is widely published in scientific and policy literature. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in international economics and development from Cornell University and her B.A. in economics from Wellesley College.

Phemo Kgomotso is a Senior Technical Advisor at UNDP with a demonstrated history of working in the environment and sustainable development field. Based in Istanbul, Phemo has been part of a team of technical advisors at UNDP who support governments to develop and implement initiatives to address global environmental problems and to meet their commitments and obligations under the Rio Conventions. Her work has focused specifically on themes related to integrated landscape management and SLM and restoration, sustainable agriculture and food. She has extensive experience in natural resource management, program development, resource mobilization and project management and in the identification, design and implementation of innovative solutions for urgent environmental challenges.

Kgomotso holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in development studies, an M.S. in water resources management and a bachelor’s degree in political science and public administration from the University of Botswana.