Our Team

Our Team, Our Story

Green Breakfast Club was founded in June of 2011 by Danielle Lanyard, with the legal guidance and blind faith of Lucien White, a corporate structure finance attorney at DLA Piper. By September, there was no business model, but loads of momentum and a growing community. Adiel Gavish came on board as Resource Exchange Director, and then a senior management team of cofounders joined the fray to evolve Green Breakfast Club into Village Green. Village Green will launch in late March with an expanded offering of products: green club events, startup incubator program, coworking facility and enterprise training company. Village Green is Danielle Lanyard, CEO; Peter Fusaro, COO; Dave Meyers, CFO; Lucien White, Legal; Dr. Paul Coleman, CTO; Frank Dinucci, Investment Committee Chair.

Danielle Lanyard, Founder and Chief Ecological Officer

Danielle Lanyard's life and work experience blends environmental study, community action, and business development. Her work began as a child and spans two decades and four continents, including early coursework in Environmental Studies at The Evergreen State College and a B.A. in Psychology from UC, Santa Cruz. Rather than enter the workplace, Danielle chose to travel, living out a lifelong dream to see the rest of the world, where she bartered her way around the globe and got the first inklings for the idea of a barter as a business. While abroad, Danielle created and taught Laos's first course in Sustainable Development, served as an Environmental Ed trainee in the Peace Corps in Senegal, and worked in Berlin as the Development Director for the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy.

Back in the US, she became a serial social entrepreneur, launching startups, Travelcology and Open Venture Society, small businesses still in business today.  She is the founder and CEO of Green Breakfast Club, and the greater Village Green organization launching in spring 2012. When not running around town getting these ventures going, you can find her tweeting away at @ecoblips.

Adiel Gavish, Resource Exchange Director

Adiel Gavish is currently developing innovation and design workshops based on Biomimicry, a science which studies and applies nature's principles, techniques and strategies of sustainable, regenerative design. These workshops are designed to help businesses optimize their sustainability and climate change initiatives by creating added value, as well as products and services that give back to the systems from which they take. She has seven years experience as Program Director for a grassroots environmental advocacy and education organization; one year as a Sustainability Strategist, consulting Fortune 500 companies, and recently conducted research on public-private partnerships for the Earth Institute's Program on Strategic Partnerships and Innovation.

Board of Advisors

Peter Fusaro

Peter C. Fusaro is a best selling author, keynote speaker and thought leader on emerging energy and environmental financial markets. He is Chairman of Global Change Associates, an energy and environmental consultancy in New York since 1991 and is the best selling author of What Went Wrong at Enron as well as 15 other books on energy and the environmental financial markets. Peter is has been on the forefront of energy and environmental change for over 36 years and has worked for over 20 years on climate change issues and with companies worldwide. He holds the annual Wall Street Green Summit each spring and is advisor to 8 cleantech software and hardware companies in the US and UK. In 2009, Peter launched the Global Change Foundation focused on environmental education and projects and held its first Green Jobs Summit in March 2010. The foundation also runs the Green Salon where artists perform and environmental experts speak.

Peter graduated with an MA in international relations from Tufts University and a BA from Carnegie-Mellon University. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He is on the Advisory Board of the ERB Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan as well as on the Board of Trustees of the UN’s Energy & Water Institute of New York.

Jon Gosier

Jon Gosier is a designer, software developer, lover of data science and the co-founder of metaLayer, which creates apps that enable users to contextualize the mobile and social web.  From 2008 to 2010, Gosier lived in Kampala, Uganda where he worked on high profile tech projects in East Africa including projects with Google Africa, the U.S. Department of State, and Ushahidi. His blog Appfrica.net was one of the widest-read blogs about the emerging African technology sector, and one of the most trafficked blogs on the continent. From 2009 to 2011 he served as Director of Product for SwiftRiver at Ushahidi working on an open-source platform for drowing insight from real-time content. The SwiftRiver project was awarded the 2011 Knight News Challenge award for its potential to improve the data journalism and news gathering process. In 2009 Jon spoke at TEDGlobal in Oxford, UK about his company Appfrica and one of their projects which connected rural African villages with the internet through a call center.  The service, in collaboration with non-profit OpenMind, was called QuestionBox and allowed people with no access to the internet to ask questions and get timely, vetted answers. Jon is a TED Senior Fellow.

Jon Gosier’s work has been profiled by a number of media outlets including the New York Times, The Economist, GigaOm, Forbes and New Scientist. Most recently, Jon is a co-founder of Apps 4 Africa, a regional competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of State with the goal of promoting African technology entrepreneurs as they built tools to serve the needs of local NGOs and their own communities.

Larry Leifer

Larry Leifer is a creative enthusiast, professor and the founding director of the Stanford Center for Design Research (CDR’84) where he works with colleagues in AA, ME, CEE, CS, MSE, Medicine and the Humanities to understand and facilitate creative technical design-team activity.  He develops objective measures of design team performance (learning) under various structured methodology conditions and uses a variety of computational tools.  These studies are focused on globally distributed product design-development on campus, across campuses, and with industry. Leifer’s design thinking research is focused on instrumenting, understanding, supporting, and improving design practice through the development of design theory. Specific issues include: design research methodology, global team dynamics, innovation leadership, interactive interaction spaces, design-for-wellbeing, and adaptive mechatronic systems.

Aman Singh

Aman Singh is a prominent CSR journalist and communications strategist. A contributory writer for Forbes and CSRwire, she is the author of In Good Company: Singh on CSR, a blog on CSR communications and strategy, and an IEMA-certified CSR Practitioner, trained in GRI reporting and UNGC guidelines. She also advises and assists entrepreneurs, marketers and sustainability professionals on communication, social media and CSR strategies. Aman served as the Senior Corporate Responsibility Editor with Vault, a career management company, where she created, designed and managed the first multimedia CSR portal. Aman's work has appeared on CNBC, Bloomberg Businessweek, Ethical Performance, the ABA's CSR Journal and The Corporate Citizen, among others and is widely read on global websites like 2degrees and The Environment Site.

Formerly with The Wall Street Journal, Aman is a New York University alumnus and was named among 2010’s Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior by Trust Across America and ranked No. 4 in HRExaminer’s Top 25 HR Digital Influencers for 2011. She is a board member of the National Association for Asian MBA’s ERG Council and on the advisory board for the Center for Sustainability & Excellence and the Council for Corporate Responsibility.

Lucien White

Lucien White is a corporate attorney with extensive experience representing investment banks, commercial lenders, investors and borrowers.  He has acted as lead counsel on several billion dollars of securitization transactions from New York to Dubai, and has extensive experience in assisting small and mid-size businesses in their development and growth and representing clients in complex cross-border securitizations and structured loan transactions involving real estate, aircraft, rail road cars, ships and satellite transponders. Mr. White advised in the structuring and formation of Green Breakfast Club and has been providing on-going assistance, counsel and support since its inception.

Mr. White received a B.S.E. in Civil Engineering from Princeton University and received his J.D. from the Columbia University School of Law.

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