Tom Brady, Arroyo Environmental Working Group
Tom Brady h
as been the chair of the environmental ministry (EDEN) of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena since 2010, and has been active in eco-spiritual activities in Episcopal and Presbyterian churches since 1990. He helped form and now chairs the Arroyo Interfaith Environmental Council, active since 2014 and a Working Group of California Interfaith Power & Light. His faith work partially reflects a long career as a, now retired, municipal recycling coordinator. He is also active in groups fighting climate change, advocating for native plants, and promoting zero waste solutions.
Debbie Mytels, Peninsula Interfaith Climate Action Network
Debbie Mytels has been a “climate activist” for over a decade – and before that she worked on other environmental issues such as food, recycling, and wetlands preservation. A member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Redwood City, Debbie headed that congregation’s team to earn a Green Sanctuary certification.
In 2014 Debbie co-founded Peninsula Interfaith Climate Action (PICA), growing out of a 2007 interfaith conference on climate change that she and others organized in the Palo Alto area. A working group of CIPL, PICA includes members from a dozen Peninsula-area congregations. At their monthly meetings, they share best practices to protect the climate, organize educational programs for their congregations and the wider community, and get involved with legislative issues.
In her professional work, Debbie is semi-retired from a 25+ year career at Acterra, a Palo Alto based environmental organization where she still does grant writing and program development. In her years at Acterra she created the Green@Home pro
gram, training over 550 volunteers and helping over 3,500 Silicon Valley residents, reducing their annual CO2 emissions by an estimated 6 million pounds. She also founded Acterra’s “Be the Change” environmental leadership program that trained over 150 emerging leaders and initiated Acterra’s Business Environmental Awards program, now in its 27th year.
In earlier positions, Debbie served five years as outreach director at the Foundation for Global Community and filled leadership positions at the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Canopy: Trees for Palo Alto, the San Francisquito Creek Watershed Council, and Leadership Midpeninsula.
An active community volunteer as well, Debbie is an Advisor to CALA, the Community Advocates Leadership Academy offered by the Committee for Green Foothills. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of Transition Palo Alto, part of the world wide network of communities that aim to build resilience in the face of climate change. Debbie is also a hike leader/docent for the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District where she combines her love of hiking with regular opportunities to educate others about the natural systems in our local bioregion.
Debbie earned a B.A. with honors in Social Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and studied in the journalism M.A. program at Stanford. She’s a 40+ year resident of Palo Alto where she lives with her husband Thomas Atwood. She has three grown children and five wonderful grandchildren – which is why she feels it is so important to curb climate change!
Rev. Will McGarvey, Interfaith Climate Action Network of Contra Costa County
Rev. Will McGarvey serves as the Executive Director of the Interfaith Council of Contra Costa County (Bay Area, CA) and serves the other half of his time as Pastor at Community Presbyterian Church of Pittsburg, CA (PC (USA) & UCC). Rev. McGarvey did his seminary studies at San Francisco Theological Seminary, where he specialized in spiritual practices and the theology of the environment. He currently teaches as an Adjunct professor at Pacific School of Religion in the Field Education department, helping students do the theological reflection on their experiences while doing their internships and at Claremont Lincoln University on “Religion in the Public Sphere.” Will is active in many justice-seeking endeavors, including LGBTQ inclusion, comprehensive immigration reform, hunger relief, affordable housing, poverty alleviation and peacemaking in Israel-Palestine. Most recently, Will has served as co-convener of the Multi-Faith ACTION Coalition in his county as they have sought to raise the voice of the faith community to address the systems that make people poor and keep people in the systems of poverty.
Rev. MaAn Barcelo & Heather MacLeod, Interfaith Climate Action Network of Alameda County
(bio and photo requested)
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