Staff
Josh Berkowitz, Project Manager
Josh Berkowitz joined CED as Project Manager in 2009. He is responsible for the day-to-day management and administration of CED, including all project logistics, budgeting and financing, communications, meeting facilitation, research, and agenda and membership development, as well as organizational strategic planning and fundraising. Prior to joining CED, Josh served as Program Coordinator for the Global Development and Environment Institute, an environmental and public policy research institute, and as Staff Analyst with the Small-Scale Sustainable Infrastructure Development Fund, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to facilitate small-scale infrastructure and related investments needed for poverty alleviation and overall economic advancement in the developing world. Josh holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University in Earth and Environmental Science and an M.A. in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning from Tufts University, with a focus on water, air and energy resources management, planning, and policy, as well as collaborative decision making, mediation, and dispute resolution. In addition, he has held a number of staff and Board management positions in various nonprofit organizations.
Gerald D. Secundy, Senior Advisor
Gerald D. “Jerry” Secundy is the President of the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance (CCEEB), and serves as a senior advisor to the CED Staff by providing advice and guidance on organizational development. As CCEEB's President & Chief Executive Officer, Jerry directs all Council activities including the management of advocacy, policy development and implementation, research, communications, member relations and administration.
Jerry is a co-founder of CED whose last position before becoming CCEEB President in December 2006 was as the Vice Chair of the State Water Resources Control Board. Jerry graduated from Phillips Academy, Harvard College and Columbia Law School. Upon graduation from law school, Jerry entered the United States Peace Corps, serving in Cusco, Peru. He then joined the United States Department of Justice where he argued environmental cases at the Appellate Level. Jerry joined Atlantic Richfield Company in 1970 as an environmental/international lawyer. In 1989, Jerry was appointed Vice President Finance and Administration (CFO) for Arco Transportation Company; in 1990 he became President of Four Corners Pipe Line Company; in 1994, he was appointed to the position of Vice President, External Affairs and Environmental, Health & Safety for ARCO Products Company; in 1998, Jerry retired from Atlantic Richfield and formed GDS Consulting where he provided environmental advice to small businesses and also engaged in crisis intervention and mediation for non-profits; in 2002, Jerry became Executive Director of Audubon California and Vice President of the National Audubon Society; in 2004, Jerry joined the CED Staff as Consulting Director until his appointment to the State Water Resources Control Board by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in March 2005.
Facilitation
Linda Gioja and other facilitators serve a critical function for the CED Plenary. They bring knowledge in the nature of collective intelligence and dialogue techniques. They also have assisted the Plenary in computer-based visual aids for knowledge management and meeting processes. These skills and tools have helped the Plenary to explore dialogue, the power of conversation, and to document ideas. The underlying commitment of the practice of dialogue is that collaborations can be cultivated among traditional adversaries and that these collaborations have great promise for increasing our societal competence at solving problems. We believe that better policy might be achieved from a mutual exploration, rather than from traditional competitive processes.
Linda Gioja began her career developing women's programs for the state of Oregon. She then spent twelve years consulting executive teams in corporations such as Allstate, Hughes Space and Communications, and Sears on cultural change and leadership. This work led to a two-year investigation of the application of complexity theory to building "collective intelligence" in organizations, the results of were published in a book co-authored by Richard Pascale and Mark Millemann in the spring of 2000. Linda's interest in the nature of collective intelligence as well as her consulting led her to explore dialogue and the power of conversation. She left corporate consulting in 1997, in part to pursue various applications of dialogue.