Prior to founding the Prometheus Institute, Travis was a partner at Steel Partners II, L.P., a hedge fund based in New York City focused on the acquisition, growth, and sale of small publicly traded and privately owned businesses. In this capacity, Travis served as both a board member and active management participant in these types of businesses in industries ranging from industrial filters to fertilizer distributors to financial service providers. Travis has worked for the Federal Reserve Bank, has lectured at top Universities including Columbia University, Duke University, New York University, and Harvard University on finance, entrepreneurship, and alternative energy economics.

For a decade before joining the Hauser Center, Ms. Dearing consulted to senior managers in nonprofits and corporations. In 1997, she started her own consultancy, working with nonprofits and specializing in strategy development and implementation, executive decision making and coaching, and large and small group facilitation. Her clients represented organizations local and international, academic and non-profit, and with budgets ranging from one to several hundred million dollars. Prior to launching her business, Ms. Dearing worked with a management consulting firm specializing in knowledge management, process development and Balanced Scorecard services to Fortune 500 companies. While there, she wrote one of the early knowledge management methodologies. She came to consulting after working for Women’s Self-Employment Project, a nonprofit micro-lending organization in Chicago, Illinois.

Ms. Dearing has a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, with concentrations in International Security Policy and Negotiation and Conflict Resolution. She had a merit-based scholarship as a Kennedy School Fellow. She has a BA in English with High Distinction from the University of Michigan. In addition to her work, Ms. Dearing remains active in her community, including serving on the Boards of Directors of the Harvard Cooperative Society, The Prometheus Institute, and the Financial Stewardship Initiative. She has published and provided commentary for media outlets such as WBUR/NPR radio, The Boston Globe, MSNBC, BBC Radio and the Battle Creek Enquirer, and has a semi-regular column with The Philanthropy News Digest. She also serves on the editorial board of the scholarly journal, The Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. She lives in Bedford, Massachusetts with her husband, one daughter and one son.

Prior to joining BEF, Tom was Executive Vice President for Sales and Marketing and a member of the Board of Directors of RWE Schott Solar Inc., one of the world's top ten largest manufacturers of solar photovoltaic cells and modules. Tom also spent seven years as co-founder and principal of Kelso Starrs & Associates LLC, an energy consulting firm focusing on the design and implementation of policies and programs to support renewable energy development, with an emphasis on solar and wind energy. Before establishing his own consulting business, Tom was an attorney with the environment and natural resources section of Seattle-based Perkins Coie, the largest law firm in the Pacific Northwest.

In addition to serving on the board of the Prometheus Institute, Tom serves on the board of directors of the American Solar Energy Society and the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies; the advisory board of Vote Solar; and the board of directors of the for-profit web-based monitoring and display company, Fat Spaniel Technologies.

Tom holds a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group, and a law degree from U.C. Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law.

Before taking this position, Mr. Shah was the manager for the U.S. Marketing Group at BP Solar. He was focused on helping identify ways for BP Solar to structure its channels and delivery mechanisms to increase its market share of the growing U.S. solar electricity business. Mr. Shah also served as head of U.S. Commercial Sales at BP Solar, and as an analyst within the Business Development Group. Mr. Shah joined BP Solar in 1999.

Prior to 1999, Mr. Shah worked in several other positions in the renewable energy industry, including at Energetics, a federal government consulting group where Mr. Shah was focused on fuel cells and alternative fuels for vehicles; and at Atlantic Orient Corporation, a wind power company in Vermont, where he completed one of the most successful projects in the wind energy at Kotzebue, Alaska. He started at AstroPower (which has since been purchased by GE Solar) as an engineer on the chemical processing line.

Mr. Shah received a bachelor of science degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and a master of business administration in 2000 from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland at College Park.