The TERRAMAR Collective…or The Team

Cristina Mormorunni

CRISTINA was born in San Francisco during the hey-day of the Summer of Love. It should come as no surprise that she was thus marked at birth as a provocateur, an agent of change, a rebel, a purposeful nomad fluent in the language of passion and spitfire. Beginning when she was a wee one, Cristina dedicated her life to the conservation of wild nature and the advancement of social justice and equity. She has been hell-bent on transforming our world into a more beautiful, artful, compassionate, and healing place ever since.

Cristina serves as TERRAMAR’s Founder and Managing Director. She has worked in the non-profit arena for over twenty years and has developed and led numerous conservation campaigns for international and national NGOs. She also has extensive experience designing and evaluating investment strategies for philanthropic organizations and family foundations.

In her past life, Cristina directed the development of an emergent Asian family foundation interested in global bio-cultural conservation. She served as a director of an international land trust, focused on large-scale land conservation in Chile and Argentina. And worked for numerous conservation organizations in the United States and abroad including: Executive Director of Conservation Voters New Mexico, Communications Director for the Bioneers, Marine Programs Director for the Asia Pacific Environmental Exchange (now called Earth Economics), and Ocean Ecology Campaigner for Greenpeace USA. Internationally, she served as a Principle Investigator for New Zealand’s Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and directed a number of marine conservation campaigns in the Southern Ocean for Greenpeace New Zealand.

From the Far North to Northern Australia, from South America to the Southern Ocean, Cristina has worked in diverse cultural, ecological, and political landscapes. She works without maps between borders without translators. She is perfecting the art of getting lost as a strategy for discovering much needed elegant, systemic, and often unpredictable solutions. In her experience, the most creative and ultimately effective strategies live in these unmapped regions of our world—the crossroads of disciplines, interests, cultures, and beliefs.
Cristina received her academic training at Connecticut College and the University of Washington’s Graduate School of Marine Affairs, where she focused her master’s research on indigenous co-management models and community-driven systems for marine conservation in the North Pacific. She recently completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute for American Indian Arts and is working on a memoir about what it means to aspire to change the world—and how ultimately you are changed in the process. The working title is: Anatomy of Betrayal.

David Gordon

DAVID is a Strategic Advisor at TERRAMAR. Growing up in Washington, D.C. during the Reagan years, he became politically active by looking at ways to reduce the threat of nuclear war.

David left the East Coast to study at Reed College, where he gained an invaluable liberal arts education that taught him to question everything. He learned Russian and traveled to Leningrad—now St. Petersburg—where he learned about the underground art scene disrupting and shaping Russia’s new cultural and political discourse in the late 1980s. He came back to Reed to write an undergraduate thesis exploring Russian feminism, the role of women in the Russian Revolution, and the failed promises of social change in the 1920s.

Since then, David has been driven by one question: what helps people organize to create the change that they want to see? Inspired by Russian environmentalists that he had met, he launched efforts at Pacific Environment, an international non-profit, to support the emerging Russian environmental movement. He worked with them to design, support, and implement campaigns that protected millions of hectares of Russian wilderness, that halted some of the most egregious proposals to extract natural resources from Russia, that protected endangered species such as the Siberian tiger and the Western Pacific gray whale, and that built a strong, locally-led environmental movement inside of Russia. He formed and facilitated the Sosnovka Coalition, a network of environmental leaders from all over Siberia and the Russian Far East.

Working at a small organization, David became skilled at all aspects of managing an organization and stepped in to run Pacific Environment as Executive Director. In addition to implementing campaigns and building deep international relationships, he led strategic planning, developing new programs in Alaska, China, and California. He worked with journalists and media, designed and implemented communications campaigns, and engaged in international negotiations such as the Arctic Council.

David moved on from Pacific Environment to join the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation as a Senior Program Officer. Having been a non-profit activist, he wanted to understand philanthropy from the inside and help to build programs at a new, impactful foundation that supports community-driven conservation around the world. He helped to scope and launch programs in the Mekong Basin, Great Bear and Tongass Coast, and the Northern Great Plains.

David was then asked to be Executive Director of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, which manages the world-renowned Goldman Environmental Prize. At Goldman, David led strategic planning efforts, designing and implementing new initiatives to bolster support for Goldman Environmental Prize winners. He oversaw extensive communications efforts to publicize Prize Winners’ work, launched new grantmaking and networking programs that supported and convened Prize Winners, and spearheaded efforts to protect Prize Winners and other environmental defenders when they come under threat.

Throughout his career, David has focused on building the power of grassroots activists around the world to create change. A skilled facilitator, writer, analyst, and strategic planner, David brings all of his tools to help build movements to have on-the-ground impact.

Dulce Anayasaenz

DULCE joined TERRAMAR as a Strategic Advisor in 2017 to contribute her unique skill sets. Dulce is an expert in leadership training and development within the political context and has worked on a diverse range of policy issues including immigration reform, education equity, and climate change.

She has direct experience identifying problems at their core and exposing conditions that drive systemic change. Her work as the Program Director of Protégete: Our Air, Our Health is one of her recent experiences that showcases the depth of her capacities. As the leader of the program she was tasked with designing, leading and facilitating its emergence for Conservation Colorado—the largest environmental organization in the state.

Through the years, Dulce has also been actively involved in local and national political campaigns. Her most recent role was serving as the National Regional Field Director for Bernie 2016 after having led the states of Colorado and Washington to victory in the primary race. Moreover, Dulce is a versatile entrepreneur, expanding her residential real estate business while continuing her political consulting work in organizational strategy and effectiveness, field, outreach, diversity and inclusion, and movement building through public narrative.

Dulce credits her ability to adapt to a variety of ventures as a reflection of her immigrant background. Originally from Hidalgo del Parral, Chihuahua, Mexico, Dulce immigrated to the United States with her nuclear family at the tender age of two. She grew up in a small rural town, Hudson, in the northeastern agricultural plains of Colorado; a relevant setting to her foundational understanding of community, family and small town values. Dulce’s upbringing significantly shaped the basis for her understanding of dichotomous worlds in combination with her fundamental identity as a Mexican immigrant navigating two distinct worlds, socially, economically and politically.

Upon high school graduation Dulce moved to the big capital city, Denver, where she attended the University of Denver (DU) and graduated with a B.A. in Political Science. The educational rearing Dulce received at the private institution proved to include invaluable exposure to ideas, people and institutions that intersected her own identities.

As a college student Dulce attended her first Movement Building training with Marshall Ganz, and was soon mentored by him while conducting public narrative and movement building trainings all over the United States and Canada—helping spark movements of change by teaching others the very tools she was taught as an immigration reform advocate.

Dulce became an ardent Latino community advocate since she started Students for Compressive Immigration Reform at the University of Denver and her advocacy has primarily focused on elevating the perspective of low-income communities and communities of color in the creation of policy.

Dulce has served as an appointee to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and Denver Latino Commission and has been a proud Advisory Board Member of Generation Latino since the organization’s inception. Dulce has been honored to participate in various leadership development programs, including the Latino Leadership Institute at the University of Denver, Emerge Colorado, Front Line Leaders Academy and the Circle of Latina Leadership.