Overcoming Barriers to Conservation and Restoration

Guest Speakers: Ashley Boren and Stephanie Falzone from Sustainable Conservation

Zoom Registration Link

Ashley Boren and Stephanie Falzone from Sustainable Conservation will speak about how public-private collaborations can jump roadblocks to yield conservation results. Ashley will open and talk about the origins of Sustainable Conservation and share the Brake Pad Partnership story.  Stephanie will then talk about PlantRight and Accelerating Restoration. Read about their visit to Marin Water’s project on Lagunitas Creek.

Ashley Boren

Ashley Boren
Chief Executive Officer
Ashley has directed the strategy, growth and operations of Sustainable Conservation since 1997. Ashley received a 2007 James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award for her unwavering commitment to innovative, balanced problem-solving to address a variety of critical environmental problems facing California.

Prior to Sustainable Conservation, Ashley spent eight years at Smith & Hawken, a mail-order and retail gardening company, where she worked in finance, new business development, inventory planning and retail merchandising. She began her career at The Nature Conservancy in program development and fundraising.

Ashley serves on the Boards of California Trout, California Water Data Consortium and Water Solutions Network and on the President’s Advisory Commission for UC California’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. She served on California’s State Board of Food & Agriculture from 2006 to 2022 advising Governors Schwarzenegger, Brown and Newsom and Secretaries of Agriculture Kawamura and Ross on issues of food, agriculture and natural resources. She also served on the Board of the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation from 2002 to 2011 (the last two years as Chair), on Stanford Business School’s Alumni Consulting Team Board from 1995 to 2002 (the last three years as Chair), and Executive Committee of the Agricultural Sustainability Institute’s External Advisory Board at UC Davis from 2008-2018.
Ashley has a BA in human biology, an MA in applied economics and an MBA from Stanford University.

Stephanie Falzone

Clarkia concinna – red ribbons clarkia
Stephanie Falzone

Stephanie Falzone
Senior Project Manager
Stephanie has been with the Accelerating Restoration Program since 2018, where she serves as the Program’s lead for outreach, communications, and research. She also led the development of the Accelerating Restoration website, which she continues to manage.
She received a B.S. in Environmental Science from UCLA and worked in outdoor education and habitat restoration before earning a master’s degree from the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara with a specialization in Conservation Planning and a focus in Strategic Environmental Communication and Media.
Stephanie began at Sustainable Conservation with the PlantRight Program in 2016, and in her spare time she is still passionate about plants and manages a communal garden with many California native species.