128 Collective

David (he/him) is a Developer in Residence, focusing on the alignment of innovation and human flourishing. He supports general initiatives and Hypothesis projects with an eye towards technology ethics, team formation, and expansion of product benefits across stakeholders.

Joining 128 Collective in 2020, David has experience across industries as a multi-disciplinary entrepreneur. He has received medical device patents, acted as an Investment Bank CTO, and authored predictive models guiding $100s of millions in investment and R&D initiatives for the Fortune 50. He studied mechanical and biomedical engineering at the University of Colorado before graduate study in philosophy at Oxford.

The ebullient, happy center of his life includes his beautiful wife, twin daughters, and son. They are often adventuring together amongst the playgrounds, trails, and gardens of Golden Gate Park. Otherwise, he can be found on a bicycle wandering the hills of the Marin Headlands.

Twitter | GitHub

Jae is our climate program manager, directing climate philanthropy and investing to high impact organizations and funds. Jae holds a B.S. in Molecular Environmental Biology from U.C. Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from U.C. Santa Cruz. Before joining 128 Collective he was a senior fellow at the University of California's Earth Futures Institute, and his career has encompassed work in research, education, and activism across multiple environmental issues.

Kate (she/her) joined 128 Collective in 2021 to focus on youth and climate education. Kate has a BA in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from the University of Colorado and multiple certifications in Montessori Education. Prior to 128 Collective, Kate spent close to twenty years in the education field, with the last twelve focusing on building out educational levels and developing programs in a public Montessori setting. During this time she played many roles, including Level and Science Leads, Director of Service Learning, and Curriculum Developer. In these roles she developed programs that fostered both skills and independence, centering student choice and interest in real-world endeavors. Most recently she developed a place-based Citizen Science program and joined the DE&I task force for NASA’s GLOBE program.

Developing and implementing these programs gave Kate a deep appreciation for the transformative power of youth-led initiatives. She believes that supporting youth with skills, resources, and paths to use them is key to this moment and recognizes the importance of justice and inclusion in this work.

Marisol (she/her) joined 128 Collective in 2021 and serves as Grants Administrator. Marisol has a Dual Masters in Public Policy and Higher Education from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and the School of Education at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Previously, Marisol worked at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University conducting research on improving educational pathways for low income, first generation and undocumented students. Marisol has extensive experience in youth organizing, movement building, philanthropy and research in immigration and higher education policy.

Marisol has been featured in the New York Times, Latina Magazine, Los Angeles Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Magazine, New York Daily News, PBS, El Diario/LaPrensa for her advocacy work.

Rob (he/him) joined 128 Collective in 2019. As the Developer in Residence he researches and builds out technologies needed for the 128 Collective mission.

He has worked with computers for more than 20 years, starting out in the mid 90s as a self-taught web designer. He later moved to ColdFusion and created the ColdFusion on Wheels open source framework (still in active development). In the mid 2000s he moved to Ruby and Rails and now works primarily on RedwoodJS, an open source framework built on React and GraphQL.

Find him as @cannikin on Twitter and GitHub.

Sono (she/her) joined 128 Collective in 2021 as Program Manager for Public Health. She leads the funding strategy related to public health, specializing in sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Sono has spent all of her career in global health focused on SRHR since 1988, serving in various management roles in large and small non-profit organizations in her native country Japan and in the US, as well as grantmaking in the US and globally at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation for 13 years. She is an accomplished champion and author of a variety of publications for integrated reproductive health, women’s economic empowerment and environmental conservation programs in East Africa that aim to serve local communities’ immediate needs, while contributing to national strategies towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. She served for six years on the board of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte in California, and is now the board secretary of the Rewire News Group. Sono has degrees from Harvard University and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she focused on Health Systems. She has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1994.

Theresa (she/her) wears many hats. Anthropologist. Entrepreneur. Investor. Philanthropist. She has spent the past two decades working to understand global poverty and injustice and to support efforts on the ground aimed at transforming political, economic, and social systems in order to better the lives of individuals.

Theresa received her BA in Anthropology and Gender Studies from Scripps College and her PhD in Anthropology from Northwestern University. Her research focused on the development of enclave economies throughout Central America and the recent surge of international direct-sales companies in their wake. In particular, the work examined how companies are able to manipulate vulnerable populations, often poor, uneducated women and young, unskilled men. In the U.S. and abroad, Theresa has worked with, advised, and founded various non-profit and for-profit organizations in fields ranging from girls and education to women and family planning to youth and technology to the tech world and philanthropy.

Tom (he/him) started his first business, Gravatar, in 2003 and sold it to Automattic in 2007. Since then he's created many open source projects that have changed the way developers work and are used in millions of open- and closed-source projects: Semantic Versioning, Jekyll, TOML, and many more.

In 2008 he cofounded GitHub which was bought by Microsoft in 2018. Tom's currently cofounder and Chief Product Officer at Chatterbug, the best way to learn a new language.

Yari (she/her) joined 128 Collective in 2021 as Program Manager for Local Politics and Environmental Justice. She leads the research and funding strategy related to strengthening progressive politics at the state and local levels through the lens of environmental justice. Particular areas of emphasis include racial justice, collective liberation, and Indigenous rights. For the past decade she has been a volunteer organizer in the movement for climate justice, working on issues including fossil fuel divestment, alternatives to policing, pipeline fights, labor rights, housing justice, and local budget advocacy.

She holds an MS and BS in Earth Systems from Stanford University, where she focused on climate resilience and urban ecology. She has worked in non-profits, local government, and political campaigns. She currently lives on Lisjan-Ohlone land in California’s East Bay.