Green Foothills is proud to welcome two new members to our Board of Directors and two new members to our Advisory Board. All four are women, extraordinarily accomplished and absolutely committed to the mission and vision of Green Foothills. COVID-19 might have eliminated our in person meetings for now but it has not limited Green Foothills from continuing to connect and grow our wonderful community.

Our Two New Board Members

Hyma Menath is a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) advocate and culture change leader with experience in system change work both in the Global Tech industry and City Government. As the founder of the DEI consultancy Talking Cranes she helped to diversify the talent pool of global Fortune 500 companies such as SAP, Walmart and Visa. As a FUSE fellow and Equity & Inclusion advisor at the City of San Jose, she is currently focused on identifying and addressing historic and structural inequities in city government. Hyma has two decades of product development and business development in Educational Publishing. Her international business experience includes building business with successful exits in Europe/UK and US. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Physics, a Diploma in Computer Science, and Masters in Publishing from Oxford Brookes University, UK. 

“For sustaining our planet, we have to recognize that biodiversity, social diversity, ecology and health are interconnected. Understanding and addressing institutional and systemic inequities, especially the part that race plays in our lives, is central to environmental advocacy and protection. As an equity and inclusion advocate, I am passionate about my work to achieve racial equity and advance opportunity for all. I see these values aligned with Green Foothills’ mission of ensuring that all communities live in balance with nature and enjoy the beauty of its open spaces. I am honored, excited and ready to bring my best work to serve this mission.”

Sarvenaz (Nazy) Fahimi currently resides in Los Altos Hills. She began her career practicing in commercial litigation in her hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota. She later moved to the Bay Area and continued working in litigation as well as in other areas of the law. She has worked on antitrust and trade regulation cases, aviation cases, breach of contract and commercial disputes, employment disputes, personal injury cases, insurance coverage and bad faith cases, as well as discrimination and civil rights cases. She transitioned to non-profit work where she was the Director of the Legal Department of a local non-profit serving immigrant communities. There she worked with members of Congress, local lawmakers, the Santa Clara County Office of Immigrant Relations, and other non-profits in providing advocacy, legal services, know your rights education, and citizenship services on behalf of vulnerable members of the community. In 2018, she transitioned back to litigation and joined the firm of Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy where she practices in several areas of litigation and is proud to work for a firm that has earned a national reputation prosecuting and defending socially just actions. In her spare time she loves to workout at Barry’s, play tennis, hike through the hills, and spend time with her three kids, husband, and dog.

“I have had the pleasure of working with some of the biggest supporters of Green Foothills at my law firm including Joseph Cotchett and former Congressman and Founder of Earth Day Pete McCloskey. Our team is so impressed with the work of Green Foothills and I am thrilled to be a part of this community to help lift up the message about the importance of protecting our collective home. I am looking forward to learning more and giving back to my community as a board member of Green Foothills, and to have my family and children learn from me through my work.” 

Our Two New Advisory Board Members

Cherise Orange is a Planner for the Santa Clara County Parks Department and a graduate of Green Foothills’ Community Advocates Leadership Academy program. She is also the Founder and Brand Strategist of You Just Got Oranged, a brand agency that transforms the ideas and values of talented women entrepreneurs and professionals into a high-quality, unified voice through design and web services, and coaching. 

“I’m interested in supporting the Green Foothills community as an Advisory Board Member because I want to have a voice in providing authentic natural opportunities for people to connect to the environment with events and programs. Green Foothills effectively melds emotion with facts to explain how each action taken by local government and businesses will affect a community’s environment and the people that ecosystem supports. I am forever grateful for the Community Advocates Leadership Academy program because it helped me to reevaluate where I was in my advocacy and determine how I could be more impactful.

Originally an import from Seattle, Lynn Stegner has spent most of her life in the Bay Area with a seven-year stint in Santa Fe, New Mexico along with an annual migration to the family cabin in northern Vermont.  She is a writer of novels, stories, articles and essays.  The essentiality of place is one of the defining aspects of her work, and in 2011, compelled by that interdependence, she assembled a collection of 67 essays by members of the Western literary tribe, to create a composite of the writer’s experience of landscape and space. In addition to the writing courses she teaches at Stanford, she is also an editor, with clients around the world.  Over the last decade she has involved herself in conservation, speaking and writing frequently on the subject, and collaborating with both US and international conservation biologists. In 2017 she participated in the first, week-long Colloquium of biologists, writers, and philosophers from every continent who met in Italy for the purpose of developing a new language of conservation.  Currently, she serves on the Board of Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve.

“Back in 1962 when my family moved to the Santa Clara Valley – the Valley of Heart’s Delight – as it was known – my father-in-law, Wallace Stegner, together with his compatriots, formed the first Committee for Green Foothills.  They knew then what I was only beginning to learn, that the places where my brother and I played, where I would soon acquire the taste for solitude, where I would find refuge and solace, and discover a category of humanity that arises not from others of my own species, but from an awareness of our place in the whole web of life – they knew the value of open space both as creatures and as stewards. They saw what we were losing to developers, speculators, entrepreneurs; they worried about the danger to watershed; they anticipated species loss and compromised environmental health, pollution and reckless commerce. It was already happening. In a very real sense, my family were party to that exponential growth, for we bought one of those splinter-new homes in the latest tract developments shoving out the orchards and creeping up the hills. It is far more difficult to reconstitute lost habitat than it is to save it in the first place. Like those who came before me, I want to be part of the saving, not the losing.”

We Value our Board and Advisory Board and are Grateful for their Service

Our Board of Directors actively support the day to day work of Green Foothills, establishing the long-term vision and stability for the organization with a focus on planning, policy development, and fundraising. Our Advisory Board is a close circle of expert advisers who expand our reach in different communities. Advisory Board members serve on some of our board committees and we turn to our Advisory Board before moving forward with big decisions. To see a full list of our entire team including our board and advisory board members, visit this webpage.

Welcome Hyma, Nazy, Lynn, and Cherise! Thank you for joining our community of wonderful people!