Laura gives credit for her passion to take care of the planet to her father, Ted Turner, the original Captain Planet. He instilled the importance of environmental stewardship in Laura and her siblings every chance he got. 

In 1990, Laura's father created the Captain Planet animated TV series with Barbara Pyle. Captain Planet is still in syndication around the world and continues to inspire a new generation of Planeteers. Laura is the Chairperson of the Captain Planet Foundation which supports high-quality, hands-on environmental stewardship projects that have enabled more than 1.1M youth across the U.S. and around the world to make significant environmental improvements to their schools or communities.

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Laura has dedicated her life to continuing her father’s legacy of environmentalism and humanitarianism.  Captain Planet taught us that the Power is Ours, and we endeavor through education and outreach to leave this planet a place our children and grandchildren will want to inherit.

Art Drogue is a retired executive from Unilever. He served as the Sr. VP of Customer Development for the America’s and led Unilever’s U.S. Customer Development organization through eight years of outstanding growth and earnings while merging six separate companies into one of the world’s preeminent CPG companies with over $12 billion in annual sales in the U.S.

Art’s previous experience included VP of Sales at Bestfoods, VP of International and U.S. Sales for Nabisco and Group VP for Northeastern Organization (NEO), a consulting group focusing on the CPG industry.  Before that he spent 21 years with General Mills and held various executive positions in both their sales and marketing organizations.

His professional affiliations have included Chairman of the Global Marketing Committee of the Consumer Goods Forum based in Paris, member of the GS1 U.S. Board of Governors, member of the Grocery Manufacturers of America Sales Council, the Board of Directors of Students in Free Enterprise (ENACTUS), and the Board of Directors of the NACDS Foundation.

He currently serves as a Director and chair of the Governance committee of Ruiz Foods,an $850mm frozen food company; as Chairman of Spar Group, a $250mm public company providing retail services to the CP industry in the U.S. and 10 countries around the globe; as Chairman of Demers Foods, an early stage frozen food company in the U.S.; and has served as a Director of JM Global Holdings and Director and Chairman of Yasso until its’ sale in 2017.  He currently serves on the board of the Community Boys and Girls Club in Wilmington, North Carolina and is a founding partner in The Resource Team, a consulting practice focusing on the CPG industry. He has also served as an Operating Partner at Raptor Consumer Fund, an investment fund established to invest in early stage consumer packaged goods companies

As Global Sustainability Leader for Whole Foods Market, Kathy develops vision, strategy and execution for sustainable engineering and green building; facilities, environmental, energy, waste, and water management and procurement for Whole Foods Market.  She sits on the Sustainability and Sustainable Consumption Committees for Retail Industry Leaders Association. 

Kathy also helped grow a start-up energy technology firm and was Director of Energy & Environmental Management for Shaw's Supermarkets. She was a past chairperson of FMI's Energy & Technical Services Committee, a participant on the 2005 New England Roundtable on Federal Renewable Energy Policy, the State EE Action Network’s Utility Working Group and served as an advisor for the Grocery sector for USGBC’s LEED program. She also served eight years on the Advisory Committee of the MA Renewable Energy Trust & Large Scale Solar, EE & Smart Buildings Committees. Kathy was named one of Progressive Grocer's Top Women in Grocery in 2013 and was elected one of Massachusetts’ High Tech Council’s Women to Watch in 2012. She was appointed to the town of Scituate, Massachusetts’ Renewable Energy Commission, where she was lead influencer in the town becoming the first 100% renewably powered in the state (PPA’s for a 1 MW wind turbine and 3 MW landfill solar installation).
 

Her passion is to reinforce resiliency through business continuity and community-strengthening through circular and regenerative economic principles and alternative distributed system design, development, financing, resource leveraging and connectivity.

Jim Pagliarini, CEO and President of Twin Cities PBS just celebrated his 20th  year at the helm of TPT. As the CEO of one of our nation’s foremost PBS stations, he is leading the organization through a major transformation, expanding their content, distribution and funding strategies to take full advantage of 21st century tools, technologies and consumer interests.
 
Before joining TPT, Jim was the founding CEO of the PBS station in Reno, Nevada, a position he held for 15 years. He has been heavily engaged as a national leader of PBS. Jim served for 12 years as a member of the Board of Directors of PBS, holding numerous leadership positions. He has also served on several national task forces exploring and refining the business of public television. In 2006 Jim was granted a leave of absence from his position at TPT to lead a national strategic planning project for the public broadcasting system. Most recently he led the development of a major new PBS website for people 50+ called Next Avenue which launched in May of 2012. Jim received his undergraduate degree in biology from Princeton University and master’s in education from Temple University.

Gene is Vice President of New Ventures at Target Corporation and head of its San Francisco Innovation Office. He is responsible for developing and incubating new concepts for the $70B retailer, oversees Target’s consumer lab (“Open House”), the company’s prototyping center as well as it’s enterprise accelerator programs in Minneapolis, MN and Bangalore, India.  Gene previously led Target’s corporate strategy team and has co-championed the company’s internal design thinking practice.

Prior to joining Target, Gene designed robotics and led new product development in the automation industry.  Outside of work, he is a mentor with TechStars and an active board advisor for several start-ups. Gene is also an active angel investor and serves on the Board of Advisors for Recycle Across America. He received an MBA from the Chicago Booth School of Business and holds an Engineering degree from the University of Illinois.

Prior to re-joining Best Buy in 2017 as a Category Manager in Procurement (Packaging, Uniforms and Supplies), Brent has over 20 years of retail experience in print, packaging, branding, sourcing and supplier management with private brand and branded programs at Target, Best Buy, Flagstone Foods and Good Natured Products.

Brent has been involved and worked on high profile programs at Target such as Michael Graves, Philippe Starck and Robert Abbey.  He helped lay the foundation of the Target Packaging Department and many of the processes and supplier relationships that exist to this present day. At Best Buy, he was instrumental in creating processes and forming relationships with strategic partners that resulted in astronomical growth of their private brand portfolio, which includes Insignia, Dynex and Rocketfish.

While at Best Buy, he effectively launched and implemented sustainable packaging initiatives that removed 100’s of tons of material and plastics from packaging (resulting in millions in cost reductions), implemented recyclable identification programs for packaged materials and introduced innovative bio-based packaging solutions.

He also serves in the Minnesota Army National Guard as a Sergeant with the 434th Chemical Company.

He is enthusiastic of opportunities to create sustainable impacts to our world by lessening the material impacts of consumerism.

Prior to founding the nonprofit standardized label initiative and Recycle Across America®, Mitch had over 20 years experience in marketing, communications and branding, serving Fortune 500 companies, as well as small to midsized companies. She has relied heavily on those communications and branding disciplines when developing the society-wide standardized labeling system for recycling bins. She is a frequent contributor to articles on the subject of recycling and the environment, including Forbes, NY Times, USA Today and industry publications. Mitch is an ongoing national and international speaker and has recently provided the keynote presentation at the European Union’s Environmental Summit in Brussels and she has chaired and been the keynote speaker at national conferences, such as the American Packaging Summit, the U.S. Zero Waste Conference, Package Design Conference, SWANA conference, and others.