Cheryl Charles, Ph.D. President and CEO, Children & Nature Network Cheryl Charles is an innovator, entrepreneur, educator, author and organizational executive. Throughout her career, she has been recognized for her leadership, collaboration and communications skills. Among her many interests, she has demonstrated a life-long commitment to the importance of getting children out-of-doors?for their health, success and happiness.

Dr. Charles is President and CEO of the Children and Nature Network (C&NN) (www.cnaturenet.org), co-founded in 2006 with author Richard Louv. The C&NN has launched a campaign to Leave No Child Inside, inspired in part by the exceptional response to Richard?s newest book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. She is also a member of the Steering Committee for the World Conservation Union?s (www.iucn.org) Commission on Education and Communication, a worldwide effort involving 80 nations and more than 1000 non-governmental organizations and businesses.

Named a ?new patriot? by author Mark Gerzon in his book A House Divided: Six Belief Systems Struggling for America?s Soul, for her pioneering work beginning in the 1970s to bring ecological concepts into the mainstream of schooling, Cheryl served for close to 20 years as founding National Director of what remain the two most widely used environment education programs in North America for K-12 educators, Project Learning Tree and Project WILD, receiving numerous awards for her leadership.

Cheryl served as a member of John Denver?s Windstar Foundation Board of Trustees from 1987 until 2002. She co-founded the Windstar Land Conservancy to conserve and manage, for educational and scientific purposes, a 1000-acre property in the high country of Colorado. Cheryl also co-founded the non-profit think tank, the Center for the Study of Community, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

As comfortable in a corporate board room as in the woods, Cheryl worked from 1997 to 2007 in a senior role at the national level with BITS, a non-profit industry consortium of 100 of the largest financial institutions in the United States. In addition, Cheryl is owner and Managing Partner of Hawksong Associates (www.hawksongassociates.com), a consulting firm specializing in innovation and educational program development with emphases on interdisciplinary curricula and diffusion of innovation.

Cheryl is author, editor and designer of a wide variety of publications including books, articles, and educational materials. Her most recent book, co-authored with her husband, Bob Samples, is Coming Home: Community, Creativity and Consciousness (Personhood Press, 2004). Cheryl has taught at the elementary, secondary, undergraduate and graduate levels; has given hundreds of public presentations and scores of keynote addresses; and has facilitated a wide variety of civic, business and educational meetings on a range of topics from developing community leadership to improving educational systems.