Our Mission
The Environmental Leadership Program has stewarded the DDCSP Alumni Network for roughly decade. The mission of the Environmental Leadership Program (ELP) is to support visionary, action-oriented, and diverse leadership for a just and sustainable future. ELP aims to catalyze change by providing emerging leaders with the support and guidance they need to launch new endeavors, achieve new successes, and rise to new leadership positions. Since 2000 we have created a dynamic network of over 1,000 of the country’s top emerging environmental and social change leaders.
Sydney Fuller, DDCSP Alumni Network Co-Director
Sydney (she/her) is a Southern storytelling environmentalist with degrees in Fine Arts and Environmental Sustainability from the University of Michigan, where she participated in the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program Alumni Network. Her interests range from ethnobotany to community building and political history, all of which continue to lead her to interesting conversations and experiences with her fellow DDCSP alumni. Now, as Community Engagement Manager for the DDCSP Alumni Network, Sydney plans webinars with speakers across disciplines, designs curriculum and programming for alumni, and finds new and engaging ways to support the alumni community. Sydney is constantly learning something new, and, when she’s not working, she can usually be found in a cozy corner with a stack of books.
Lucy Alejos, DDCSP Alumni Network Co-Director
Lucy or Luz (she/her/hers) manages community weaving and curriculum design for Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program Alumni Network, including in-person gatherings and online leadership development. Common threads that have run throughout Lucy’s career are relationship-building, curriculum design, and resource sharing. Prior to joining ELP, Lucy coordinated grants, outdoor education programs, and special events for the REI Co-op’s Mid-Atlantic Market and Houston Market. Lucy is grateful to serve as Board President for Groundswell Community Project, a Natural Leader and Fresh Tracks Trainer for Children & Nature Network, and a council member for National Parks Conservation Association’s Next Generation Advisory Council. Luz grew up surrounded by mesquite trees, nopal, and roadrunners on the lands and waters of the Tonkawa peoples (San Antonio, TX). In her spare time, you can find Lucy repeatedly falling off and climbing back on her surfboard in her new home on the lands and waters of the Kumeyaay people (San Diego, CA) or getting her hands dirty as a worker at Pixca, a POC cooperative farm.
Teri Brezner, DDCSP Alumni Network Director
Teri (she/her) comes from the “space in between”, the place of never fully being from here or there, she is a body of many cultures. She identifies a black mixed-race, cis-woman, daughter of Guyanese immigrants, descendant of disruptors, visionaries, culture carriers. She is multilingual, immigrant, sister, friend, partner, mother, elder millenial and afro-futurist global citizen who isn’t a fan of identity labels. These particular identities capture the lineage of being that has incubated her curiosity and fascination in culture, belonging, relationships, group dynamics, social change and collective liberation. Teri’s lived experience has taught her the art of belonging in liminal spaces, building bridges between worlds and cultivating a deep committed relationship with change.
Teri’s purpose on this planet is to hold and co-create relational space for transformative change and collective liberation. Her career spans nearly two decades designing, directing and facilitating programs and trainings to support hundreds of social change leaders around the world through personal, organizational and societal transformation. In her approach to the work, Teri centers: people on the margins, justice, vulnerability, play + experimentation, relationships, learning and healing. She’s cried, laughed, fallen, been inspired, afraid, burned out and transformed by the work of social change. On her best days she is celebrating the seeds of transformation she tended with leaders that bloomed into the community garden, dream job, organization evolving into an anti-racist org or the disruption of a multi-national pipelines. On her worst days, in the face of impossible conditions Teri holds on to the belief that “if it’s necessary, it’s possible”.
In her free time Teri enjoys avoiding small talk and starting conversations about the meaning of life, getting outside, moving her body, finding wonder through the eyes of her 3 year old son, winning board games and putting herself into uncomfortable and awkward situations, all in the spirit of learning as much as she can and connecting to the divine interrelatedness of all human and non- human relations.