Our Team

Our Leadership Team

Jacob is a visionary strategist and consensus builder. He is a leader in stakeholder engagement and collaborative strategy in the public and nonprofit sectors.
Some of the project topics he's led at the local, state, and national levels include climate, climate justice, outdoor recreation, environmental conservation, water policy, behavioral health, affordable housing, firearm death and injury, and education.
He is the Principal of Wellstone Collaborative Strategies, a founding board member of the Civic Consulting Collaborative, and the Executive Director & Co-Founder of Better Together America.
After 25 years of working with businesses, state and local government, nonprofits, and foundations, he specializes in uncovering the invisible threads that bind diverse and divergent stakeholders together to solve a challenge.
Prior to consulting, Jacob was focused on western water for nearly a decade and a half. This included being the Executive Director of the Colorado Watershed Network and developing and facilitating Colorado's Water Plan for the Department of Natural Resources.

Kathy Gschneidner has managed the foundation’s financial administration for over a decade, in addition to serving on the Board of Directors for 7 years.
Growing up on the prairie and earning an accounting degree from Iowa State University, Gschneidner is at home in the mountains and with her spreadsheets.
She has also owned and operated a financial services company, Mountain Accountin’, for almost 30 years, where she builds bookkeeping and accounting systems for small businesses and organizations.

Maria Brinck is a visionary thought leader devoted to breaking up
the traditional leadership monopoly in order to generate the
“diversity of thought” necessary to solve our most pressing
challenges in organizations and nations. Maria founded Zynergy
International, a leadership advisory firm in 2013, to fulfill her
passion. Her book “The Leadership We Need” is to be released Oct 7th, 2025.
Born and raised in Sweden and Algeria, Maria was educated in Sweden, France, and the USA with a focus on International Business.
Her most transformative experience, reshaping her worldview, came when she lived and worked with indigenous people in the Congo Basin Rainforest in a remote part of Cameroon. While working on the rehabilitation of chimpanzees and gorillas, she observed first-hand human planetary destruction and its consequences for all living things, but also the type of leadership we need to bring out the best in humanity.

Maria is a Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach and holds a CPCC Certification from CTI, and an ACC Certification from ICF, the International Coach
Federation. She previously held positions at GE, Eli Lilly & Co, and Novo Nordisk. Her clients include Quanex, Astra-Zeneca, Beacon, IBM, DaVita, Vizient, Aspen Surgical, Brasseler, ConMed and Stryker.
Today, Maria works with board members, CEOs, executives,
business teams and HR professionals and is based in Colorado.

Victoria currently applies her Project & Quality Management skills to help catalyze civic health and engagement connections and relationships. This includes areas of community building via Civic Hubs, by identifying synergies, and incubating coordinated action among nonpartisan democracy and civic health-promoting organizations. She is committed to defending and strengthening democracy, civic health, and social cohesion at the local, state, and national levels.

Her prior experience in the pro-democracy space includes working with the Bridge Alliance Education Fund, helping them fulfill their mission of supporting the democracy ecosystem and advancing the healthy self-governance movement.

Prior to that, she spent 19 years driving project management, quality management, change management, knowledge management, and training at PAREXEL International. Before working at PAREXEL she supported researchers doing AIDS Clinical Trials work at the Harvard School of Public Health, Statistical and Data Analysis Center. In addition, she has worked in the technical education field as well as being co-owner of a small business.

Mesa is a political mediator, community-builder, and nonviolence practitioner based in Boulder, Colorado.
With degrees in Political Science (BA) and International Affairs (BA) from Indiana University and Conflict & Global Development (M.Sc) from Universiteit Gent Belgium, Mesa’s focus has always been in how peacebuilding efforts are most effective when institutions partner with community leaders to support locally driven approaches to healing mass civil division. Her graduate research examined social organizing strategies that transform civil conflict and achieve democratic reforms, specifically focusing on nonviolent civil resistance.
Mesa’s impulse to “think global and act local” has led her to work with national support networks committed to uplifting community-based collective action. Her research on the polycrisis/metacrisis heavily informs her theory of change, which is that only by collaborating across sectors and perceived lines of differences can we hope to co-create a people-powered, resilient democratic republic. Personal mindfulness practice and deep connection to community are cornerstones that ground her peace work.

Mark Gerzon, Founder and Former President of Mediators Foundation, has specialized in leadership that bridges divides. As an experienced facilitator in high-conflict zones, he has advised a wide variety of organizations including the US Congress, multinational corporations, and the United Nations Development Program. He is also a leading author of books in the field of conflict transformation, including A House Divided (1996), Leading Through Conflict (2006) and Global Citizens (2010).
His concern about the increasing polarization in America led him to devote the past three decades to working on the ideological frontier between Left and Right. He co-designed and served as the head facilitator for the US Bipartisan Congressional Retreats in the late 1990s, and has spent the following years participating in a wide variety of efforts to deepen dialogue across the political spectrum. This work led to his most recent book The Reunited States of America,which inspired the film The Reunited States, now playing on Amazon Prime.
Mark lives with his wife Melissa in Boulder, Colorado, and has three sons and eight grandchildren.
To hear Mark speak, check out his TedTalk in Vail and TedTalk in Saltillo, Mexico.

Jake has been a member of Mediator’s board since 2018 to provide a perspective on environmental impact, sustainable finance, and armed conflict.
Professionally, Jake works for the Nature Conservancy, the largest environmental nonprofit globally, and leads TNC’s Sustainable Financial Advisory team which develops new business, finance, and market interventions to solve conservation challenges. An Army veteran, Jake has an MBA from the University of Colorado, Boulder where he focused on sustainability and finance.
Jake lives in Evergreen, Colorado, and spends his time skiing, mountain biking, trying to keep his garden alive, and babysitting numerous nieces and nephews.

Brandon brings over 15 years of nonprofit leadership and more than $20 million raised across multiple sectors. His expertise spans major donors, institutional grants, and corporate sponsorships, with a particular focus on equity-centered grantmaking and sustainable funding systems. Prior to joining Mediators Foundation, Brandon served in senior development roles at HomeFree USA and Bethesda Center for the Homeless, and spent four years at Coca-Cola Foundation reviewing proposals and managing corporate giving initiatives. He holds a BA in Political Science from UNC Charlotte and lives in North Carolina with his family.

Vinay Orekondy builds grassroots movements for a better world.
He’s an attorney, mediator, community organizer, advocate, coalition-builder and founder of advocacy startups with over thirteen years of international movement-building experience.
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Originally from Australia, Vinay has been involved in various political and advocacy initiatives, including co-founding the Australian Progressives and running as a candidate for the Keep Sydney Open Party in the 2019 New South Wales elections.

Vinay speaks French fluently and is a member of the Bar in Vermont and New South Wales. Currently, Vinay lives in the United States, working as a Co-Founder or Better Together America as well as his local Civic Hub. He believes the way forward is a global, community-rooted democracy movement.

Marisol Rodriguez is a master facilitator and an expert in organizational development with experience advising the strategic growth of countless organizations throughout the public sector. Marisol specializes in strategic planning, and is inspired by the synergy between strategy and highly effective leaders and teams. Clients count on Marisol’s uncommon ability to help teams comprised of individuals with diverse skills, styles and perspectives come together in alignment around a shared path forward. She founded Insignia Partners in 2012.
Before founding her own company, she was a program officer with the Walton Family Foundation. Marisol is an education-sector veteran who also understands the funder mindset. She began her career in higher education, traveling across the country to advise fraternity chapters in their organizational development. After several years of strategic management consulting for federal agencies, Marisol gained a national perspective and deep content expertise in public education through roles at the foundation and a national education nonprofit.
Marisol holds a Bachelor’s of Arts degree in Political Science and C.L.E.G. (Communications, Legal Institutions, Economics and Government) and a Master’s of Public Administration with a concentration in Nonprofit Management, both from American University.

John Steiner, with his wife and working partner of forty years, Margo King, is a networker, mesh-weaver, convener, and field builder, working to further develop and serve the transpartisan/cross-partisan/bridging divides/healthy democracy movement.
They are two of the co-founders of the Bridge Alliance, on whose board John sits. His extensive experience continues with a variety of projects: he was a co-founder (and now senior strategist) to YOUnify, is an adviser to Living Room Conversations and to BridgeUSA, was a founding board member of Search for Common Ground, is part of the Leadership Council of the Convergence Center for Policy Resolution, and has long worked with Dr. Robert Fuller to help further the Dignity Movement.
With their grown children, Elizabeth King, Michael Steiner, and Mara Tasker, John and Margo support the power of film to change our culture and to raise environmental consciousness, largely through Impact Partners, and such films as Chasing Ice, Chasing Coral, The Human Element, The Biggest Little Farm and The Social Dilemma. They are all trustees of the Steiner King Foundation.
John and Margo’s work and life are animated by a long-term commitment to the timeless, non-dual wisdom traditions, the demystification of enlightenment in everyday life, and to planetary awakening.