Stephen Blackmer is founding executive director of Kairos Earth and chaplain of Church of the Woods. Steve comes to this with 30 years of conservation experience, having founded and built conservation organizations including the Five Rivers Conservation Trust, Northern Forest Alliance and Northern Forest Center.

A midlife shift led him to Yale Divinity School and ordination as a priest in the Episcopal Church, carrying the question in his heart and mind: “How can being a priest deepen my work to conserve the Earth? What does the Christian tradition have to offer to this work? How can the Christian tradition be re-understood and re-imagined in a time of need? How can the conservation movement recover its understanding of the Earth as holy ground?”

From growing up in the forests and fields of Michigan and Ohio to living next to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Jo’s love of the outdoors has only grown with time. As a New Hampshire resident for the past nine years, Jo comes to Kairos Earth after working as the Community Outreach Director and a Head of House for a girls’ dorm at St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH, and as a full-time mom to an energetic and nature-loving son. Jo also spent six years in the Marine Corps as a Logistics Officer – based in Iwakuni, Japan, and Camp Pendleton, California – where she honed her love of detailed planning and spending time outside around the world!

She is a voracious reader, loves to hike, kayak, and take long walks with her husband, son, and Greater Swiss Mountain Dog, plus has a yoga and meditation practice that was first established almost 20 years ago.

The Reverend Canon Carla Valentine Pryne, a graduate of Bowdoin college and Yale Divinity School, served in active ministry as an Episcopal priest from 1980-2016. She served seven congregations in the Seattle area, including as Canon Pastor at St. Mark’s Cathedral, and rector of Church of the Holy Spirit on Vashon Island, the position from which she retired in 2016. Certain themes have been at the heart of Carla’s ministry since the beginning: interfaith dialogue; spirituality of the earth; the intersection of the arts and spirituality; and Christian initiation (what does it mean to be a Christian in our day). In the early 1990s, Carla co-founded and became the first Executive Director of Earth Ministry, an organization that has been engaging the faith community in environmental stewardship and advocacy for over 25 years. She served for four years on the national Board of Directors of the Trust for Public Land, in addition to serving on its local board during that time.

Carla loves to grow vegetables for her local food bank, hike and backpack, practice yoga, ride and train horses, and most of all, be with her kids and grandkids. Carla and her husband Eric, a retired journalist, live on a rural island in Puget Sound, accessible only by ferry.