Board of Directors

Dr. Sue Sill, President and Executive Director, LCHPP, Inc is a botanist who works on the systematics of Tillandsia of the Bromeliaceae. She is Executive Director of NABA International Butterfly Park in Mission, Texas and was a Board member of the Michoacán Reforestation for two years. She lived in Michoacán, Mexico for eight years and is familiar with the culture and the environmental challenges of the area. She has devoted her career to directing botanical gardens and parks, working in plant conservation and habitat restoration. With a strong commitment to reforestation, the teaching of sustainable forest management, and the development of non-timber forest project, she believes LCHPP can become a model for other restoration projects across Latin America. Her goal is to help address the great need for forest restoration to provide for a healthy global environment while helping rural families improve their standard of living.

Ed Rashin, Vice-President of LCHPP, Inc is a Forester and Forest Hydrologist, who resides in Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán. Ed has been a technical advisor to the LCHPP project almost since its inception, working with Jose Luis Alvarez for nine years. He has worked on the monitoring of the reforestation sites, collected basic site data, evaluated overall site conditions and maintenance needs, evaluated program success, prepared maps and reports, including inventory of reforestation sites and participants in the program. He helps Jose Luis Alvarez provide participants with technical assistance for tree planting and ongoing care and maintenance of reforested sites. He was a founding Board member of Michoacán Reforestation Fund where he served for nine years. Under his guidance and expertise, with help from U.S. financing, the program has grown from 7,000 tree seedlings planted the first year, 1997, to 460,000 in 2006, bringing the total to 2.5 million over the past ten years.

Maraleen Manos-Jones, M.A., Secretary of LCHPP, Inc is the author of “The Spirit of Butterflies’, and a conservation activist who lectures around the country. She started raising and tagging monarchs in 1972 and became the first woman from the United States to find their overwintering habitats in 1977. She has returned to Mexico every year since then, dedicated to protecting the monarchs and helping the people who live in their midst. She has worked with the women of the mountains in the creation and marketing of pine needle crafts to promote the development of non-timber forest products, thereby helping impoverished families earn cash resources from the forest without damaging the forest. She is an avid butterfly gardener. She started working with LCHPP in 1999 and served seven years as a Board member of the Michoacán Reforestation Fund.

Board of Advisors

Jose Luis Alvarez Alcala has been a tree nurseryman for seventeen years. He directs LCHPP-Mexico and is an Advisors to LCHPP, Inc. As owner of Vivero La Cruz, a forest tree nursery in Santa Clara de Cobre, it was his vision that initiated the forest restoration and reforestation project that became LCHPP in 1997 after he became aware of the widespread deforestation in and around the monarch butterfly over-wintering habitats. Under his guidance and expertise, with help from U.S. financing, the program has grown from 7,000 tree seedlings planted the first year, 1997, to 420,000 seedlings planted in 2006, bringing the total to 2.5 over the past ten years. The success of the program is in large part due to the ingenuity of Jose Luis Alvarez, whose innovative techniques have produced and coordinated the planting of these healthy and hardy trees. He is our reforestation specialist and field program coordinator, and is responsible for carrying out our reforestation projects and environmental education initiatives in Michoacán. His education initiatives in communities and schools have encompassed forest ecology, watershed protection, and sustainable living from and with forests, while planning for future generations.

Dr. Lincoln Brower is Research Professor of Biology at Sweet Briar College and Distinguished Service Professor of Zoology, Emeritus at the University of Florida. Brower's passion for monarchs began when he was a graduate student at Yale in the 1950s, and his research interests include the overwintering and migration biology of the monarch butterfly, chemical defense, ecological chemistry, mimicry, scientific film making, and the conservation of endangered biological phenomena and ecosystems. He is recipient of the Gold Medal of Zoology from the Linnean Society of London and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Animal Behavior Society. Dr. Brower has published over 200 scientific papers and edited two books. He has served as Presidents of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Lepidopterists' Society, and the International Society of Chemical Ecology.