Jeffrey Mikulina

Executive Director

Prior to working with the Foundation, Jeff served for ten years as the director of the state's largest environmental advocacy organization, the Sierra Club, Hawaii Chapter. His accomplishments in environmental advocacy include passing legislation that sets a binding cap on Hawaii’s greenhouse gas emissions, requires that all new homes use solar water heaters, requires returnable deposits on all beverage containers, provides incentives for renewable energy use, and increases the funding of natural resources through tourism taxes. He also served as Vice Chair of the Honolulu Planning Commission and the Honolulu Charter Commission, authoring the city charter amendments that mandated island-wide curbside recycling and created a bike- and pedestrian-friendly Honolulu.

In addition to his role with Blue Planet, Jeff also serves as a district manager for Vice President Al Gore’s Climate Project, and he has been awarded an EPA Environmental Hero Award. In 2005, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin ranked him among "10 Who Made a Difference," and Pacific Business News selected him as one of their "Forty Under 40" in 2010. Jeff has been quoted as a source thousands of times in Hawaii, national, and international news outlets. He holds Master’s of Science in Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he specialized in decision theory.

richard wallsgrove

program Director

Richard formerly worked as an attorney in Honolulu, handling complex litigation on a wide range of issues. He has also worked with the Center for Island Climate Adaptation & Policy at the University of Hawai'i, analyzing climate-adaptive tools for managing water resources. He has lectured on legal issues to future technological and social entrepreneurs at U.H.'s law, business, and engineering graduate schools, and he has authored papers on shoreline issues, renewable energy resources, and other topics. Richard graduated summa cum laude from the William S. Richardson School of Law, where he was Editor-In-Chief of the U.H. Law Review. While at U.H., he also performed field and laboratory res earch on biochemical markers of climate change (M.S., chemical oceanography). At the University of California at Berkeley, he studied chemistry (B.S.).

Francois Rogers

Special Projects Director

Francois spent sixteen years with one of the largest Japanese wholesale travel agencies, where he was directly involved in event management, educational programming , and sales and marketiing for group packages to Hawaii. He also served as director of the highly successful Honolulu Festival for nearly a decade, managing the branding, logistics, marketing, budgeting and organizational structure of the nonprofit entity. Francois was born in New York, raised in Japan and the Philippines, and currently lives in Kaneohe. He joined Blue Planet Foundation in 2006.

catharine lo

communications director

A long-time contributor to print and online publications, Catharine is a Hawaii journalist who has written hundreds of stories about critical issues that affect the Islands, from land development to resource conservation, cultural traditions to island recreation. She was formerly editor-at-large at Honolulu Weekly and a section editor at Wired magazine. Catharine’s work has garnered multiple honors from the Hawaii Publishers Association and the Hawaii Society for Professional Journalists. She received a special interdisciplinary B.A. in Political Persuasion from George Washington University in 1995.

CHARIN TOMOMITSU

OPERATIONS DIRECTOR

Charin Tomomitsu has had more than 20 years of community relations and marketing experience spanning the private and public sector. While working with Forest City Military Communities, she managed community relations for 20-plus Navy housing communities on O‘ahu and Kaua‘i. Her development of sales and marketing of new products at HPC Foods resulted in an increase of more than $10 million in sales in under five years. Tomomitsu worked with the management at Ala Moana Center to design and implement their customer service kiosk program, and she oversaw community relations campaigns throughout multiple mall expansions. At the Hawai‘i state legislature, Tomomitsu served as a legislative aide to Rep. Marcus Oshiro and as office manager to Sen. Clayton Hee. She also served as the founding executive director of the Honolulu Festival Foundation, instrumental in establishing the annual $3 million, two-day event.

Tomomitsu has sat on numerous boards, including HUGS, the Waikiki Improvement Association, Pacific Asian Affairs Council, The Outdoor Circle, and the Japanese American Citzens League (JACL). She is a former President of HUGS and JACL.

David "Tamba" Aquino

Project SPECIALIST

David Aquino recently graduated with a B.A. in Environmental Studies from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he led the Energy Team of Sustainable UH. Tamba's team engaged campus groups in energy efficiency efforts, training them in how to assess the energy consumption in their campus facilities. As the team leader and Logistics Manager of Sustainable UH, David was one of three students in 2008 chosen by Blue Planet Foundation to attend the Powershift conference in Washington DC. The conference brought together 12,000 young activists from across the globe to lobby for clean energy and green jobs in front of the nation's Capitol. David has since carried this momentum forward and continues to deliver the clean energy message to Hawaii's youth. Tamba was born and raised on Oahu, and loves to surf and eat English muffins (sometimes at the same time).