Experience in service of locally led change

Dr. Leslie Behrends serves as Collaborative for Change's technical lead across all of CFC's water and watershed programs - including the Nyamwamba watershed and mine-drainage remediation partnership in Kasese, Uganda - and sits on CFC's Board of Directors.

Les brings over forty years of experience in aquatic ecology, aquaculture, and wastewater treatment to that role. He began his career as a Peace Corps Volunteer in fisheries extension in the Philippines, earned his Ph.D. in Fisheries and Allied Aquacultures from Auburn University, and spent thirty years at the Tennessee Valley Authority - fifteen leading TVA's freshwater aquaculture program and fifteen as Senior Aquatic Ecologist and Manager of TVA's Constructed Wetlands Research and Development. Along the way he served as technical consultant to the UN Development Program, the World Bank, USDA, and the Near East Foundation, deploying decentralized wastewater and aquaculture technologies across Egypt, Jordan, and several Caribbean and Central American countries.

Les holds the patent on the ReCiprocating Wetlands process, a decentralized wastewater treatment technology he developed that cycles water back and forth through treatment cells to improve pollutant removal - now the basis of Tidal-flow and Reciprocating Wetlands LLC, which he leads. That expertise is central to CFC's water work, and he's currently helping adapt the technology to treat acid mine drainage, directly informing CFC's growing remediation programs at former mine sites.

John Gaisford is a geologist who began his career in mineral exploration across Africa before turning his attention to agroecology and circular food production systems. He co-founded Get Dirty, a company that manufactures ergonomic hand tools for smallholder farmers, and has spent the last five years immersing himself in natural farming methods.

Most recently, John has merged his geology background with sustainable agriculture, developing an anaerobic bio-mineral processing method that cleans mine tailings and converts them into an organic fertiliser that regenerates soil. He joins Collaborative for Change as a mine tailings cleanup consultant, bringing a rare combination of geological expertise and hands-on regenerative agriculture experience to CFC's remediation work. Since joining, he has also contributed research into phytoremediation techniques, adding another tool to CFC's growing toolkit for restoring land affected by mining.

Hollis McLellan founded Collaborative for Change on a simple premise: a clean environment is the foundation everything else is built on. If people have clean water, healthy soil, and unpolluted air, they can feed themselves, educate their children, and build livelihoods - and without it, every other intervention is working against the current. That conviction shapes how CFC approaches every project, from agroforestry to mine remediation.

Hollis holds a Master of Public Health with a concentration in Environmental Health, which informs a distinct lens on CFC's mining-site work in particular - approaching contaminated land not just as an ecological problem but as a public health one, including the kind of concentrated illness sometimes described as a "cancer alley." As Executive Director, Hollis coordinates across CFC's implementation leads, technical experts, strategic partners, and funders, connecting community-led projects with the resources and governance structures - including LCPA in Geneva - they need to scale.

Husein Siamwalla is an agriculture and sustainability professional with experience spanning agronomy, precision agriculture, soil health, agricultural technology and environmental systems. He brings a practical, field based perspective to Collaborative for Change, supporting the development of its environmental monitoring platform and helping translate data into measurable outcomes across agriculture, agroforestry, carbon and ecosystem restoration projects.

Husein has worked directly with growers, agricultural businesses and farming communities on crop performance, soil management, precision agriculture and the adoption of sustainable technologies. His experience includes precision soil mapping, variable rate applications, crop and field health monitoring, agricultural technology adoption and the use of agronomic data to support farm level decision making. He has also managed agricultural and agri technology projects involving controlled environment agriculture, hydroponics, waste conversion and resource efficiency.

Husein holds a Bachelor of Science in Botany from Savitribai Phule Pune University and an MBA from the university’s Department of Management Sciences.

Dr. Ana Vasques is a sustainability and transformative change consultant, researcher, and educator with extensive experience working across disciplines and organizations to support meaningful societal and institutional change.

With a background in ecology and environmental sciences, Ana brings a systems perspective to complex sustainability challenges, combining scientific knowledge with expertise in transformative learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, and change processes. Her work has increasingly focused on bridging knowledge and action - helping people and organizations rethink how they work, learn, and collaborate in response to sustainability challenges.

Ana has led and developed initiatives in transformative sustainability education and research, worked on institutional sustainability strategy, and facilitated interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches to change. Her consultancy practice draws on this combination of research, education, and hands-on organizational experience to support Collaborative for Change's partners in navigating complexity, developing shared understanding, and translating ambitious ideas into meaningful action.

Jill Wagner leads Earth Awareness: Restoration Principles and Practices, the professional land restoration training program every Collaborative for Change project completes as part of its 10-month capacity-building journey. The course gives implementation leads a thorough, science-based grounding in restoration ecology - covering ethnobotany, land-use history, seed collection and banking, plant propagation, site preparation, and species identification - so that CFC-affiliated projects can carry out restoration work with technical rigor from the start.

Jill's seed bank model is one of the core environmental tools CFC projects rely on, supporting the environmental pillar of the three-pillar (social, environmental, financial) framework CFC uses to design every project. By building local capacity for seed collection, storage, and propagation, the model helps projects sustain their own restoration work well beyond the initial training.

Participants who complete the program have gone on to lead restoration efforts across East and Southern Africa, and many describe the training as a turning point in their work. As one graduate, landscapes restoration manager Teresa Muthoni, put it: "Working with Jill as the expert instructor, I've gained valuable insights into building healthy soils and managing ecosystems effectively... This training has not only enhanced my professional skills but also deepened my appreciation for the interconnectedness of all living things."