Founder & Principal Advisor
Andy Lipkis
Founder and former President of TreePeople. Andy started planting trees to rehabilitate smog and fire damaged forests as a teenager. By age 18, he founded TreePeople, and served as its president from 1973 to 2019. Lipkis is a pioneer of Urban and Community Forestry and Urban Watershed Management. The Society of American Foresters and the American Society of Landscape Architects have, respectively, granted Lipkis the honorary titles of Forester and Landscape Architect in recognition of his life’s work.
Interim Executive Director
Jennifer Bravo
Jennifer has 20+ years’ experience in nonprofit advocacy and management, local governance, and technological and social innovation, including designing and operating open innovation programs for the National Geographic Society and NASA’s Centennial Challenges Program.
SENIOR POLICY DIRECTOR
Deborah Bloome
Deborah has 25+ years’ experience in creating international, national, and local environmental and natural resource policies. Bloome utilizes a watershed approach to address multiple environmental and social issues in a region, and her deep experience in, and commitment to, facilitating multi-agency and multi-sector collaborations has been a recurring theme throughout her career.
Policy manager
Becca Ayala
Becca has 7+ years of nonprofit and government experience at the federal, state and local levels. She brings an intersectional, multi-pronged approach to her policy work at ARLA. Becca grew up in Highland Park and is dedicated to fostering a resilient Los Angeles for future generations.
Senior Manager, Planning & Program Alignment
Devon Provo
Devon has 10+ years of experience in urban planning and environmental policy. At ARLA, Devon leads cross-functional efforts to ensure ARLA’s programs, policy initiatives, and strategic communications are aligned within a living infrastructure approach. She brings a systems-thinking lens to advance ARLA’s mission in service of climate and community resilience.