EcoPraxis Board

• Mark R. Jones

Mark is CEO of Sunyata Group, a Master “Systems Architect”, and spiritual teacher - with over twenty-five years leadership experience in business, non-profit, and elected positions. His current focus is the Solidarity Project and the Compassionate Action Network, which helped bring Seeds of Compassion to the Seattle area.

• Jon Ramer

Jon is the executive director of the Interra Project - a non-profit focused on democratizing “philanthropy” - and a husband, dad and musician.  Jon feels blessed to love the work.

• Tim Unkrur

Tim is a manufacturing specialist who has contributed to the advance of sustainable manufacturing principles in the Puget Sound region.  Professionally, Tim works as a manager at Weathervane Windows.

• Bryan Wilson

Bryan Wilson has been building websites since 1995.  Bryan is passionate about building tools and designing environments which link people and resources in a way that facilitates understanding, makes useful connections, reduces conflict, and increases value.

Founding Director

Viki Sonntag, PhD is a practitioner, activist, and researcher in alternative economics and founding director of EcoPraxis. Her current projects include participatory action research on the local food economy and launching the B-Sustainable Information Commons, a sustainability information network based on community indicators. From 1997 to 2003, Viki did research in the Netherlands, working with the leading practitioners and theoreticians of transition management, a policy approach to structural/system change adopted by the Dutch Ministry of Environment to guide their sustainability initiatives, (arguably the most progressive policies in the advanced industrialized world). Her PhD thesis examined the relation of over-consumption in the highly industrialized countries to changes in production technologies. Viki is also a Buddhist whose spiritual practice informs her work in sustainable community development. She is seeking to wake people up to over-consumption and social inequality as root causes of the looming ecological/economic collapse.

Viki is a board member of Washington Citizens for Resource Conservation (WCRC), an advisory council member for the Community Alliance for Global Justice (CAGJ), an advisory committee member for the Vietnamese Friendship Associations’ CARE (Community Action Research and Empowerment) Project, and a member of ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability’s STAR Economic Prosperity Technical Advisory Council.

Practicum Researchers

• Travis English
• Amy K. Ring

Current Collaborations

• Balle-Seattle

• City of Seattle Local Food Initiative

• Experience Food Project

• Sustainable Cascadia

• Sustainable Seattle

• Jubilee Farm and Sno-Valley Tilth

Past Collaborations

• Black Dollar Days Task Force

• Coop Fremont

• The Interra Project