betsy taylor

Volgenau Climate Initiative

Betsy Taylor is President of Breakthrough Strategies & Solutions, a small consulting firm in New Haven, Vermont. Betsy served as the original visionary and start-up Director of the Volgenau Climate Initiative, working closely with Ernst Volgenau and the Volgenau Foundation. She is shifting to chair the Steering Committee of the VCI in mid-2023.

Betsy has served as the president or executive director of numerous non-profit and philanthropic groups, including the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, Center for a New American Dream, 1Sky, 350 Action, Merck Family Fund, Ottinger Foundation, and Stern Family Fund. She helped launch numerous initiatives including State Voices, Environmental Grantmakers Association, Sustainability Funders, the Nuclear Free &Independent Pacific Campaign, 1Sky, and Funders for Regenerative Agriculture and has served on the boards of CERES, Greenpeace, 350, the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, and the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation, among others. She organized and chaired a 2017 conference in France with over 200 participants from 33 countries focused on strategies for scaling agroecology, regenerative agriculture, and a healthy global food system.

She is author of a 2019 guide for philanthropic action, Healthy Soils to Cool the Planet, author of What Kids Really Want that Money Can’t Buy, and co-author of Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the 21 st Century. She is living on a 20-acre homestead where she is planting native species, sequestering carbon, and restoring the land while experimenting with eating the weeds in her garden.