Our Team

Alejandro Foung

Managing Director and Seed Funder

Alejandro Foung is a trustee of Walter and Elise Haas Sr. Fund, Rockefeller Family Fund and serves as President of the Climate Cousins Foundation. Alejandro also advises various companies in the digital behavioral health space. Prior to this, Alejandro was founder and CEO of Lantern, which was sold in February 2019. Alejandro was an early employee/founding team member at consumer technology companies NexTag and Trulia (IPO, acquired by Zillow). Alejandro has a B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University.

Kimberly Dasher Tripp

Strategy and Partnership Advisor

Kimberly Dasher Tripp is Founder and Principal of Strategy for Scale where she works with donors as a philanthropic advisor, conducts research on philanthropic practice and trends, and works with partners to launch new efforts to activate philanthropic capital. She led the consulting team that designed Redwoods to create a new kind of intelligence service, specifically built for donor advisors and philanthropic intermediaries, and now focuses primarily on partnerships. Previously, Kimberly was Principal on the Portfolio Team of the Skoll Foundation, where she ran the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship, and Program Officer at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. She holds a B.A. in politics from Princeton University and an M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. She sits on the boards of the National Center for Family Philanthropy and Health Care Without Harm and is a member of P150.

Maria Elena Franco

Pilot Director

Maria leads the Redwoods startup team. Her days are spent building and testing a model to help philanthropists and their staff to move money to big climate solutions. Before joining Redwoods, she spent seven years at the Mulago Foundation. There she led the sourcing and evaluation of hundreds of innovative solutions for vulnerable people and the planet. In this role, she also designed and directed fellowships for the innovators of those solutions. Prior to venture philanthropy, she worked in international nonprofits (including: MIT JPAL, Children International, APEC) and trained for 15 years to be a ballet dancer. Maria is originally from Hawaii and now lives in Marin with her husband, baby girl, and their giant ridgeback dog. She's thrilled to have the chance to -- in a small way -- try to keep our communities and natural world healthy.

Allie Gates

Advisor Lead

Allie leads the team’s work with advisors, donors, and other philanthropic professionals participating in the pilot.  With experience as both an entrepreneur and a funder, she excels at building bridges between grantmakers and fundable opportunities. Prior to joining Redwoods, Allie was an Investment Principal at Mulago, a private foundation based in San Francisco, where she helped build out the foundation’s portfolio of climate grants. Before that, she served as Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer at Odqa Renewable Energy Technologies, a VC-backed spin-out from Oxford University developing a new type of concentrating solar power plant to decarbonize industrial processes. Allie received an MBA from Oxford’s Said Business School and a BA in International Development from UCLA.

Liz Bershad

Product Lead

Liz leads Redwoods’ product and platform development, focusing on the best ways to share resources and engage with our community of philanthropic professionals. She joined the Redwoods initiative in 2022 supporting early concept development and discovery. Prior experiences include management consulting at Bain & Company and Open Capital Advisors; various roles in the tech industry, including at Lantern and Wello; and non-profit roles with XPRIZE, Inspire, Inc. and the Elmseed Enterprise Fund. Liz volunteers with MAPS, a pioneering psychedelic non-profit, and Jewish World Watch. She has a B.A. from Yale and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, and currently lives in Los Angeles.

Cameron Bradley

Content Lead

Cameron leads Redwoods’ content partnership with Climate Lead, leveraging their trusted climate insights and knowledge for philanthropic professionals. Since 2018, Cameron has managed strategic projects and partnerships at Climate Lead, growing initiatives that are critical to helping more philanthropists find their path to climate impact. Throughout her career, Cameron has collaborated with foundations, local governments and grassroots communities to build and grow projects focused on reproductive and emergency healthcare, food security, forest conservation and clean water access. Cameron began her career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania, where she witnessed first-hand how critical local leadership and community empowerment are in constructing lasting solutions to health and environmental challenges. Cameron’s wealth of experiences has shown her not only the power of collective donor action, but also the critical role that environmental sustainability plays in building a healthier and more just planet.

Apply Today

Redwoods is in pilot mode; we are starting with a select group of philanthropy professionals who can help us learn, test, and ramp up.

If you’re interested in joining our pilot, please fill out an application here.

For all other inquiries, please email info@redwoodscollective.org or fill out this contact form.