Niyanta Spelman
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Niyanta Spelman is the founder and executive director of Rainforest Partnership. Until 2007, she was the owner and principal consultant for PPPMC Inc, a public sector-oriented management consultancy she formed in 2000. Prior to that, Niyanta worked for the Texas Legislative Budget Board, Texas Legislature and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality; initiated an environmental needs assessment working for the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe located in Budapest, Hungary; and worked for the first lobbying firm in London, England.

Niyanta has been extensively involved in the local community: She has been a founding member of Livable City, chair of the Austin Asian-American Chamber of Commerce, co-president of the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association, founding member of the Texas Federation of Asian American Chambers of Commerce, and a member of the Austin Zoning and Platting Commission and the Austin Planning Commission.

Niyanta lived in Tanzania, India and England for the first part of her life and has called Texas home for over 20 years. She received a B.A. in biology from the University of Texas at Dallas, and a Masters degree from the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin.

Maurine Winkley
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
Maurine is an Austinite who recently returned from an eight year hiatus in California and other Latin American countries. She has combined her love for entrepreneurship and finance with her desire to create long-term sustainability through environmental improvements and awareness. Her background includes carbon financing, financial analysis, and business management. She has worked with nonprofits and for profits, including her own business, both domestically and internationally.

She received her MBA in international management from the Monterey Institute of International Studies and her bachelor’s in Global Economics from the University of California – Santa Cruz. Part of her studies completed at the Universidad Pontificia Catolica in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has also traveled, worked and/or studied in Ecuador, Mexico, Costa Rica and Panama, and thus speaks Portuguese and Spanish.

Lucia Eslava
PROGRAM COORDINATOR
Lucia Eslava, a native of Lima, Peru, has been helping Rainforest Partnership (RP) since April 2008, traveling with RP Executive Director, Niyanta Spelman, and Board Chair, Hazel Barbour, to rainforest communities in central Peru and acting as the point person with RP’s potential partner communities.

Lucia graduated from the National University Agraria La Molina (UNALM) in Lima with a Bachelor of Forestry Science. Her experience includes forestry work in different areas of Peru: georeferencing and reporting illegally disturbed areas for extraction of the Caoba (Swettenia) tree in the National Park of Pacaya Samiria, Iquitos; working with the Peruvian NGO CIMA to georeference areas where the Piazaba palm grows in the forests of the native community of Chipaota; and providing environmental education in Chipaota and nearby communities.