Neelam Patil, M.Ed., MFA, is a Climate Literacy and Science Teacher in the Berkeley public school system. She was awarded TIME Innovative Teacher of the Year 2022 by TIME Magazine based on her work teaching children they can do something about climate change. Ms. Patil spearheaded the planting of the first Miyawaki schoolyard forests in North America in Berkeley, California. While teaching her students about deforestation, they wanted to do something immediate and impactful. They demanded, ‘Let’s plant trees!’, and the rest is history.

Ms. Patil has been an educator since 2000. Her work specializes in empowering children to face the most pressing challenges of our time through climate resilience, mindfulness, plant based culinary education, and youth urban forestry. She is a certified SKY Breath instructor and recently founded a non-profit, Green Pocket Forests, whose mission is to green urban spaces using the Miyawaki method.

Dave Muffly has been planting trees (especially oaks) in the Bay Area and other California locations for more than 30 years. Dave began his tree career when he received his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, at Stanford University. Moving from engineering to ecology, Dave managed native oak plantings at Stanford with the non-profit Magic, in a project that has yielded more than 4,000 established oaks in 40 years. Dave then branched into fruit trees, and urban tree plantings, with a special focus on street trees.

Dave subsequently became a Board Certified Master Arborist and designed/oversaw the 101 Freeway Soundwall planting as part of the East Palo Alto Tree Initiative led by the non-profit Canopy. This radical and experimental 1000-tree drought adaptation planting succeeded far beyond expectations and laid the foundation for the changes reverberating through the California tree nursery industry today. The East Palo Alto Tree Initiative became the proof of concept for the even more radically diverse plantings at Apple Park in Cupertino, where Dave spent seven years as Apple's Senior Arborist. Today Dave works as a senior arborist and horticultural futurist.

David Teuschler is the Chief Horticulturist for Devil Mountain Wholesale Nursery. He established the nursery’s propagation program and currently directs the propagation and inventory teams for the company’s sixteen locations across California. David has worked in the nursery industry for three decades, including many years at Valley Crest Tree Company. While there, he served as Plant Health Care Manager for the Specimen Tree Division, Account Manager in the Estate Gardens Division, and, most notably, Chief Arborist for the Apple contract grow, responsible for growing over 7,000 trees – half from seed – for installation at the Apple campus in Cupertino, CA. David is a Certified Arborist and a member of the Western Chapter of the I.S.A. and the I.P.P.S. He is a 3rd generation Californian and has a BS in Ornamental Horticulture from California State University, Fresno.