Our Team

Mary Cerulli is the founder of Climate Finance Action formed May 6, 2020 after 18 months of climate finance work in conjunction with an investor-led (former New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer) campaign to decarbonize the 20 largest electric generating utilities in North America and efforts to press JPMorgan to replace lead independent director Lee Raymond, the former CEO of Exxon.

Prior to entering the nonprofit sector, Mary worked as an analyst and consultant for over twenty years in the financial services industry. She began her career at a subsidiary of New York Life to create tax-advantaged packaged products in oil and gas and real estate and later helped to found Cerulli Associates, Inc. where she concentrated on retail distribution dynamics, packaged products, and the retirement markets. She authored Cerulli reports on the wealth management industry, high-net-worth market, and the annuity industry. She worked on client projects on emerging manager expansion strategies and independent registered investment advisors (RIAs).

Mary now uses her experience in the financial sector to research and decode financial information and empower advocates to wage smart effective campaigns to push the financial sector to address the climate crisis. She serves on the Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board’s ESG Committee.

Mary has an MBA from Boston University and a BA in Geology from Skidmore College. She completed the University of California Berkeley Law/Ceres course on ESG: Navigating the Board’s Role.

Natalia Daies is a Certified Marketing and Project Management Professional with over ten years of experience in communications. Natalia has an MDiv from Mercer University and a BS in Public Relations from Georgia Southern. She leverages her social justice, ethics, and community organizing foundation to design and implement mission-driven campaigns, content strategies, and processes that amplify the voices, stories, and impact of underrepresented and historically excluded people.

Most recently, Natalia leads communications at Women Who Code, the largest and most active community of women in tech, supporting the organization in reaching its vision of a world where women are proportionally represented as technical leaders, executives, founders, VCs, board members, and software engineers.

Natalia is excited to join CFA to help raise awareness about the intersection of climate and publicly held capital and activate stakeholders at every level as advocates for economic justice.

With 15+ years of experience in organizing, campaigning, and policymaking, Danielle is driven to build communities and opportunities that bring people together to strengthen their advocacy skills, examine their power, and harness their passion toward more just policies and systems. She is thrilled to join CFA to activate shareholder power and wield capital as a force for tackling climate change and advancing economic justice.

Prior to joining CFA, Danielle worked as the campaign director with the Union of Concerned Scientists. There, she ran impactful campaigns to activate science as a force for more evidence-based, equitable policies and democratic processes-- from environmental justice and voting rights to public health regulations. She also built the UCS Science Network, a national community of 25,000 scientists and technical experts seeking training, leadership development, and action opportunities to advocate for policy change.

Danielle also worked as the research director for the Massachusetts State Legislature’s Joint Committee on Public Service, which spearheaded policy reforms for pension and healthcare coverage. She was also the national student program coordinator for Physicians for Human Rights, where she built a network of 75+ chapters and ran campaigns for early career health professionals to advocate for health and human rights policy.

She has an MSPA from the University of Massachusetts Boston and a BA in international development and social change from Clark University.

Beverly A. Ortiz comes to CFA from two decades as a labor, immigrant, and community organizer. Her work has focused on developing predominantly women of color leadership in their organizing efforts.

For 10 years, she worked at SEIU Texas organizing janitorial, multi-service, fast food, and hospital, security officers & airport workers to fight for economic, immigration, environmental and racial justice. She was key in leading the Fight for 15 campaigns in Houston, Austin, and Dallas.

Bev also served as Executive Director for two broad-based, multicultural coalition- building groups: Good Jobs Great Houston and Real Values for Texas. Their work focused on creating broader strategic campaigns to hold corporations accountable to their fair share in taxes, provide good quality jobs, and push the state to reform the property tax system. She also worked closely with key allies on post Hurricane Harvey recovery work.

Beverly has a BA in History from University of Texas- Rio Grande Valley.

Susan Drury is an experienced campaigner, research director, and COO. She has spent the last twenty-five years supporting and leading campaigns and organizations focused on workers’ rights, health care access, public education, and climate justice. Susan spent over fifteen years as staff and consultant at SEIU and has deep experience with the politics and finance of pension funds.

Susan has a B.A. from Carleton College and an M.Ed. from Vanderbilt University.

Peggy Hanratty is Certified Financial Analyst with over 30 years of managerial experience in the finance sector, including positions in equity analysis, investment banking, and corporate finance. She served as Vice President and Treasurer at Cabot and was a VP of Mergers & Acquisitions at Credit Suisse.

Peggy has a MBA from Harvard Business School and a Masters in Economics from The University of Virginia.

Dr. Phillips works with advocates, community members and policymakers to apply his research to advance sustainable communities and a habitable planet.

He is a physiological ecologist who studies land-climate interactions in terrestrial ecosystems and human-dominated environments, including exchanges of energy, water, and greenhouse gases including methane and carbon dioxide exchanged between the air and leaves, soil, buildings, humans, and pipelines.

Dr. Phillips has a Ph.D. from Duke University and a physics degree from California State University– Sacramento.

Vonda is the Program Manager for The Just Transition Project at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a board member of the Good Work Institute and a steward of The Hudson Valley Prosperity Network which is focused on developing a shared understanding of what a resilient economy looks like, and how to build that with local communities.

Before joining the IRI, she was the Director of the Capital Stewardship Program at Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which was created to engage the capital markets and financial institutions in innovative ways. Prior to her time with SEIU, Vonda worked as a community organizer in Chicago, New York, and Boston with the Industrial Areas Foundation. In addition, she co-founded the Trustee Leadership Forum for Retirement Security at the IRI.

She earned her B.A. from Calvin College and A.M. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago.

Jason Opeña Disterhoft is a senior investor engagement specialist, working with investors to strengthen their proxy voting practices and policies to mitigate systemic risk from climate change and racial inequity at Majority Action.

He was formerly at Rainforest Action Network, where he led engagement with the biggest U.S. banks on their fossil fuel lending and underwriting. Jason holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and a master's degree (in philosophy) from Tufts University.

Tom has been an investor and advisor to private and public companies for over 20 years. Tom is a Co-Founder of A-Street, an investor in companies that provide coherent, differentially effective, and equitable solutions to transform the future of K-12 learning. Prior to A-Street, Tom was an investor at Berkshire Partners and General Atlantic. Tom chairs the boards of Teach for America Massachusetts and Mighty Earth, a leading environmental advocacy group. He is also a Trustee of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and serves on the board of the Community Music Center of Boston. Tom is passionate about companies and platforms that help to achieve a more equitable, just society and a sustainable future.

Tom holds an A.B. in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Regina is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is a faculty member of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her clinical and research interests are in infectious diseases, environmental health and travel medicine.

Dr. LaRocque received her MD from Duke University School of Medicine and MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. LaRocque is a member of the advisory board of the MGH Center for the Environment and Health.

Alyssa Lee works with Future Coalition and the Youth Climate Finance Alliance, a movement of youth climate justice activists mobilizing to hold big banks accountable for funding the climate crisis and environmental exploitation. She primarily works on the campaign targeting Chase Bank.

She got her organizing start in the student fossil fuel divestment movement, in which she was involved for 8 years. She is passionate about strategies to build local power and resilience and using the climate finance movement to not only end the fossil fuel economy, but also to unlock a vision for alternative financial systems that permanently place people before profit.

Marcela was trained in the analysis and integration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into investment decision-making and brings this discipline into her advocacy work to identify corporate impacts. She challenges companies to make meaningful changes to their policies and practices, and collaborates with NGOs, investors, experts and fellow advocates to help advance social and environmental outcomes, especially focused on front-line communities.

Marcela serves on the advisory board of the Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management, as a trustee at the New York Foundation, The Migration, Climate Adaptation, and Finance Working Group, the Workforce & Organizational Research Center, and represents ZAM in the Racial Justice Investing Coalition and the Investor Circle Toward Decarceration/Justice Capital.

Previously, Marcela worked with Mercy Investments as a director of shareholder advocacy, as a director of sustainable investing at CBIS, and leading ESG research at Boston Trust Walden. More recently, on her own and with BSR, consulted for various Fortune 500 companies on their sustainability strategy. With BSR, she also advised on and supported due diligence for impact and ESG-related investments for KKR’s Global Impact Fund.

Derek Seidman is a writer, researcher and historian based in Buffalo, New York. He worked as a research analyst and then research director for LittleSis from 2017 through 2022, and now serves as a contributing writer.

His writings have appeared in In These Times, Jacobin, Truthout, Washington Post and other outlets, and his research has been referenced in the Guardian, Houston Chronicle, Politico and other media. Seidman is also a regular contributor to Truthout. He has a History PhD from Brown University.