Our Team
Our team is a collective of professionals who have worked in the natural resources sector for many years.
Jane Church
Jane is interested in working with diverse groups of people and organizations to understand the big picture. She specializes in pulling together viewpoints to find new ways to understand the world and solve complex problems.
She is an experienced facilitator who has worked with companies, communities, and civil society groups. Born and raised in Toronto, Jane has spent time living and working overseas but always loves coming home to Canada. Jane has an Master of Arts in Law & Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Toronto.
Carolyn Burns
Carolyn is interested in how local communities and big organizations build relationships. She specializes in designing and implementing operations and management process to make things run smoothly and efficiently. Specifically, Carolyn has helped big corporations, academic institutions, small companies and non-profits implement operational systems to understand and manage their interactions with people.
Carolyn is from Edmonton, Alberta and has lived and worked in many countries. She has a Masters in Business Administration from the Schulich School of Business, a Graduate Certificate in Community Relations in the Extractive Sector from Queen’s University and a Honours Bachelor of Arts from McGill University. This is the fourth start-up organization that Carolyn has worked with.
Our Advisors
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LUC ZANDVLIET
Luc is the Founder and Director of Triple R Alliance (TRA), a small collective of experts that has provided support to natural resource companies operating in frontier markets.
Luc has conducted over 90 site visits with 30+ companies. Together with Mary Anderson, Luc co-authored Getting it Right; Making Company-Community Relations Work, which benchmarks best practices with regard to company/community relations in contexts of social and political instability and is broadly used in the industry. Luc started his career in the humanitarian field, working for the International Red Cross in Ethiopia and with Médecins Sans Frontières in Burundi, the DRC, Uganda, Sudan, Eritrea and Sierra Leone. Seeing the parallels between his humanitarian work and company/community conflict in the natural resource sector, Luc made the transition to focus on improving social performance within the extractive industry.
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Sandra Sutter
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Sandra Sutter, a Cree Metis woman from the Prairies, is the Aboriginal Partnerships Manager for Tarpon Energy Services and CGT Industrial and the Executive Director for the Circle for Aboriginal Relations (CFAR) Society.
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She has been involved in the financial, utility, non-profit, accounting and oil and gas sectors in her professional and volunteer life since moving to Calgary in 1988. Sandra Chairs the Metis Women's Economic Security Council for the Province of Alberta; is the past President of the Aboriginal Friendship Centre of Calgary where she is now on the Senate; and serves on the National Negotiating Committee for the National Association of Friendship Centres, where she served as Treasurer for a one year term.
Sandra was honoured to receive a Metis Entrepreneurial Business Award for service to the local Metis business community from Metis Region 3 in 2014. Having recently completed the Indigenous Community Industry Relations Citation program through the University of Alberta Faculty of Extension, Sandra is a life long learner with a deep passion for Indigenous community.
Sandra is a published poet, a singer/songwriter/musician and public speaker/emcee in her leisure time.
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NErys John
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Nerys John is currently Anglo American’s Social Performance Principal focused on the mining and exploration operations of the De Beers Group.
She is a social performance professional with 15 years’ experience with De Beers, Barrick Gold, Xstrata and Glencore. Originally from the UK, she has spent 13 of those years in southern and eastern Africa and is currently based in Johannesburg. Nerys has an in-depth understanding of the socio-political context of South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Tanzania. Her field experience includes managing company social performance teams at all stages of the mining cycle: exploration, project planning and construction, operations, closure preparation and disposal. In recent years she has applied her site experience and knowledge of international best practice to corporate roles focused on the embedding of social performance and the building of internal capacity. Nerys completed her undergraduate studies at Cambridge University and has since achieved an MA in African History & Politics and an MSc in Responsible Business Practice.
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