Meet the Principals
Anna L. West
Founder & Managing Principal
Anna L. West Founder & Managing Principal
Anna L. West is a Co-Founder and Managing Principal of Kearns & West. She has over 30 years of experience in collaborative solutions, facilitation/mediation, and public engagement, particularly related to water, energy, environmental, natural resource, land use, and infrastructure issues. Anna is a member of the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution’s mediator roster.
Sharif Ebrahim
Managing Principal
Sharif Ebrahim Managing Principal
Sharif Ebrahim is a Principal with Kearns & West. He brings nearly 20 years of experience designing and implementing multi-disciplinary public involvement and outreach programs, including working on numerous complex water, energy and land use issues, initiative campaigns, and state and federal legislation and regulatory proceedings. Sharif has worked with local, state and federal agencies, trade associations, Fortune 500 companies, and various collaborative processes to help them communicate their vision and form productive relationships with their stakeholders.
Debra L. Nudelman
Principal & Senior Mediator
Debra L. Nudelman Principal & Senior Mediator
Debra L. Nudelman is a Principal and Senior Mediator for Kearns & West with nearly 30 years of experience as a consensus building and dispute resolution professional. She has experience in convening, facilitating, mediating, and managing projects including stakeholder assessments, workshops, strategic planning and agreement-focused processes involving complex public policy, natural resource, land management, and environmental issues, among others. Debra oversees the Kearns & West office in Portland, Oregon.
Dr. Eric Poncelet
Principal & Senior Mediator
Dr. Eric Poncelet Principal & Senior Mediator
Dr. Eric Poncelet is a Principal and Senior Mediator at Kearns & West with over twenty years of experience in designing, mediating, and analyzing complex, multistakeholder collaborative planning and dispute resolution processes. His practice has focused on marine resource planning and conservation, fisheries management, water conservation, flood management, offshore energy, species protection, and land use management. Eric works to facilitate effective communications and agreement building among a broad range of stakeholder interests, including government (federal, state, and local levels), fishermen, farmers, business and industry, environmental organizations, recreational interests, and community groups. Eric leads Kearns & West’s marine practice while also co-leading the training program, providing interactive training courses on such topics as mutual gains negotiation, facilitation and mediation, collaboration, and effective management and communication of scientific information.
Jason Gershowitz
Principal & Senior Facilitator
Jason Gershowitz Principal & Senior Facilitator
Jason Gershowitz is a Principal and Senior Facilitator at Kearns & West managing the firm’s Digital Collaboration Practice which involves connecting people and solutions in innovative ways. His interests include bridging communications, technology, and collaboration skills to create and sustain solutions in changing and complex environments, across a wide range of issues.
Ben Gettleman
Principal
Ben Gettleman Principal
Ben Gettleman is a Principal at Kearns & West with over ten years of experience managing environmental projects and a current focus on land use, water, air quality, and marine resource projects. His central skillset includes strategic planning and process design, meeting and public workshop facilitation, stakeholder outreach, and materials development. Ben is a member of the National Coalition of Dialogue and Deliberation and is a graduate of the Coro Center for Civic Leadership Public Affairs Fellowship Program.
Joan Isaacson
Principal & Senior Facilitator
Joan Isaacson Principal & Senior Facilitator
Joan Isaacson is a Principal and Senior Facilitator at Kearns & West with over 25 years of experience in community engagement, stakeholder facilitation, and urban and environmental planning. Many of her projects integrate multiple sectors – water, transportation, energy, resiliency, land use, natural resources, parks, and open space. On complex regional and local projects, both government agency clients and their communities and stakeholders appreciate Joan’s steady guidance in formulating and implementing effective participatory processes.
Dr. Ken Kearns
Founder & Senior Counselor
Dr. Ken Kearns Founder & Senior Counselor
Kenneth D. Kearns is a Senior Counselor and Kearns & West co-founder. Since 2012, when he stepped away from the firm’s leadership, Ken has divided his time between a few selected projects and an active retirement. Ken specializes in facilitation and public engagement for high-stakes collaborative projects in water, energy, and environment.
Joey Goldman
Principal
Joey Goldman Principal
Joey Goldman is a Principal at Kearns & West and leads the firm’s Transportation Practice. He has more than 25 years of experience managing community development and transportation projects with an emphasis on planning, public engagement, consensus building, communications, marketing, and branding. He brings expertise in multiparty transit system integration negotiations and meaningful public engagement for transportation investment projects (including planning games, community tours, ambassador programs, etc.). An experienced project manager and facilitator for passenger rail, transit system design, and multimodal transportation projects, he also brings skills in regional/rural investment studies, mobility management, first/last mile plans, and environmental review processes.
Jenna Tourjé-Maldonado
Principal
Jenna Tourjé-Maldonado Principal
Jenna Tourjé-Maldonado is a Principal at Kearns & West with over a decade of leading community engagement, facilitation, and community planning projects. She is passionate about partnering with communities on the path to creating healthy places where people love where they live and have a voice and a stake in the future. She is fluent in Spanish and has facilitated collaborative projects with NGOs, municipalities, regional and federal agencies relating to resiliency, flood-risk, community planning, active transportation, transportation planning, health, and parks and open space.
Julie Leimbach
Principal
Julie Leimbach Principal
Julie Leimbach facilitates and engages stakeholders so that people can create collaborative solutions that decrease the cost of conflict and inertia. For more than a decade, Julie has enjoyed bringing together groups of water agencies, resources agencies, local government, and NGOs to find common ground and advance jointly held objectives in water resources, land and forest management, climate change adaptation, hydropower, clean energy, and health.
Nora De Cuir
Principal
Nora De Cuir Principal
Nora De Cuir is a Principal at Kearns & West with over fifteen years of experience facilitating collaborative decision making around land use, transportation, energy, water and natural resource management issues. Nora’s experience at the local, state and federal levels coupled with her passion for stakeholder collaboration helps our clients to conduct meaningful engagement that builds agreement. Nora’s core skillset includes strategic planning, public involvement, and facilitating conflict resolution within multi-party groups.