Jill Drzewiecki Rios, Director

Richard Fireman, MD

Richard Fireman, NC IPL's Public Policy Coordinator, is a retired physician. He was the founder of the Green Sangha of WNC, a Buddhist social and environmental justice community. In 2005 he helped organize Caring for Creation of WNC and  joined the Steering Committee of NC IPL. As a student of Father Thomas Berry and deep ecology, he believes that humanity is poised on the cusp of either continuing a death spiral into cultural and ecologic collapse or a transformation of human society into a life enhancing age, named the Ecozoic Age by Berry. This will entail not only a reinvention of the conventional human institutions such as business, government, education, law, and medicine, but a transformation of the human spirit. He believes that our joy, passion, determination, and creativity are fully capable to create a sustainable earth democracy, in which the rights of all beings, both human and other than human can fulfill the highest potential of their evolutionary capacity.

Mark Ginsberg

Mark Ginsberg is the Outreach Coordinator for NC Interfaith Power & Light. He currently serves on the speakers bureau of NC GreenPower and also the Climate Change Committee overseeing the Orange/Chapel Hill/Carrboro Greenhouse Gas Project.  Mark completed several years of service on the Orange County Commission for the Environment, and was formerly the Director of the N.C. Sustainable Energy Association (2002-2005). In the 1980s, Mark was a grassroots activist in Florida, serving on the Coordinating Council of the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice and co-founding the Southeast Florida Greens. He holds a B.A. in International Studies from Bradley University, his graduate-level education was in international science and technology policy and the social impacts of technological change, and he earned a Certificate in Nonprofit Management from Duke University. Mark is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh and previously served on the Boards of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Ft. Lauderdale, the Community Church of Chapel Hill, and was a co-founder of the UU Congregation of Hillsborough. He lives with his wife Luci on a horse farm in Zebulon, along with 7 horses, a donkey, and numerous cats and dogs.

Casey Burger

Throughout the course of her undergraduate study Casey M. Burger has been passionate about exploring the natural connections between spirituality and environmental activism. She recently graduated from Warren Wilson College in western North Carolina with a BA in Integral Sustainability, the study of environmental sustainability as system that calls on the integration of strong community relationships, environmental activism and cultural/political understanding. Her family is of Jewish decent and she was raised as part of a Unity Congregation. She has studied yoga and Theravadin Buddist meditation. Supported by this diverse spiritual background, she is committed to communicating across faiths concerning the ecocrisis we face as a global community. Casey has joined the NC IPL team as an AmeriCorps volunteer working on the development of the statewide weatherization program. Her position is connected to the larger Project Energize involving 6 other organizations in Western North Carolina. The aim of this project is toward weatherizing 300 low income homes. She is excited by the breadth and depth of this project.