Yolanda Kakabadse
Yolanda Kakabadse, senior adviser of Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano, is a member of the Ford Foundation Board of Trustees. She previously served as a Ford Foundation trustee from December 1996 to September 1998, when she was appointed minister of environment for the Republic of Ecuador. Currently she is a member of the following board committees: Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom; Management and Governance; Investment, as well as its Transactions Subcommittee.
Ms. Kakabadse founded Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano in 1993 to promote sustainable development in Latin America through policy dialogues and conflict management, and she served as its executive president until 2006. From 1979 to 1990, she was executive director of Fundación Natura, a leading environmental nongovernmental organization in Quito, Ecuador. In the early 1990s she coordinated the participation of civil society organizations in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit) in Geneva, Switzerland. From 1996 to 2004 she was president of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (the World Conservation Union). In 2001, she was a visiting professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Ms. Kakabadse's current board affiliations include being a director of Inter-American Dialogue and Tropenbos International. She also chairs the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel of the United Nations Environment Program's Global Environment Facility.