CHRIS HENRIKSON

Board Chair

Founder and Executive Director of Street Poets Inc., Chris Henrikson has over 20 years of experience teaching poetry and mentoring highly at-risk youth and young adults within and around the Los Angeles County educational and juvenile justice systems.

Originally from Boston, Chris is a graduate of Duke University (B.A. English 1989) and the American Film Institute (M.F.A. Screenwriting 1993). Chris worked as an arts journalist in New York City (The Village Voice and Entertainment Weekly) and later as a screenwriter in Hollywood before a volunteer teaching stint in a Los Angeles County juvenile detention camp back in 1995 inspired him to create Street Poets.

In recent years, his efforts to initiate young people into lives full of meaning, passion and purpose have led him into the study and practice of the indigenous healing traditions of Africa and the Americas. He has been married to screenwriter Susannah Grant for 18 years, and they have two children, Olivia (14) and Arlo (12) — both of whom love Wolf Connection almost as much as he does.

DANIEL AMIR

Board Treasurer

Daniel is a Finance executive with over 15 years of experience in leading financial institutions like Lazard, Bear Stearns and JPMorgan. Daniel’s career focus has been around technology and has held leadership positions during his career. Earlier in his career he worked for the Department of Treasury in Israel and was a non-commissioned officer in the Israeli Air Force. Daniel’s education includes a MBA from UCLA and a MA and BA in International Relations and Economics from the Hebrew University in Israel.

Daniel during his life has always been a big supporter of under privileged kids and education and has been involved both in Israel where he grew up and in the US in organizations that support “At-risk” kids. His deep passion to animals and the desire to give back to the community has led him to Wolf Connection.

In his spare time, Daniel loves to travel the world, teach the next generation of leaders and hang out with his wife and three daughters.

ASHTON DORKINS

Board Secretary

Ashton is an internet strategist, with a background in gaming, finance and technology. He was born in Singapore, and has experienced many cultures having lived in Indonesia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Zambia, to name a few, before settling in London, and now Los Angeles.

Ashton’s love of animals grew from his childhood in Africa. He supports wildlife and endangered species conservation, and worked for John Aspinall, who did pioneering work with wild animals. He believes sustainable solutions to problems exist, and all it requires is the political will to implement them.

ROSANNE ZIERING

Board Member
Rosanne Ziering is a person of many talents and interests and an active philanthropist supporting social justice, cultural, and environmental causes and institutions. She currently serves on the boards of The Broad Stage in Santa Monica and the Southern California Foster Family and Adoption Agency, in addition to the Los Angeles Review of Books. Rosanne has a strong commitment to social change. In 2008 she became aware of the horrendous issues surrounding foster youth in Los Angeles, particularly youth who were exiting the system due to reaching age 18. To address these, she founded a co-mentoring project called FACE (Foster Alumni Co-Mentoring Experience). The project is still going strong, touching over 50 youth and growing. Rosanne has worked as an environmental educator for the Santa Monica Conservancy. She is an avid supporter of the NRDC (National Resources Defense Council) and is a member of the Los Angeles NRDC’s Leadership Committee. She earned a B.S. in Conservation of Natural Resources from the University of California at Berkeley and an MPW (Masters of Professional Writing) from the University of Southern California.

ERROL SPIRO

Board Member
A native of Johannesburg, South Africa, Errol arrived in LA as an ambitious 17 year old. After graduating from college he began a 30 year long career in real estate. Currently Partner and CEO at Miller& Desatnik Realty Corp., Errol specializes in residential income property with a focus on Westside apartment sales and development.

Growing up in South Africa, Errol witnessed extreme inequality in the era of apartheid which informed his commitment to mentoring young adults coming out of the Los Angeles child welfare system. Errol is a founding member of the Foster Alumni Co-Mentoring Experience, a program founded in conjunction with Southern California Foster Family and Adoption Agency, that offers support to teenage foster youth as well as transition aged youth who have very little or no family support, poor schooling and few life skills . Through his involvement with this program since 2009, Errol has had the opportunity to work with and learn from the many young adults he has encountered.

At Wolf Connection, Errol is drawn to the similarity between the young adults he mentors and the wolves. He comments that for many of Los Angeles’ foster youth, the opportunity for self-insight and empowerment does not exist. And in many cases they struggle to step out from the stereotype that society places on them. Errol is honored to have this opportunity to expand his work with young adults at Wolf Connection.

LEE CRAWFORD

Board Member
Lee Crawford Boyd is a litigation partner in the law firm of Brownstein Hyatt Farber & Schreck LLP in the firm’s Los Angeles office.  She has extensive experience in human rights, foreign affairs and international law litigation and had represented human rights victims, including indigenous peoples, heirs and survivors of the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide, Falun Gong, Sudanese victims of atrocities and hijacking victims.

Lee also teaches International Litigation as an adjunct professor of law at Pepperdine Law School where she was a tenured faculty member before returning to private practice in 2007.  Lee also worked as a criminal prosecutor in New York, a litigation associate in a major entertainment law firm, and of counsel to a boutique high-stakes litigation firm in Los Angeles.  Lee has worked in South America with human rights non-profits, and serves as a board member of the Association for a More Just Society in Honduras.

Lee lives with her husband, Charles, their triplet teenagers and several rescue animals in Newbury Park, California.

Miguel Rivera

Board Member
Born in Guatemala, moved to the United States at the age of 13. Miguel started playing music professionally as a Percussionist in 1973 and has toured and recorded with several major artists and in a variety of musical styles. Miguel is currently an award-winning Supervising Sound Editor for Films and Television since 1984 to the present. Miguel taught Drumming at the Men’s conferences in Mendocino and Los Angeles from 1991 to 1995  and Minnesota  from 1993 to the present.  Also collaborating as presenter with Robert Bly, James Hillman, Ed Tick, Daniel Deardorff, Martin Prechtel, Haki Madhubuti, Robert Moore, Jack Kornfield, Luis Rodriguez, Malidoma Somé, John Lee, Francis Weller and Martin Shaw from 1993 to the present.

In 2001 in collaboration with Robert Bly, Miguel translated and published an English collection of the poetry of Humberto Ak’abal “Poems I brought down from the Mountain” in the United States. He also collaborated with these bilingual editions “Tejiendo las Huellas” Uruguay, 2006 and “El Animalero” Guatemala, 2008.

Miguel’s Board affiliations include being a Board Member of “Shade Tree,” a mentoring group in Los Angeles since its inception in 1996, introducing at risk youth to traditional Native American ceremonies and ways of knowledge, Board Member of “Western Gate Roots and Wings Foundation,” an organization dedicated to bring back rites of passage to youth, and Board Member of “Soldier’s Heart,” an organization dedicated to working with Veterans.

Nori Wolfson

Board Member

Amy Parish, Ph.D.

Board Member
Dr. Amy Parish is an interdisciplinary scholar who teaches at University of Southern California. She received her undergraduate training at University of Michigan and her graduate school education at University of California-Davis and then taught at University College London. Her post-doctoral research at the University of Giessen in Germany focused the topic of reciprocity. The Leakey Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Center for Feminist Research, and Sigma Xi have funded her work. She is currently writing a book and is affiliated faculty in the Psychology Department at Georgetown University and is also an Honorary Research Associate at University College London and teaches in the Public Health program at USC.  Dr. Parish has studied the world’s captive population of bonobos for the last twenty-five years. Bonobos and chimpanzees are the two closest living relatives of humans living today. She found that the social system of the bonobo is unusual in many respects: females form real and meaningful bonds in the absence of kinship and females attack and dominate males. She was the first to characterize bonobo society as a matriarchy.  She has also studied the mating system of white-handed gibbons in Thailand and is currently interested in female mate choice decisions in humans. In all of her research, Dr. Parish uses an evolutionary, bio-cultural, feminist, and interdisciplinary approach to shed light on the origins of human behavior. She is most interested in the intersection between Anthropology, Psychology, and Biology in understanding human evolution.  The renowned anthropologist Sarah Hrdy and the renowned psychologist Frans de Waal jointly supervised her PhD work.  Over the last twelve years, Dr. Parish has taught sixty-three classes on twenty topics in seven fields (Anthropology, Gender Studies, Arts and Letters, Health and Humanities, Preventive Medicine/Public Health, Psychology, and the Marriage and Family Therapy program in the School of Education).

Dr. Parish co-founded WorldWideVisionaries.org, an online forum that served as a five year forum for young people to develop and exchange ideas about working on social justice and environmental causes.  Dr. Parish has served on the Board of Directors for the Arusha Project, a non-profit organization devoted to helping HIV infected women in Tanzania. Current activities include a position on the Board with the organization Up the River Endeavors, which is devoted to addressing sustainable development, global peace, women’s empowerment and social justice. She also serves on the Boards of KidsEcoClub and the Bonobo Conservation Initiative.  Her work has been featured in Ms. Magazine and she has appeared on Nova, National Geographic Explorer, NPR, and Discovery Health Channel productions.