We’re excited to introduce two new members to our team: Thaïs Arjo & Oscar Elias
Thaïs Arjo (she/her) supports Sustainable Conservation’s publicly funded work and contracts as the Grants and Contracts Administrator.
Thaïs grew up in the East Bay and now lives in San Francisco. She received her B.A. in History from UC Berkeley and wrote her thesis on community banking in 19th century America. After college, she worked at the ACLU of Northern California in the Development department and then managed the operations of a consulting firm in Oakland. Following that, she joined the San Francisco Parks Alliance and worked with community partners across the city to implement public space projects such as murals, trail expansions, and native plant gardens. She is excited to support Sustainable Conservation’s important work of stewarding the natural resources of her beautiful home state. In her free time, Thaïs enjoys walking and taking public transit, eating pizza, and seeing all that the Bay Area has to offer.
Oscar Elias (he/them) is a second-year Grizzly Corps Fellow, joining the Sustainable Conservation team as the 2024-2025 Fellow. They grew up in Los Angeles and have lived in Merced for close to a decade now. Oscar Graduated from UC Merced with a degree in Public Health and has recently worked for UC Cooperative Extension Fresno County with their small farms team. Oscar has worked for multiple soil ecology and microbiology labs and has also been a Park Ranger in Yosemite National Park. He will be working with the Solutions in our Soils team to bridge connections with local RCDs, technical assistance providers, and other land and water management agencies in the San Joaquin Valley with Sustainable Conservation. Oscar hopes to better understand how the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices, specifically cover cropping, is being conducted in the SGMA era of land and groundwater management.