Sierra Business Council is excited to welcome Alex Herrin as a Climate & Energy Project Manager and Lizzy Velthoen as a CivicSpark Fellow to our team! Follow the links to learn more about their backgrounds, find their contact information, and read about their roles on our team.

Here’s a little more about each of them! 

Lizzy Velthoen:

Growing up in Ventura, California, much of Lizzy’s connection to nature came from time spent at the beach. While she loved the Southern California coast, she always looked forward to summer trips to Northern California and the Sierra Nevada, where she spent more time in the mountains. Now living in the area, she is looking forward to hiking, improving her skiing skills, and spending time at nearby lakes. Outside of her love for nature, she enjoys cooking new recipes, baking for friends and family, and practicing yoga.

Lizzy graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in June 2025 with a degree in Political Science. Her interest in public service has grown through hands-on work in nonprofit and community settings, including direct service at Ventura County’s food bank and policy and outreach work at a California nonprofit dedicated to children’s welfare. She also spent a summer working on a farm in Denmark, where she gained firsthand experience with sustainable practices and saw how environmental and community-focused work can strengthen local resilience. These experiences showed her how much access to resources can shape everyday life, especially for underrepresented communities, and strengthened her commitment to equity-driven work and supporting community resilience.

As a CivicSpark Fellow with Sierra Business Council, Lizzy supports the Climate and Energy team with a focus on the Northern California Rural Regional Energy Network (NREN). She is especially involved in the Residential Equity and Residential Rebate programs, helping expand access to energy efficiency resources and build community engagement across rural Sierra Nevada communities. Through this fellowship, she is excited to deepen her experience supporting equitable access to resources and strengthening resilience in underrepresented rural communities.

Alex Herrin:

Alex moved to the Tahoe region in 2017 to work in the ski industry and immediately fell in love with the entire region, from the desert to the mountaintops. When the pandemic rocked the ski & hospitality industry in 2020, Alex took the opportunity to return to school and get a master’s in environmental policy.

He went on to serve as a CivicSpark Fellow at Sacramento County, where he authored their first in-house greenhouse gas inventory. After spending the last two years away from the area growing his sustainability career, Alex returned to the Sierra as a Project Manager for Sierra Business Council to make a positive and lasting impact on the environment and community that he now calls home.