Margaret Love
Consultant – Founder & Program Director
Margaret is the director of the Jungle Mamas Program (Ikiama Nukuri,”Women As Keepers of the forest” in Achuar) for The Pachamama Alliance. Margaret is a midwife, mother, grandmother, landscaper and was the founding board president of a private school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Margaret created the Jungle Mamas program after a visit to the rainforest on one of the Pachamama Journeys, which she took out of her commitment as a facilitator of the Awakening the Dreamer Symposium. She lives in Berkeley and travels frequently to Ecuador to run the program in conjunction with The Pachamama Alliance’s sister organization, Fundación Pachamama. She is a fierce stand for gender equity and social justice in the world.
Robin Fink
Consultant – Program Manager
Robin is the Jungle Mamas program manager based in Quito, Ecuador. She coordinates with the local coordinator, Narcisa Mashienta, and the program director, Margaret Love with program planning, monitoring, and evaluation. She works to assure clear communication across the international and intercultural Jungle Mamas team.
“I am impassioned by the intersection of health and culture specifically related to structural inequality and gender . I am committed to empowering Achuar women and men with the tools they need to assure the health and well being of generations in the future and the rainforest.”
Robin has worked with the indigenous peoples of Ecuador since 2006, when her call to reproductive health rights began with the Kichwa population of the Andes. She has worked with the Kichwa of the highlands in a culturally adequate family planning clinic and worked to coordinate groups of student volunteers. Having received her Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, she wrote her ethnographic thesis on how cultural change impacts the perceptions and experiences of sickness and health in a Kichwa community.
Yeshi Neumann
Consultant – Principle Educator
Yeshi Neumann has been working as a midwife since 1970. In addition to her work in the United States, Yeshi has taught and learned from midwives in Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Trinidad, Tibet, Morocco, India, and China. She has been the principle educator and co-curriculum developer in the maternal-child health project, Jungle Mamas since 2008. She is inspired by the dedication of the Achuar people to the concept that the health of the woman is key to the health of the Achuar people.
Yeshi has facilitated hundreds of workshops about women’s leadership and empowerment. Yeshi also trains social change leaders from the non-profit, philanthropic, labor and socially responsible business sectors in the Art of Leadership at Rockwood Leadership Institute.
In addition to being a Certified Nurse Midwife, Yeshi has a Masters degree in History and a Masters degree in Public Health. Yeshi is the mother of two daughters and the grandmother of two granddaughters both of whom were born into her own hands.
Narcisa Mashienta
Consultant – Program Coordinator
Narcisa is the local program coordinator for Jungle Mamas. She is of the indigenous Shuar nationality and has been working as an indigenous activist with the Shuar and Achuar in keeping transnational oil companies out of the rainforest since the late 90s since she was a teenager. She has a very powerful vision for empowering Achuar women and has harnessed that passion into a fierce commitment to women’s health.