ADVISORS
Fabian Kremkus
AIA, LEED GA
Design Principal
CoArchitects
Emma Hendy
COO
Doyle Sails
Kenneth Madsen
President
Dimension-Polyant, Inc.
Capt. Breezy Grenier
Owner
Breezy SEAS
Scott Thompson
Founder
Farm from a Box
Meg Ruxton
Principal
MNR Consultants
Sean K. Falvey
Project Executive
SUNDT
Lesley Ewing. Ph.D.
FABIAN KREMKUS
Fabian Kremkus has worked nationally and internationally on academic and research facilities, secondary schools, hospitals, corporate headquarters, sports, and entertainment facilities during more than 20 years of architectural practice. Since joining the firm in 1999, Fabian has designed major museums, performing arts, research, healthcare, higher education, and justice facilities in Southern California and throughout the country.
His enthusiastic devotion to the profession of architecture and the craft of building is unsurpassed, and his approach to each project merges design sensitivity with great attention to detail and craft. His award-winning career is a testament to his design ability and the art of building well. He has designed multiple projects for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; academic projects for LAUSD and the California State University; healthcare projects for Shriners Hospitals, Scripps Health, and Kaiser Permanente; and justice facilities for the Judicial Council of California.
EMMA HENDY
The Doyle Sails loft network is in safe hands with Auckland’s head office home to the Doyle Sails International offices, strong and steady is Emma Hendy the COO of the group.
Hendy’s approach is simple and direct, not one to shy away from an impossible task. For the past 8 years, Emma has worked with the brand. Throughout this time has come the need for evolution within the sustainability pillar of the business model and a direct focus on the end of the life cycle of sails not only within Doyle Sails but the marine industry as a whole.
Emma has come on board with the Sail to Shelter Board of Advisors with Doyle Sails International to use the Doyle Sails connections with over 50 lofts and customers all over the globe through their network to get sails delivered to the Sail to Shelter initiative.
KENNETH MADSEN
Kenneth has been involved with sailcloth since the start of his sailing career. At 12 years old he was designing sails based on C.A. Marchaj theory of sailing and making them with his mother’s garment fabrics. Kenneth’s designs quickly evolved, and his passion for precision lead him to sail with and against some of the best sailors in the world. Today, Kenneth is president of Dimension-Polyant’s USA operation and continues his quest for perfection. Thanks to the company, hundreds of sailcloth styles are produced and sold to sailmakers around the world generating lots of pleasure and victories for the sailing community. In 2021, Dimension-Polyant’s two production plants in Germany and USA proudly became 100% carbon neutral. Kenneth says, “It’s only natural that we amplify our sustainability initiatives by collaborating with Sail to Shelter and sailors around the world to upcycle their sails for people in need”.
BREEZY GRENIER
Captain Breezy Grenier is a modern-day explorer with the ocean serving as her home, workplace, and playground. A Coast Guard Veteran and URI Alumna, her background is as diverse as it is unique. Having had to constantly pivot and adapt to her personal life’s track, she became a serial oceanprenuer, tying in from her own experiences to aid in knowledge and skills exchange, bridging gaps, in the blue economy realm.
She is the owner of Breezy SEAS; President and Co-Founder of South Coast AI; opening the New England Waterworld Training (NEWT) Center; and establishing Farm-A-Sea. In addition to her own businesses, she wears several other hats, working in the fields of marine renewable energy, chemical engineering, snowsports instruction, volunteer fire services, is the Technical Director of a Corinthian sailing team and licensed 200 ton captain.
She is a firm believer in trade work and life skills, and aims to connect industries across disciplines, to form strategic partnerships, incorporating old methods with new techniques, after generational lessons learned, to save our oceans with common sense, sustainable solutions.
SCOTT THOMPSON
A native San Franciscan and global life enthusiast with an addiction to golf anywhere anytime!
Currently, Scott is the Founder of Farm from a Box building off-grid agricultural infrastructures
for small-scale farms up to 12 acres in multiple markets globally providing the proverbial fishing
pole to communities for revenue and a better life.
Scott attended UCLA in the early 80’ and spent the rest of the decade playing professional golf in
Europe and Coaching the National Team in Norway.
Upon return to the US of A, Scott applied his energies and a keen sense for detail and logistics to
his event companies like San Francisco Event Solutions and San Francisco Sports Counsel which
culminated in an event called the International Children’s Games with 1648 athletes from 44
countries and 87 cities playing 8 sports for 5 days…
Scott works a great deal with his local community group The Guardsmen raising capital for
underserved youth in San Francisco and enjoys an active membership with fellow wanderers at the Explorers Club!
MEG RUXTON
In Meg’s consulting practice and as an advisor to nonprofits, she works on forward-thinking environmental initiatives to promote ocean conservation, electric mobility, and sustainable agriculture. With over 30 years of experience in law, public affairs, city government, and sustainability, she provides her clients with effective solutions.
For marine conservation nonprofits, she works as an advisor to support programs that protect species and ecosystems while engaging others in their work. She helps them form strategic partnerships to expand their reach while improving their fundraising efforts.
One of her interests is to get the sailing community more involved in ocean conservation by forming partnerships between nonprofits and the St. Francis Yacht Club so that members can become engaged in nonprofit efforts, through her position on the club’s Executive Race Committee as Sustainability Subcommittee Chair.
SEAN K. FALVEY
As a lifelong sailor and sustainability enthusiast Sean Falvey has spent his professional career building projects for clients in the education, science & technology, and commercial business sectors. Most of his projects have been delivered via collaborative arrangement where he partners with the architect team to develop a design that most efficiently solves the clients needs. A few of his favorites include building a half-pipe skate ramp in the lobby of a well-known tech company’s office, and a 120-seat planetarium that has been used to screen deep space images from NASA’s James Webb Telescope.
In addition to his day-job, Sean serves as a trustee for the Construction Industry Education Foundation, where he works to educate students of all ages (and their parents!) about the great career opportunities available to them in the construction industry.
Sean has joined on as an advisor to work with the multidisciplinary team to develop solutions that can be efficiently produced and scaled across the world.
LESLEY EWING
Dr. Ewing has been fascinated by water for most of her life. She was splashing around in a pool and the ocean before her 1 st birthday, and she has been in or near the ocean most of her life.
She has also had a life-long concern for the environment, attending the first Earth Day at
Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, and trying to follow the mantra of reduce, reuse, and recycle most of her adult life. In her early career, she combined her training in engineering and land use planning as an environmental engineer. Later, she learned that people could be coastal engineers. She returned to school, first for a master’s in coastal engineering and then for a Ph.D. and, for over 30 years, Lesley served the State of California as a coastal engineer with the
California Coastal Commission (CCC).
Lesley was raised in a family that valued community service. Soon after she discovered the coastal world, she became active in the California chapter of the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association (ASBPA) and later in the Coasts, Oceans, Ports and Rivers Institute (COPRI) of the American Society of Civil Engineers. She has been a director of ASBPA and COPRI is now a director of CSBPA, a member of the Network Independent Advisory Committee for the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure of the National Science Foundation, and editor-in-chief of Shore & Beach, the ASBPA Journal. She also has served three times as the Chair of the Northern California Chapter of the Explorers Club. She has written and spoken extensively on coastal engineering issues, co-authoring the first CCC reports on how sea level rise could impact the California Coast, and has served on three ASCE teams post-disaster teams to learn engineering lessons from the Samoa and Tohoku tsunamis and from Hurricane Ike in
Galveston. For all her work, she has been awarded the 2004 Coastal Zone Management Award,
the 2006 ASBPA Unsung Hero Award, the 2008 ASBPA Morrough P. O’Brien Award, 2020 ASCE Orville T. Magoon Sustainable Coasts Award, and the 2022 ASBPA President’s Award. She holds professional engineer licenses in California and Virginia and is a licensed Crew Pilot for
Deep Flight Aviator Submersible.