Throughout her career as a collaborator, strategist, event producer and activator Kelly Proudfoot has led national and international campaigns. The 2012 Arctic Winter Games first brought Kelly to the Yukon. Her position as Manager of Sponsorship and Marketing seeded a deep connection to the territory, and she now calls the Yukon home. Kelly joined the Yukon University Foundation team as Manager of Development in 2016. Through this role she strived to create mutually-beneficial partnerships with corporations and community groups that are both innovative and inclusive. Kelly, through both personal and professional means has found herself seeking a deeper understanding of the history for Indigenous people and has a strong penchant for learning and being a part of the live, vibrant Indigenous cultures, ways of knowing, doing and being in present day. Through this journey, her passion to move things forward, and her skills in breathing life into ideas and projects she has found herself intertwined with many local and global collaborators.

Jodi’s Yukon upbringing and later life experiences instilled a profound respect for and curiosity about the natural world, and the familial relationship of many Indigenous peoples with ancestral lands and waters. Jodi is of Swedish and Scottish descent on her Father's side and of mixed Irish, Scottish, English and Inuit ancestry from the Upper Lake Melville region of Labrador on her Mother’s side (her grandma Monnie Broomfield became a beneficiary of Nunatsiavut late in life and was raised disconnected). She is grateful that her work provides the opportunity to work towards her reconciliation responsibilities as a settler, and to honour her Indigenous ancestors too. Aotearoa/ New Zealand has been Jodi's second home since 2007. She has worked on projects with intergovernmental organisations such as the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs and the International Whaling Commission, as well as public advisory bodies like the Yukon Salmon Sub-Committee. She gratefully lives between Tūhoe, Ngāti Awa, and Whakatōhea lands in Aotearoa, and Southern Tutchone lands in the Yukon where she was born and raised. Jodi continues her work with Indigenous and Crown governments to evolve governance and economic models. She has been humbled to support the Yukon First Nations Climate Action Fellowship in development of their Reconnection Vision since 2020, and is incredibly grateful to continue to support this systems change effort in her role as the Illuminating Worldviews Program Director with NCGC and River. As a settler, her role in her work revolves around supporting community-led efforts to fulfil ancestral stewardship responsibilities. Jodi has a Masters in Conservation Leadership from the University of Cambridge where she studied as a Gates Cambridge scholar.