Danielle Lanyard

My background of life and work experience in environmental study, community action, and business development began as a child working on my first political campaign and local charity fundraiser and now spans two decades and four continents. With a B.A. in Community Psychology and a minor in Environmental Studies, I decided to throw caution to the wind and travel the world. During five years of independent, international travel and development work experience, I lived in Laos and launched one of South East Asia's first community performance spaces, created and taught the region's first college course in Sustainable Development through partnership with environmental NGOs, served as a trainee in the Peace Corps in Senegal as an Environmental Educator, and worked in Berlin as the Development Director for the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy. Upon return to the U.S., I worked extensively in several related social enterprise, travel and green companies and startups to build the foundation in business development needed to launch any venture. After designing and delivering various business and marketing strategies for startups and sustainable ventures, I traveled towards my true passion and founded Travelcology in fall of 2007, a venture to retool tourism into a vehicle for positive social change. When the world economy plummeted, this global vision was put on hold, to consult other startups, and then to cofound Open Venture Society, an open source web firm geared to provide web services to socially responsible ventures. In winter of '09, a new cofounder appeared to picked up the travel venture where I left off and is leading our partnership in launching Travelcology. Which brings us to the next project on the horizon, Third Rail Ventures, just taking shape as the lovely culmination of all of the above.