Administration

William Shutkin, President and CEO and Richard M. Gray Fellow in Sustainability Practice

William is the President and CEO of the Presidio Graduate School, where he is also the Richard M. Gray Fellow in Sustainability Practice. In addition, William is a Senior Advisor at Aravaipa Ventures, a green investment firm based in Boulder, CO, and a founding Partner of Urban Sustainability Associates.

He is the former Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute and a faculty member at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, where the Institute is based, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. Prior to this, William led several organizations at the intersection of community development and sustainability, including the nation’s premier environmental justice law center, Alternatives for Community & Environment, which he cofounded as an Echoing Green Fellow in 1993; the pioneering green development research and consulting organization New Ecology, Inc.; the Orton Family Foundation, an operating foundation with a sustainable development mission; and the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, the world’s fastest growing sustainable business trade association, which he served as a consultant/interim CEO. He is also an Associate of the Citistates Group, a think-tank for metropolitanism and regional development, and on the Advisory Board of NRDC’s Smarter Cities.

From 1999-2008, William was on the faculty of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and, from 1993-2004, taught at Boston College Law School. He has lectured around the world on environmental policy and sustainable development and has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report and on National Public Radio. William is the author of the award-winning book, The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, and A Republic of Trees: Field Notes on People, Place and the Planet. He is also a published poet. David Brower described William as “an environmental visionary creating solutions to today's problems with a passion that would make John Muir and Martin Luther King equally proud.”

He received his bachelor’s degree from Brown University and a law degree and master’s degree in history from the University of Virginia. William also completed doctoral studies as a Regents Fellow at the University of California Berkeley and was a law clerk for U.S. District Court Chief Judge Franklin S. Billings, Jr. in Vermont. He’s an avid telemark skier, trail runner and musician.

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