The Sierra Forward Leadership

Corley Phillips is the founder of American River Ventures, a $100M venture capital fund investing in early-stage information technology companies. He founded the firm in 2000 and retired as Managing Director in 2008. From 1993 to the founding of ARV, Corley was an active private stage investor in Northern California start-up companies.

Prior to his activities as an investor, Mr. Phillips had a distinguished entrepreneurial career. From 1990 until its successful merger with a public company at the end of 1994, he served as President and CEO of Manzanita Software Systems, an accounting software company based in Roseville, CA. 

As with many residents of the Sierra foothills, Corley has business roots in Silicon Valley. From 1984 to 1990, he was President and co-founder of Grafpoint, a communications software company based in San Jose, California. He previously held various sales and marketing positions with Envision Technology and Hewlett-Packard.

Corley retired so he could fish and sing more. He fishes all over the world, and sings with a local barbershop chorus, the Stay Tuned a Capella Chorus, and several quartets. He and his wife Patricia have lived in Granite Bay since 1996. Corley is registered with the Common Sense Party the founders of which, including former Rep. Tom Campbell (R-San Jose), are pushing for centrist policies and more civil discourse. 

A resident of Camino, CA (El Dorado County), Les Francis brings a wealth of political and policy experience to the leadership of Sierra Forward, of which he was a co-founder (with Jim Hermann) in 2017. 

A native Californian and product of the state’s public education system, Francis cut his political teeth in Santa Clara County. A protégé of the late former San Jose Mayor, Congressman and Cabinet Secretary, Norman Y. Mineta, in the late 1960s and early 70s, Francis was one of the national organizers of the 18-year-old-vote campaign, and the eventual successful passage and ratification of the 26^th Amendment to the Constitution.

During his career and at various times, Francis has been a Congressional chief of staff, a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy White House Chief of Staff (Jimmy Carter), and Executive Director of both the DNC and DCCC. He has managed and/or consulted on campaigns for every office from City Hall to the White House, and literally dozens of ballot measure campaigns in every region of the country. Among other activities, Les is a national leader in the current bi-partisan drive to expand and enhance civic learning in our public schools. He is registered now as a No Party Preference voter.

In a stirring 2020 victory, Jaron Brandon became the youngest currently serving county supervisor in the State of California, securing a place for his vision of rural leadership and proving that age is no barrier to public service.

Jaron’s campaign was underpinned by a vision for enhancing the quality of life and bringing people together in Tuolumne County, an idyllic part of central Sierra and its foothills, housing approximately 55,000 residents within its 6% developable land. Running on the three pillars of housing, jobs, and transparency, Jaron is known for his scrappy, fierce, and collaborative leadership approach to changing the priorities and approaches of modern government. In addition to these core issues, he hasn’t shied away from tackling other hairy challenges such as illegal dumping, broadband deployment, biomass utilization, forest management, public safety, homelessness, digital government transformation, green hydrogen, cyber security, and more.

Having honed his leadership skills in student government at UC-Merced and through political internships with the non-partisan Maddy Institute out of CSU Fresno, Jaron’s unassuming entry into the political landscape belied his remarkable ability to rally grassroots support and the power of “ideas over ideology” — focusing on “meat and potato” issues and innovation over partisan stances and political rhetoric. A no-party-preference independent representing a conservative district, he won an incumbent’s seat 59-41 learning the power of listening to people, modern campaign tools, wearing out shoe leather, and bringing compelling ideas forward that focus on improving people’s day-to-day lives.

Beyond his role as County Supervisor, Jaron holds multiple other leadership responsibilities including the Chair of CHIPS Forestry working with indigenous tribes, membership in the CalRecycle Illegal Dumping Task Force and the Institute for Local Government board, Vice-Chair of the National Association of Counties Technology & Telecommunications Steering Committee, cofounder of a local housing collaborative, among others. He’s been a speaker at the Green Hydrogen Coalition Catalyst H2, UC Ag and Natural Resource 2040 Vision Conference, and local high school classes alike. In his free time, he enjoys getting his hands dirty with trash cleanups in local waterways and roadsides. 

Jaron’s commitment to crossing political boundaries mirrors his belief in Sierra Forward, and he actively cultivates unity by championing shared values over partisan politics.

Richard Cray is the ultimate “can do” guy. He first showed up on Sierra Forward’s radar screen when the organization was looking to host—or co-host—a forum featuring candidates in the First Congressional District and Third Assembly District during the 2022 election cycle. Richard took on the task with zeal—found and secured the site, invited the candidates, circulated notices, arranged for a moderator, obtained a sound and video streaming system, and kicked off the event. He was a one-person advance team!

As his reward—or punishment—he was asked to join the Sierra Forward Leadership Team. 

Richard is a Northern California transplant. Born in Seattle, he grew up on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. After two years in college and three years in the Air Force at Beale AFB, his love of music (but his admitted lack of musical talent) gave rise to a career in audio engineering. In the 1970s he built large disco sound systems for nightclubs in Vancouver, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In 1985 he joined a Bay Area concert sound company as an engineer and Production Manager for such events as the Monterey Bay Blues Festival. A back injury in 1999 brought an end to his concert work and he moved to Yuba City in 2000.

 A lifelong interest in politics led him to join the Sutter County Democratic Central Committee where he has served as Treasurer and, currently, as Vice-Chair. In this role, he has worked with numerous campaigns for local candidates as well as regional races. Five of the last six Democratic nominees for State Assembly in his district have made him their male appointee to the State Democratic Central Committee and CADEM Delegate. In 2015 he was named Volunteer of the Year for Region 1 of the California Democratic Party. In 2023 he was elected as an ADEM Delegate to the State Democratic Central Committee.

A native of Iowa City, Iowa, and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (BA in Business Administration), John Friedrich moved to South Lake Tahoe in 2005 to join his now wife, Kim Carr. John and Kim have a daughter Rosie, who is set to graduate high school in the spring of 2024. 

Since becoming a dad, John has been motivated to do everything he can, politically and otherwise, to help create a better world for Rosie and all children everywhere.

John was elected to the South Lake Tahoe City Council in 2020 and serves on the Board of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, as well. John also works full time with Momentum, a small business based in Sacramento that works with a variety of corporations, municipalities, ports, and airports to design, develop and deploy renewable energy and zero-emission transportation projects.

John has extensive program and policy development experience in the private, government, and non-profit sectors, with a focus on environmental protection, renewable energy, climate policy, and electrification. He has managed numerous electric vehicle, energy efficiency, and distributed renewable generation programs and has designed and led multiple local, state, and national issue and political campaigns. 

John is strongly in accord with Sierra Forward’s commitment to engage with voters across the political spectrum to find common ground to our common challenges.

An activist by nature, Nevada County’s Pete Minett declares, “Politics is not my first passion. I am involved because it is necessary.  I was stunned by the rise of the tea-party movement in spring of 2009. Their tactics echoed the Brown Shirts in the early thirty’s – hauling weapons into public meetings, shouting down folks they did not agree with…. using the same bullying tactics. That was enough to get me involved in politics!” 

While he had always been interested in civic engagement, Pete’s truly serious involvement began in his local teachers’ association. That early school-level involvement eventually saw him moving into leadership, then regional and state positions. Then followed organizing and deeper involvement with the Nevada County Democratic Central Committee, where he has been on the executive board for a dozen years. 

Pete Minett is and has been a mainstay in numerous campaigns, partisan and non-partisan alike, from city council, county board of supervisors, state legislature and Congress. Whenever candidates and/or campaign organizers want to know what is going on in the Northern Sierra, or how to create a base, Pete Minett is on their call list—and eventually on speed dial. His first advice is always the same: “Go meet and listen to people. Then learn to speak their language.”

Although an active and partisan Democrat, Pete describes his political philosophy as “center-right on foreign policy to ‘progressive’ on social issues”. He grew up overseas (in Germany), which helps account for his interest in foreign policy, and his centrist views on the topic. As he puts it, “I have seen first-hand the skullduggery that goes on – the worst of it comes from non-American sources, and as a nation we are becoming less naive than when I grew up.” 

Pete worries that “The greatest threat to the United States is no longer being united, and the rise of distinctly anti-democratic forces with no respect for the rule-of-law. I lived in a country run by a dictator. I do not want that here. And, so, I am still involved. Sierra Forward is doing the non-partisan, practical work of trying to win elections for viable, reasonable candidates who will preserve our democratic processes and institutions while working to improve the lives of all their constituents.”  

Raised in Northern California, Sara Rogers has been engaged in helping her communities and advocating for marginalized populations from an early age. Her perspective is in part informed by her experience as a disabled woman born with a hearing loss, and her educational background in Sociology, Comparative Literature and Art History from the University of California, Davis.

She currently works at Way to Win, a homebase for progressive donors and organizers to transform political funding with data-backed strategies to win elections across the South and Southwest. While this work is part of a national strategy, she cares deeply about her home region and believes that the same strategies of building a reflective democracy by centering long-term organizing can be done in Northern California.

She has previously served as Senior Program Manager at the California Fire Foundation, where she managed fundraising efforts and a wide variety of programs including implementing multiple local disaster relief plans in response to the devastating fires and natural disasters throughout California. 

Sara has also served as a Field Representative for State Senator Lois Wolk in California’s 3rd Senate District where she functioned as a liaison to constituents through developing and maintaining relationships with community members. Sara has broad experience working and volunteering on campaigns, including implementing field operations, advising groups and training volunteers on community organizing and canvassing to increase voter turnout and register voters.

A native of Chicago, IL, moved to Three Rivers, MI, at the advanced age of six months! The family settled there, and Steve graduated from Three Rivers High School in 1961. He enrolled at Michigan’s Alma College, from which he graduated with Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry in 1965.

He went from there to graduate school at UC-Irvine, which was brand new when he enrolled. There he received his PhD in Chemistry with an emphasis in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). The next stop, first as a post-doctoral student and then as a Senior Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech). From there he moved to Palo Alto, where he worked for thirty-three years for a major manufacturer of scientific instruments.    

In late 2006, after decades in Silicon Valley, Steve and his wife, Rosemarie, retired and made the move to the Sierra foothills—first to their vacation home in Pollock Pines and then to their dream “green” home in Mariposa, not far from Yosemite National Park. There they have become active in several community organizations.  

Steve got his first taste of politics in the Sierra Nevada when Rosemarie ran for Mariposa County Supervisor in 2014 and Steve served as her campaign manager.  Rosemarie is now serving her 3rd 4-year term in that position after being reelected in 2022.

Steve currently serves as the President of the the Sierra Nevada Alliance, the Chair of the Upper Merced River Watershed Council, and the Chief Technical Officer of the Mariposa Biomass Project. He is also the Chair of the Mariposa County Democratic Central Committee.

 He has supported Sierra Forward for many years as he appreciates Sierra Forward’s sensible policies and support for candidates for political and non-political offices who avoid extreme or divisive political positions. We all work together to support our communities in the Sierra.