Eric Poncelet is on the Board of Directors currently serving as Board Chair, and is the grateful parent of two daughters (ages 16 and 18) who have completed the Stepping Stones program. During the daytime hours, Eric works as a Senior Mediator/Senior Director for Kearns & West, a stakeholder engagement and collaborative solutions consulting firm in San Francisco that provides facilitation, strategic planning, and process design services to assist diverse stakeholders come together to address complex natural resource management issues.

Eric has a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering and experience working as a systems engineer in the utility industry (for PG&E). He also has a M.A. and Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology, where he studied the cultural dimensions of multistakeholder environmental collaboration in Europe and the US. It was through his work as an anthropologist that he became interested in rites of passage. Like the founders of Stepping Stones Project, he too perceived a striking need within our society to provide coming-of-age guidance for young teens, as well as their families.

In his excessive free time, he enjoys hiking with his wife Susie, playing keyboard in a rock/dance band with other school parents, and surfing avidly along the CA coast.