Mary Rafferty is a strategic climate campaigner, seasoned coalition facilitator and proven organizational builder with nearly twenty years of experience.

For the last decade, she has served as the Executive Director of Virginia Conservation Network, where she grew the organization into a diverse coalition of over 160 conservation partners working together to advance historic climate, clean water, transportation and environmental justice policy. 


Before joining VCN, Mary worked with Environment America and the Public Interest Network running political and conservation field campaigns. She got her start as a grassroots organizer with the Sierra Club and Green Corps. Mary graduated summa cum laude from the University of San Francisco. She currently lives in Rhode Island and is the proud mom of two elementary school boys.

Vero is a clean energy policy strategist with 20 years of experience in project finance law, program development, and state and federal policy.

She most recently served as Deputy Director of the Clean Energy States Alliance, where she led programs on low-income solar/solar+storage, virtual power plants, and offshore wind, including a bipartisan network of 54 grantees under EPA's $7 billion Solar for All program and the VPP Acceleration Initiative, a multi-partner technical assistance program for state agencies on virtual power plant deployment.

She previously directed clean energy programming at Yale University and practiced project finance law at international law firms Gide Loyrette Nouel and Hogan Lovells. She holds a Master of Environmental Management from Yale. Vero is a member of the New York bar and the Paris bar. On weekends, you can find her somewhere outside, running, gardening, or bushwhacking on skis with husband and children. They all enjoy a good knock-knock joke and spicy food.