Rockefeller Spotlights Meridian’s Julian Portilla in Blog on DSI

The Rockefeller Foundation recently featured John de la Parra, Director of the Global Food Portfolio at The Rockefeller Foundation, and Meridian Institute Senior Mediator and Program Director Julian Portilla in discussion about their collaborative work on digital sequence information on genetic resources and their experiences building trust throughout convenings and high-level negotiations.

Julian Portilla brings his rich experience designing and facilitating complex, multistakeholder, consensus-building processes to his work on the DSI project. The DSI team at Meridian supports parties, stakeholders, and rightsholders at the Convention on Biological Diversity to identify areas of convergence and divergence on fair and equitable benefit sharing arrangements from the use of Genetic Sequence Data.

Both Julian and John share great insights on this work and their progress in this Bellagio Breakthroughs piece: Start at the Tension Point: John de la Parra and Julian Portilla on Building Relationships and Trust – The Rockefeller Foundation

Curious to learn more? Julian and two other Meridian DSI team colleagues, Brad Spangler and Audrey Burns, recently shared their insights on the formal DSI negotiations at CBD COP16 and the development of the groundbreaking Cali Fund in this Meridian Insight Post: Setting Up for Success: How Meridian’s Informal Convenings Contributed to High-Level Agreement at CBD COP16 – Meridian Institute