Executive Team

Founder and President - Tia Diaz-Balart: Tia has been an environmentalist since 1987 because of personal circumstances. At the age of two, in 1969, she inhaled a chemical fertilizer on her grandparent’s farm leaving her lungs permanently damaged. As a result she spent her next years constantly battling pneumonia, collapsed lungs and even comas. After her doctors gave up on her and declared that she would not live past 13, she was sent to live for 12-months at the National Jewish Hospital in Denver, Colorado where they literally saved her life.  Although she still required daily heavy medication and hospitalization at least twice a year, it was a big improvement.

In 1987, she suffered a particularly bad double-pneumonia while visiting home from college. Her retiring family doctor made a comment that changed Tia’s future. He said that she had control over her health and if she took more basic steps in leading a healthy lifestyle, she would improve even more.

It was then that she became a vegetarian, read anything she could on health and nutrition and began applying the lessons on herself with outstanding results. From these changes, Tia went for 14 years without one single hospitalization. By eating organic foods, cutting out animal products and making sure she was getting the nutrients she needed, Tia discovered the power of nutrition on one’s health. By learning about the benefits of organic foods and lowering animal product consumption, Tia naturally also learned and adopted other earth-friendly practices over the years to the point where it became not just a way of life for her, but her personal passion.

Tia wanted to finally merge her traditional corporate-world experiences with her passion for helping the environment. With more than 19 years of experience in marketing for multi-national companies, including seven years with Hewlett-Packard. Her experience includes creating and implementing campaigns in the consumer and business-to-business space in-store, online and direct for clients including Office Depot, Staples, Wal-Mart and Costco.

She frequently found green companies coming to her wanting marketing services, but because they were start-ups, they did not have the budgets of more established companies. When the economy began to worsen, it was these companies that were hurting most and some were not able to make it. It was then that Tia decided to put her passion for the environment together with her marketing experience to help support companies who were environmentally responsible so that they could thrive even in challenging economic times. The vision for the EcoChamber emerged to help eco-friendly companies do business and network together from across the globe increasing their chances for success.

In addition, Tia envisioned a way for businesses AND the environment to thrive in the future. She noted how often laws were passed that might be good for the environment, but would cost thousands of jobs. In her opinion, there needed to be a mediator to help negotiate a deal that would be beneficial for all parties involved; saving the environment and jobs. In reality, she felt that it would be businesses that would bring about true environmental progress and a better partnership needed to be forged.

The other challenge that Tia wanted to address was the fragmentation among the environmental interests leading none of them to have enough traction within governments compared to their counterparts such as other food and medical organizations. The EcoChamber was created to help unify the varying eco-sectors such as energy and agriculture to create an environmental voice that could not be ignored and would foster even more rapid progress.

Diaz-Balart is also a named partner at a South Florida firm, Gordon|Diaz-Balart and had originally worked with them in 1994 where she joined following her service on the staff of the Summit of the Americas, the unprecedented gathering in Miami of the heads of state of the 34 nations of the Western Hemisphere. She is also the founder of Kids at Ease, a non-profit organization providing services and funding research to ease the trauma of children who are hospitalized.

Tia is active within the community and serves on the steering committee of the United States Conference of AIDS, The Children’s Bereavement Center, and works to support the Caribbean Heart Menders which is a group of health professionals who provide free life-saving surgery in the poorest Caribbean countries to children who would otherwise not survive. Diaz-Balart’s husband, U.S. Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, and their son live in Miami, Florida.

Founding Partners

Chief Technology Officer: Stefan Kosel is a digital media veteran with over 14 years of interactive multimedia development experience.

Born, raised and educated in Germany, he studied Graphic and New Media Design for several years in Hamburg and at the Art Institute of Southern California, Los Angeles. Since the infancy of the Web, Stefan has been working as a Creative Director and Programmer on a variety of award-winning multimedia projects.

Stefan has developed high-profile Internet and CD-ROM projects such as Paramount Pictures’ ‘Star Trek’ Enhanced CD series, Sony’s ‘Godzilla’ website, and Disney’s ‘A Bugs Life’ website. Additionally, Stefan has been involved in the conception and development of several startup tech-companies and owns a multimedia development studio, Plus Media Interactive. He’s currently working as a new media consultant and entrepreneur involved in several new online start-up ventures.

As a founding partner, his EcoChamber responsibilities include the creative and technical oversight of the chamber’s online endeavors as well as day-to-day operations.

Chief Operations Officer: Gregory Clayton attended California institute of the Arts. Having majored in advertising design, his skills gained him an immediate position as Art Director at Wells, Rich and Green Advertising Agency where he headed such accounts as Benson and Hedges , Colombia Pictures, and TWA. As his popularity grew, he began to freelance at other top agencies to work on their top accounts, most notably Suzuki at Grey advertising and Levis Strauss at BBDO.

Working with Columbia Also got him noticed in the feature film arena and he began to work exclusively with the major studios producing designs and full campaigns for Universal, 20th, MGM, Warners For such films as Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Romancing the Stone, Rocky IV, Tarzan, the list is endless. At this point in his career, he chose to take an extended sabbatical in Europe to further study art and architecture. Upon his return he immersed himself in the realm of interactive design and is now a successful developer, designer and is Creative Director with Plus Media Interactive.

Executive Director: Aaron Newman is the Executive Director of EcoChamber, responsible for day-to-day operations and strategic planning to meet the organization’s mission and vision.

Aaron brings an entrepreneurial and marketing background along with strong industry knowledge. Prior to joining EcoChamber, he was co-founder and CEO of Envision Prefab which manufactures modular green homes, including large-scale recycling of affordable, adaptable and highly reusable steel cargo containers. The company designs products to fill the gap between sustainable but costly custom-built modulars and cheaper non-sustainable products. Envision Prefab received the first U.S. approvals for a modular-based container home and a container home able to withstand wind loads in excess of 160 mph.

After relocating from New York to Florida in 2001, Aaron co-founded Urban Core International, S.A., a real estate development firm focused on urban infill projects and traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs) in the United States and Central America. The firm’s projects included Panama’s first residential, LEED-certified building. In 2007 he published The Letter Green, a bilingual magazine about sustainability and green building in Panama.  

In his early career as a marketing and advertising consultant, Aaron became CEO of WaxDigital where he delivered sales in excess of $2 million by building key relationships with Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 executives. Aaron was named one of New York’s “Top Entrepreneurs” by Crain’s New York Business.

Aaron is a Certified Green Professional and an active member of the Congress for New Urbanism and the Urban Land Institute. He is also a past member of the Green Building Consortium of the Manufactured Housing Research Alliance (MHRA) and the Manufactured Housing Institute (MHI). While serving as secretary of the Midtown Miami Community Development District (CDD), he helped obtain a $20.8 million HUD Section 108 loan and a $103 million secured bond offering by Bank of America.

Vice President of Marketing: Meghan Schlicher has an extensive background in business development within many aspects of the advertising field and helped augment one of the leading advertising agencies in the world. She brings almost ten years of experience in the advertising and branding industry to the EcoChamber.

In addition to her role at the EcoChamber, Meghan is also Partner/Business Affairs at /Slant.Point., a new media company in Miami, with expertise in the areas of branding, digital, new media and social media. The group leverages their extensive working network of professionals in all areas of the advertising, branding, and tech industries worldwide, to help their clients to execute their business objectives.

Prior to partnering with /Slant.Point and joining the EcoChamber’s Executive team, Meghan worked with the rising talent at Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B) advertising agency based out of Miami, FL and Boulder, CO. She wrangled the creative talent through generations of clients, such as Volkswagen, Burger King, BMW MINI, Microsoft, Truth and Miller Lite. During her tenure at CP+B she took on many responsibilities; she promoted the agency’s creative work which won top awards at national and international shows, assisted the public relations initiatives on behalf of the CP+B brand and its clients, was responsible for the recruiting of all creative and digital talent, and built the agency’s and the industry’s first Department of Product Innovation and Development.

Subsequently, Meghan was recruited to become Director of Business Development at FRANK., a creative integrated media boutique agency in Miami, Florida’s Design District. She was responsible for landing new agency of record clientele and strategic partnerships, hiring, heading up public relations initiatives, promoting the agency through the awards circuit and managing process and flow of the agency.

Meghan’s first post-degree professional work was comprised of a stint in the nonprofit world helping to research and disseminate information on women’s giving with the Women’s Philanthropy Institute. Afterwards, she moved to New York City and worked at The ADVERTISING Club of New York where she entered Madison Avenue’s world of advertising. Among its acclaimed international juries, the International ANDY Awards -a program of the AD Club- offered Meghan the chance to earn her “Ph.D.” in the industry hobnobbing with creative masters and top advertising execs. She also managed efforts for funding and running educational and professional programs for New York’s five boroughs’ best talent.

Meghan graduated from James Madison College, Michigan State University in 2000 with a degree in International Relations. She spent her early career serving at the American Embassy in Athens, Greece. She is a speaker at student and professional groups, and teaches at the Miami Ad School. She is literate in Spanish and has basic knowledge of French and Greek.