Terry Rumsey

Terry Rumsey is the founder and President of Green Seeds. Terry has been raising money for social justice and community service organizations for more than 25 years. During that time he has helped local, state, regional, and national organizations raise over $15 million. Terry brings decades of experience to his business as a development consultant for organizations dedicated to healing and transforming the world. Terry Rumsey has a proven record for starting, solidifying, and sustaining the kinds of organizations that need his assistance.

Although Terry has experience with the full range of fundraising approaches, including annual giving drives, congregation-based campaigns, major gifts solicitation, and special events, his core area of expertise is in grant development. Terry has written successful grants for a wide variety of programs, such as community recreation centers, homeless healthcare services, prison to community reintegration initiatives, voter registration drives, and national anti-death penalty campaigns, just to name a few. He has secured grant awards from small family foundations; religious funds; prominent national foundations; major corporations; and local, state, and federal government agencies. The size of the grant awards has spanned the gamut from several hundred dollars for uniforms for an inner city basketball team to over a million dollars for a national mental health clearinghouse.

Terry has worked as a community organizer at the grassroots level, served as the executive director of several dynamic social justice organizations, and more recently managed grant development for the nation’s largest mental health association. From 2001 to 2006, Terry held the position of Director of Grants Management for the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania. Terry was the principal grant developer for this agency with an annual budget of $16 million that served tens of thousands of mental health consumers in the five-county Philadelphia region. From 1998 to 2001, Terry was the Director of Development for the YWCA of Chester, PA. There, he helped to raise a million dollars for one of the cornerstone institutions in a community devastated by poverty and social problems. During the 1980’s and 1990’s Terry served as the executive director of a voter empowerment organization in Chester, as the executive director of a local chapter of the national Jobs With Peace Campaign, and as the founding executive director of Pennsylvania Abolitionists United Against the Death Penalty. In the 1970’s Terry gained hard-won knowledge as a businessperson while owning and operating a vegetarian restaurant and a fruit and vegetable business based from an organic farm in central Pennsylvania. He has also served as chairperson and/or on the boards of a long list of peace, community, and environmental organizations.

Terry Rumsey has lived an extraordinary life, and he has been a change agent in his local community as well as at the national level. He has accumulated the right balance of activist, organizational, fiscal, and fundraising skills to make Green Seeds a vital, living resource for individuals and organizations determined to make the world a better place.

Robin Lasersohn

Robin Lasersohn, Green Seeds Vice President, performs research, grant writing, editing, and organizational consulting services for the company.

Robin, an activist, educator, and editor, worked for 19 years at The School in Rose Valley, one of the nation’s oldest and most influential progressive elementary schools, where she developed the school’s service and partnership learning program. Robin is a contributing editor of Schools, a biannual journal that “explores the subjective experience of school life.”

For nearly 30 years, Robin has also been a leader in the peace and justice movement in the Philadelphia region.  She was the founder and Executive Director of the Youth Organizing Project, served as the Chairperson of Delaware County Jobs With Peace Campaign, co-coordinated the Peace Center of Delaware County, co-founded Delaware County Wage Peace & Justice after 9/11, helped start Friends of Glen Providence Park, and initiated Delaware County United for Sensible Gun Policy.  Robin graduated from Swarthmore College in 1988 with a special major in Education and Social Change.

Robin brings professional research, writing, editing, strategic planning, and meeting facilitation skills to the Green Seeds team.

A Vital Partnership – and now, a Family Business

For people who know Terry and Robin, their partnership is virtually a community institution. Over the years, they have utilized their complementary skill sets to co-lead a variety of activist organizing efforts, run two small businesses together, homeschool their two children, and maintain a joyful marriage for over 30 years. Like all of their shared efforts, their work for Green Seeds leverages their cooperation in a way that includes, empowers, and inspires others.

Now, their daughter, Meg, has joined the Green Seeds team. A family grant writing business sounds a little funny, but it makes sense! Strong communication skills and a commitment to social change run in the family, and now we have more capacity to serve our clients.

Meg Rumsey-Lasersohn

Meg Rumsey-Lasersohn, Associate Grant Writer, performs research, grant writing, and editing services for Green Seeds. She joined the company in 2019. Meg is a superb writer, whose experience as a professional storyteller and educator bring her words to life and help the reader to learn about the issues at hand and imagine the impact of the programs she describes. Her research skills are invaluable. She is driven by an insatiable curiosity to understand every aspect of the context for any given project. Meg can efficiently gain the background knowledge needed to explain her clients’ needs and identify research that supports their strategies. Having grown up in an activist family, Meg has been actively involved in many efforts to make the world a better place. Her commitment to social justice, nonviolence, and ecology is deep-rooted.

When Meg is not researching and writing for Green Seeds clients, she works as a professional actor. She is a member of the experimental, immersive theater company Die-Cast, and has performed widely in Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and London.  She has taught at Mount Anthony High School in Bennington, VT as well as Philadelphia Young Playwrights and Curio Theatre Company, both in Philadelphia. She has performed as storyteller, with an expertise in folk tales featuring strong female characters and nonviolent solutions to problems. She graduated from the London Dramatic Academy in 2013 and Bennington College in 2014 with a BA in Theater and Education. She is a 2019 Harvey Award nominee and 2017 Barrymore award winner in education, served as non-fiction editor from 2013 to 2014 at the literary magazine Plain China, and now resides in Pasadena, CA, with her partner and pets.