Our Board

Joel Appel
Joel has been an entrepreneur and business manager most of his life. After attending Claremont McKenna College and Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Joel worked at the Quaker Oats Company for 8 years. He then founded Orange Glo International, the inventors of Orange Glo, OxiClean, and Kaboom, with his parents. Joel and his family sold Orange Glo to Church & Dwight/Arm & Hammer in 2006. A year later Joel co-founded FullBar and Brainetics, two consumer products companies that distribute their products through retailers across North America. Joel has two kids, loves the outdoors, and has tremendous passion for personal and spiritual growth.

 

 

 

Jennifer Feikin
Jennifer is an advisor to non-profit organizations, as well as start-ups and major media companies.  She also sits on the national Board of Trustees for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America.

Prior to being an independent advisor, Jennifer was at Google, Inc.  She joined Google in 2002 and negotiated some of Google’s first and largest search and advertising deals.  She then conceived of the idea for Google Video, which launched in 2005, and she managed the business side of the product including the content partnership team.  Jennifer joined Google from AOL Time Warner’s strategic development group.  Prior to AOL, Jennifer worked in Hollywood in theatrical business affairs where she put together movie deals at Twentieth Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures as well as Morgan Creek Productions.  She began her career as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company.

Jennifer holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from Duke University.  Prior to law school, she received a Henry Luce Scholarship and spent a year in Malaysia fighting against the mandatory death sentence for marijuana trafficking.

Jennifer is beyond passionate about First Descents.  She participated as a camper at a 2011 kayaking camp.   Not only did she leave camp knowing how committed she was to FD, but as a breast cancer survivor, she left with a renewed sense of life and an openness to what life presents to each of us.  She can not imagine not helping other cancer survivors and fighters share this experience.

Brent Goldstein - Board Chairman
Brent Goldstein is a principal and co-founder of Avanti Capital LLC, a Rockville, Maryland-based company that structures, organizes and raises private equity and debt for real estate acquisitions and venture capital investments. Brent is a 1989 graduate of Colgate University and a 1993 graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center. Brent lives in Rockville, Maryland with his wife Lisa, three daughters, Daryn (16), Arlyn (12) and Bailey (10), and a Lhasa-Poo named Simba. He is an avid biker (road and mountain), golfer, hockey player, hiker and skier. In September 2006, Brent was challenged by the late First Descents Executive Director, Allan Goldberg, to compete in the Leadville Trail 100 mountain-bike race (recently won by Lance Armstrong). The Leadville 100 is a one-day, 104-mile endurance mountain-bike race starting in Leadville, Colorado at 10,200 feet of altitude with aggregate ascents of nearly 14,000 feet. As Allan was about to compete in his own version of the Leadville 100 in the form of chemo and radiation treatments for cancer, Brent accepted the challenge, enlisted some fellow bikers and turned the event into a fundraiser for First Descents. In August 2007, Brent battled exhaustion and severe cramping to complete his first Leadville 100 in just over 11 hours. More importantly, he and his “Team First Descents” buddies succeeded in using the race to raise over $80,000 for First Descents. Since then, he has completed the Leadville 100 in 2008, 2009 and 2010 in improving times of 10:35, 9:56 and 9:43 and has used the race to raise an additional $255,000 for First Descents. Brent is thrilled that the Leadville team fundraising effort has become the blueprint for the current Team First Descents concept. Brent is delusionally hoping to break the magic 9-hour mark in Leadville in 2011!

Eva Ho
Eva Ho currently is the VP of Marketing and Operations at Factual, an open data platform that leverages large-scale aggregation and community exchange. She also serves as the Executive Director of Whole Child LA, a non-profit pediatric pain clinic, and on the Board of Iridescent, a science education non-profit. Prior, she was a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Google and Youtube for 5 years. Prior to Google, Eva was the head of marketing for Applied Semantics, a company that was sold to Google in 2003. Additional past employers include The Wilkerson Group, Procter & Gamble and IBM. Eva holds an MBA from the Cornell University Johnson School of Management as well as an AB in Biology from Harvard University.

 

Brad Ludden - Founder
Brad (aka Daril, Biff, Bud, B) was born in Wyoming and raised in Northwest Montana. He spent his days in the outdoors with his family hiking, camping, fishing, hunting, skiing and, of course, kayaking. Of all his passions, kayaking caught his eye the most. His parents gave him his first kayak when he was 9 and at age 12 he was traveling and competing internationally. By 18 he had kayaking in over 20 countries and found his true passion within the sport, first descents. A first descent is the first time a person successfully kayaks a river or section of river that has never been done. Through his first descents he found immense challenge, adventure, community and personal growth.

Cancer went from being just some random word to something very personal when he was 12 and his Aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 38. After watching her endure cancer and seeing how little support there was available to her, Brad started volunteering for a local pediatric oncology program by teaching the participants how to kayak. He fell in love with it and decided it was time to do more so at 18, he started working on an organization that would soon become “First Descents”. Its goal- to help young adults like his Aunt by giving them the life changing experience of kayaking. “I wanted to recreate the experience of a ‘first descent’, that had so greatly impacted my life, for people like my aunt who really needed it. Even though thousands of people have been down the rivers they’re kayaking at camp, it’s still the FIRST time they’ve been down it and that’s the magic of FD!”

Brad continues to kayak professionally for Teva, Dagger, AT Paddles, Kokatat and Smith Optics and still pursues his own adventures on rivers around the world when he’s not passionately working with and for First Descents.

Corey Nielsen
Before coming to First Descents in 2000, Corey trained and raced whitewater slalom kayaks at the national and international level. Having earned two national championship medals in wildwater and slalom, he dedicated his life to pursuing his passion of excellence in whitewater kayaking. A major highlight in his athletic career came in 1996, when he served as the head coach for the Republic of Panama in the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. After retiring from paddling, Corey targeted the multi-sport discipline of adventure racing as a medium to continue to push himself in his life. He raced for one of the top teams in the United States in such races as the Eco-Challenge, Four Square Challenge, and the Adventure Extreme Series. As a result of his life experiences in both whitewater and adventure racing, Corey founded the Nielsen Training Group (NTG), a leadership and sales training-based company specializing in professional skills training. Recently, Corey has utilized his community influence and passion and has begun work with a grassroots environmental organization striving to designate numerous rivers near his hometown of Durango, Colorado as Wild and Scenic River status. Corey not only brings his unbridled enthusiasm and energy to First Descents, but also a vision to touch as many lives as possible in an attempt to maximize the quality of life for fellow humans surviving cancer. Corey’s first job; “Helping my dad clean up a housing project (that he “invested in”) and using a fire hose to clean out sewers. It was a humbling experience at age 13 and every job from then on was a walk in the park!” His inspiration, he says, “without a doubt is the participants of First Descents’ programs over the years who have taught me the true “meaning of life” – to laugh and to love. For this, I am eternally grateful.

Larry Smith
Larry is an emergency physician who practices in Washington state and has volunteered for First Descents since 2006. He is a cancer survivor and currently lives with his wife in the North Cascades town of Mazama, Washington. Originally from the Midwest, they bounced around the globe with the military for a few years before finally finding a suitable place to indulge their interests in various mountain sports and other outdoor pursuits.

 

 

Brad Reiss
Brad has 25 years experience in real estate and real estate transactions. He is the Chairman & CEO of Ark Investment Partners and Ark Real Estate Partners, which are the principal owners, operators and capital investors in various real estate interests throughout the United States and Canada. He is also the Chairman of Willow Hotels a full-service management company specializing in boutique and lifestyle hotel properties. Brad serves on the boards of Multiple Sclerosis Research Center of New York and First Descents.

 

 

Brian Wickman
After graduating from Duke with a BA in Environmental Science and Policy, Brian worked in the non-profit world for several years before moving to New York City. While working as a hotel manager in NYC, he was diagnosed at age 30 with an extraskeletal myxoid chondrosarcoma in his left leg and a papillary carcinoma in his thyroid. After the removal of his left leg and his thyroid and a nearly fatal dose of chemotherapy, Brian embarked on a slow path back to health. He attended First Descents as a camper in 2007 (where he received the nickname Beemer) and returned to help produce a film about the camp in 2008. Beemer continues to return to FD annually in the role of counselor while he is pursuing a Masters in Social Work from Columbia University and a Masters in Divinity from Union Theological Seminary.