Laila Racevskis, Ph.D. is Director of Economics and Policy for The Balmoral Group where she brings 20 years of experience working in environmental policy, natural resource economics, program evaluation, and stakeholder engagement. Her career includes a decade of service conducting research on state and local government policy issues for the Florida Legislature’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability. Prior to that, she served as director of the University of Florida’s Natural Resources Leadership Institute, where she provided training for professionals in the public and private sectors on facilitation, consensus-building, and collaboration. Her current areas of focus include ecosystem service valuation, including cost-benefit analyses that account for natural resource values; payment for ecosystem services (PES) program design; and collaborative process development. Laila holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics from Michigan State University, and an M.S. in Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics from The Ohio State University where she also obtained her B.A. in French and International Studies.