Ross Hostetter

Trust Protector and Legal Counsel

Ross is a conscious lawyer, serial entrepreneur, father, novelist, gardener, trout fisherman and spiritual practitioner who brings over 40 years of experience in negotiation, mediation, non-profit management and commercial law to the ERA team.  His current engagements include serving as Global Counsel to the Savory Institute, a leader in the regenerative agriculture movement.  Ross also works as a strategic advisor and  fundraiser for Humanities Team, the world’s largest non-profit in the transformational education space. He has spent much of his career negotiating and closing complex business deals, and enjoys working in high-stakes environments with sophisticated clients.

Ross began his legal career as an international and environmental law lawyer for a fortune 100 oil and gas company in Dallas.  He moved on to found an AV rated boutique litigation firm, and spent a decade as a trial lawyer.  Realizing that there had to be a better way to resolve disputes, Ross devoted 25 years of his life to the creation court-annexed mediation in Texas.  He has conducted over 4,000 mediations, and helped train over a thousand lawyers in the art of the art of negotiation, deal-making, and peacemaking.  His mediation consulting firm was hired by clients such as Chevron Corporation, the FDIC, and Jones Day, the world's largest firm at the time.  Ross has been recognized by D Magazine as one of the best lawyers in Dallas, and has been named a “Texas Super Lawyer” four times by Texas Monthly Magazine. 

Overall deal flow in rooms where Ross has been a negotiator has been in the hundreds of millions.  More recently, Ross served as a consultant and attorney for Austin-based Momark Development Company, where he worked on creation of several large multi-use developments in the Austin area. 

Ross and his wife Mary have also been lifelong spiritual seekers, a path that was initiated for Ross by a near death experience followed by a profound opening into the Unitive Field that occurred while on an extended solo canoe journey into the Canadian Wilderness in his early 20’s.  This and other experiences were chronicled in Ross’s award-winning work of visionary fiction, Keepers of the Field, An Invitation to the Unitive Life published in 2014. 

He and Mary were co-founders an intentional community in Texas exploring Christian mystical experience.  They were also co-founders of the Boulder Integral Center, a nonprofit that ran a 12,000 sq. ft. event and seminar space in Boulder Colorado.  This was a home and stop-over for consciousness explorers, writers, monks, mystics, gurus, philosophers and organizational development consultants, along with many of the world's best known spiritual teachers.  We also hosted a tribe of burning man refugees that occupied the basement one night and never left.  

Ross and  Mary have enjoyed a generative 37 year relationship together that continues to explore the creative power of love.  They live in Boulder, Colorado, and have raised three children together.