Don Jarvis lives in Provo, Utah, where he is the Mayor’s Sustainability Adviser, Chair of the Provo City Sustainability & Natural Resources Committee, and Secretary of the Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce’s Clean Air Task Force. He is also a trustee of Centro Hispano (a support center for immigrants), past President of Provo Rotary Club, a member of Provo City’s Agriculture Commission, and LDS Earth Stewardship. He publishes quarterly editorials in Provo’s Daily Herald.His wife Janelle conducts the Provo Sustainability Committee’s annual school air-quality campaign, working with Breathe Utah and reaching all of Provo School District’s 15,000 students.
Don grew up near Des Moines, Iowa, earned a B.A. in Russian at Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. at Ohio State University. Until retiring in 2004, he taught Russian at BYU where he also directed North America’s largest university Slavic language program as well as General Education, the Faculty Center, and the Foreign Language House program. His publications were mainly on language teaching and faculty development. From 1996 to 1999, the Jarvises lived in Moscow and in Yekaterinburg supervising LDS missions. From 2005 to 2007 they served a humanitarian mission in Vitebsk, Belarus.