Journey North's Founder and Director, Elizabeth Howard, coordinated the program from Vermont. Her office sat on a hillside overlooking Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains. Journey North was founded in 1994. Inspired by the early Internet-based projects in which school children tracked human expeditions (e.g. across the Arctic by dogsled or Africa by bicycle), she saw a clear and exciting parallel between these expeditions and the wildlife migrations that cross the globe with the seasons. While no longer with Journey North, she ran the website, which uses citizen scientists to track the movement of many migratory species and other seasonal phenomenon across North America. She was also deeply engaged in the analysis of Journey North data and published several analyses on the movement patterns of Monarchs.

Jeff is a former faculty member at Duke University where he conducted research on forest ecology and climate change; taught courses in ecology, forestry, and wildlife surveys; and coordinated and conducted bird, herp, and butterfly surveys across North Carolina. He moved to Montana in 2014 and spent 3 years establishing the MPG Ranch butterfly monitoring program near Missoula, until moving back to North Carolina by 2017. He is currently a Research Specialist at Georgetown University working with Leslie Ries in the Butterfly Informatics Lab, coordinating and supporting butterfly monitoring programs across the continent through PollardBase and The North American Butterfly Monitoring Network. In 2023, Jeff launched the Carolinas Butterfly Monitoring Program, a community science effort to monitor butterfly populations across both North and South Carolina.