Our People
In Alphabetical Order
Jenna Bradford
Jenna grew up in the Sacramento River delta in California, swimming, climbing trees, searching for animals along the water’s edge, studying their ways, and always looking for excuses to be outside. She received her B.A. in Environmental Studies and Bioethics from Loyola University in Chicago. Before becoming a teacher, Jenna worked on farms in Colorado, designed and sewed clothing, and studyied plants through an herbalism apprenticeship with Wildroot Botanicals and an ethnobotany immersion with Raven’s Roots Naturalist School. Jenna taught 5th and 6th grade at Paonia’s North Fork School of Integrated Studies. She is excited to continue with some of her current students on this adventure. Jenna loves teaching because she loves learning and loves to share that enthusiasm with others.
Sophie Browner
Sophie is so excited to learn and grow as a Groundwork fellow this season! Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she studied Speech Pathology and Studio Arts at University of Pittsburgh, where she fell in love with the surrounding forests of Pennsylvania, and began to immerse herself in the environmental world through hiking, camping, and learning with friends and teachers. Though she found community in both Cleveland and Pittsburgh, she was seeking an alternative path to the one that loomed post graduation. She spent a year traveling and working on Permaculture farms, and felt a newfound simplicity and connectedness with this way of life. Sophie enjoys walking barefoot, creating macrame jewelry, playing music, and making tea for friends from her ever-growing collection of herbs. This season, Sophie is hoping to slow down and look within herself, her fellow community members, and the land to help her understand and work towards a vision of the world that inspires her.
Megan Davey
Megan (she/her) is inspired and grounded by the natural world around her, blessed to call the Western Slope home. Growing up near the headwaters of the San Juan River, she has spent the majority of her life in Colorado, with stints in Oregon and California as well. Megan is inspired by imagining more holistic, diverse, and equitable food systems, and currently works for the National Young Farmers Coalition, an advocacy nonprofit, working to shift policy (and power) to more equitably resource a new generation of farmers and ranchers. Previously, she has operated a diversified vegetable farm with her partner in Southwest Colorado, coordinated food security programs for a nonprofit, and researched issues of agricultural labor in Colorado. Megan is a student and practitioner of yoga, finding great solace and healing in the connections between breath and movement. In her free time, she can be found gardening, trail running, exploring new crafts, spending beloved time with her two cattle dogs and partner, and generally exploring the wonders of the North Fork Valley.
Forrest Gillies
Forrest was fortunate to be raised at one of the oldest intentional communities, nestled into the red sandstone foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Being surrounded by wilderness, sustainable agriculture and abundant community shaped him into a human inspired to share these gifts with a world starving for land based connection. Guided by the question of how to create and sustain real, viable culture, Forrest found answers in the seeds. After studying Ecological Agriculture: Seeds, Bees & Soil at the Evergreen State College, he discovered the ways in which seed, subsistence agricultural systems and traditional life-ways create the foundational framework for real culture to emerge. Forrest has managed multiple regenerative farm and education projects including Siskiyou Seeds and White Oak Farm, offers nature connection programs for youth and is apprenticing in natural building. Rooted in reverence for the human & more-than-human world, Forrest walks in service to a more beautiful world we all know is possible. Forrest is a certified Wilderness First Responder.
Nikki Hill
Nikki is a seasoned tumbleweed who has been engaged in an ongoing, experiential inquiry of the dynamic weavings of ecological relationships for the past 18 years. She can be found in a diversity of habitats throughout the Western U.S., from remote wild places and feral haunts to boardrooms and stakeholder halls where land management protocols are written. Nikki holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental science and botany and started this journey with a focus on ecosystem restoration. Disillusioned with a focus of eradication as healing, (where herbicides are utilized as the primary tool for restoration), she sought solace in fostering direct connection as a small scale farmer.
For the past nine years she has been living semi nomadically, gathering seeds and tending wild plants, with a focus on plants that benefit from or rely on human disturbance. Nikki’s inspiration for teaching comes from a reclaiming a sense of belonging unfolding curiosities that continue to inspire her include reclaiming the role of human seed bearers, cultural landscape awareness, beneficial disturbance theory, assisted plant migration and remembering the ultimate mystery and joy of this dance. Nikki is a certified Wilderness First Responder.
Keshet Miller
Keshet has been a teacher, mentor, and program manager in experiential education for the last 10 years both in the United States and internationally. Keshet believes in the power of experiential education and continues to use this style of learning and teaching to encourage people to examine the natural and human world more critically, and with a deeper sense of curiosity. After years of living and working in a new location every 6 months during her 20’s, Keshet is excited to slow down and grow roots in Paonia. Her favorite things to do are eating good food with friends, reading fiction, and living in community in creative and lasting ways.
Kelly Moody
Kelly grew up in rural southern Virginia in tobacco country, working at her family’s nursery business. She earned a B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies, Anthropology at Christopher Newport University in Virginia in 2009, focusing on globalization of culture and land relationships, environmental ethics and ‘east-west’ comparative philosophies. After that she worked on and ran organic farms, studied with various herbalists, gardeners, permaculturists and ecologists from Vermont to Ohio, North Carolina, California, New Mexico and beyond. She has also spent countless hours in self-study working with plants on public land across the U.S. west. She is the main facilitator behind the Ground Shots Project and Podcast, a work that explores cross-ecological and societal intersections. Kelly is a certified Wilderness First Responder.
Ramphai Noikaew
Ramphai lives half of the year in Colorado and half at Pun Pun Organic Farm in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand where she enjoys sharing her knowledge of sustainable living practices and the tradition of seed saving with visitors from all over the world. She facilitates many workshops teaching permaculture principles at the farm and elsewhere in Thailand. In her free time she can be found gardening, doing yoga, biking, hiking, or simply being out in the wilderness. She loves sharing her love of cooking organic food because she strongly believes that food is medicine. Ramphai believes that we can enjoy life in the present moment, everywhere we go, we grow by wisely developing our inside as well as out, and we find peace by letting go. Education is not just to be found in classes and universities. It is outside, in the natural world.
Ally Pecego
Ally Pecego (she/her) grew up in Long Beach, CA, one of the most polluted cities in the United States, a byproduct of our fossil fuel-reliant society. Concerned about humans’ impacts on the world, she earned her B.A. in Environmental Studies and Legal Studies at UC Santa Cruz among the redwoods and sandy Pacific beaches. Determined to engage in transformational climate action, she became a California Climate Action Corps Fellow where she led a food recovery program in Watsonville, CA, collecting businesses’ excess food and donating it to local food pantries to reduce waste and feed hungry mouths. Struck by our overly complex, industrialized global food system, Ally realized that food is the cornerstone of civilization, yet most people have no idea where their meals come from. To untangle these destructive norms fueling the climate crisis, she completed her M.A. in Climate and Society at Columbia University to find equitable solutions to systemic problems destroying the Earth and its residents.
Fern Sarquiz
Fern Sarquiz grew up in Montpelier, Vermont on the unceded land and ancestral territory of Abenaki. She grew up amongst the maples, pines and birch trees. Fern Holds a B.A from Prescott College in Social Justice and Adventure Education. Her studies and mentors helped guide her towards understanding the complex political, ecological and social landscapes of life through a lens of interconnectedness. The work Fern is engaged in is critical, it involves carefully questioning and detangling the long projects of Colonialism and Capitalism. She believes that in the face of uncertainty and particularly unsettling times we must learn how to divest from systems that are meant to keep us separate from each other and the land. She believes in praxis that acknowledges the uncomfortable tension and friction as a prelude to the flame of change that can spark new growth. She sees the potential for deeper care by examining our relationship to the ecology of a particular place. Fern is most curious about the ways in which people discover a sense of belonging within themselves and in connection to the land and non-human world. Fern leads with her curious hands and her energetic heart; She loves to play, dance and clown around. As a new member of the Groundwork Team, Fern is looking forward to co-collarborting a story of song and seed. She is particularly passionate about the stories and songs that the plants tell us. She encourages all of us to give our ears a good cleaning and make a plant friend to listen to.
Wild The Woodworker
Wild is a woodworking artisan creating custom-made tree furniture with reclaimed materials and local hardwoods. Wild left a career as a wildlife biologist to pursue woodworking, and has developed his craft to rely as little as possible on the timber industry, opting instead to use discarded orchard wood, fallen trees, and other reclaimed materials to create his beautiful furniture. You can see a gallery of his work on his website, Menagerie Woodworking.
Pieter Van Winkle
Pieter is a father, husband, hobby rancher and youth mentor. He has worked in the business world as an executive coach, sales manager and real estate investor. Pieter believes passionately in the power of youth mentorship — in particular nature-connected, community-supported rites of passage. He is committed to helping foster experiences for our valley youth that helps prepare them for the rapidly changing world they will soon inhabit, lead and transform. Pieter is also a potter who uses clay he gathers from the Earth and processes himself. He lives in Paonia with his wife Emma and their son Wendell.
Robin VanHouten
Robin (he/they) loves three things most in this world. Play, delicious healthy food, and chicken cuddles. It’s no surprise that Robin’s parents, Pete and Kristin, taught him that play and connection are the most important things in this world. Robin grew up in the Patapsco river
valley of central Maryland where his favorite games were “where does this trail go?”, “how much cuddling can one human do?” and “when is dinner?” Play has always been a throughline in Robin’s life, but of course he had to get serious on some things. Robin studied Biology, bacteria, conservation, and math at the University of Puget Sound in Washington. After school, they found themselves in a job they loved – working at a hydroponic greenhouse that had a dual-mission of growing local food and employing folks with disabilities. One day, Robin realized that
he did not align with how energy-intensive the hydroponic growing was. In search of sustainability, Robin worked briefly on Winona LaDuke’s farm on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, learning about indigenous ways of farming. Robin left that experience with a belief
that it's the resilience and flexibility of nature that allows us to live here on this earth. And what happened next? A whirlwind journey through the southwest, a reunion with an old friend and a previous groundwork fellow, Mattea Goetz, and bing, bang, Boom! The Groundwork farm landed in Robin’s life! Now, Robin is excited to embrace his dream of growing healthy food, sustainably. Robin is passionate about changing the culture in our country around farming to create a future that is holistic, healthy, and worthy of passing to our children.
Jeff Wagner
After a university education didn’t provide sufficient answers, Jeff began seeking answers to the big questions that weren’t answered by academia: how we might reimagine U.S. society in the age of climate change, and what it means to be a responsible human in an unraveling world. For over a decade, Jeff sought answers outside the mainstream: living at wolf sanctuary in the Colorado mountains, leading NOLS expeditions across North America, and facilitating cross-cultural semesters in the Andes, the Amazon, the Himalaya, and the great Mekong River Basin. Jeff’s biggest focus has been teaching to the cultural roots of environmental issues, and helping students both experience and examine different ways of life that can be applied as cultural activism at home in North America. As a person dedicated to questioning the mindsets stemming from settler-colonialism, Jeff finds inspiration in the communities working to maintain and strengthen relationships with the natural world and with the sources of food, water, clothing, shelter, and meaning. Jeff likes walking slowly, weaving fabric and baskets, and growing beautiful varieties of heirloom seeds. Jeff founded Groundwork to help people pursue the goal of becoming ancestors that their descendants will be proud to tell stories about. Jeff is a certified Wilderness First Responder.
Acknowledgements
Our educational farm has been our biggest project since 2021. We want to acknowledge everybody who has contributed to the farm over the years to. make it what it is today:
Ramphai Noikaew: Assistant Farm Manager, 2022-2023.
Kollibri terre Sonnenblume: Farm Manager, 2023.
Gregory Pettys: Food Systems Fellowship Mentor, 2022-2023.
Angelica Calabrese: Food Systems Fellowship Mentor, 2021.
Parker Pflaum: Food Systems Fellowship Mentor, 2021.
Kevin Witkow: Food Systems Fellowship Mentor, 2021.
Keshet Miller: Food Systems Fellowship Mentor, 2021. Co-founder of Food Systems Fellowship.
Jeff Wagner: Farm Manager, 2021-2024. Co-founder of Food Systems Fellowship.
Food Systems Fellows
2025: Ally Pecego, Fern Sarquiz, and Robin VanHouten.
2024: Sophie Browner, Kate Goldwater, Belen Lopez, and Marion Madanguit.
2023: Mia Borger, David Dearmore, Mattea Goetz, and Quinn Van Buren.
2022: Sylvie Shaya and Anthony di Martino.
2021: Ben DiNoia, Quentin Freeman, Blake McClain, Gabby Raymond, Paige Silverstein, and Bailey Walker.