Our People
In Alphabetical Order
Mandy Bishop
Mandy is a ritual artist, nature-based mentor and guide, and also the founder of Old Ways Wisdom—a place where ritual art, ancestral skills, and Sacred Storywork weave together to bring us back into relationship with ourselves, the land, and the wisdom of our ancestors. Born and raised in the Front Range of Colorado, Mandy has a deep relationship with and life-long apprenticeship to the plants and the wisdom of the land. For most of her life, Mandy has been intimately involved with the wild ones in many forms, including foraging wild foods and wildcrafting medicines, weaving baskets, carving gourds, tanning hides and apprenticing to fire. Mandy is in service to the remembrance of our wild selves; to a partnership between nature, creativity and soul; and to the wisdom carried in our bones waking us up to what is most important in our lives. Outside of guiding and teaching, Mandy fills her days with homesteading, crafting, ceremony and adventuring in the wilderness.
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.
Belen Lopez
Belen was born and raised in Miami, Florida, and studied Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Florida International University. In 2021, Belen moved just a few hours away to Orlando, Florida where anticipating being engulfed by a lifestyle of theme parks and hyper-consumerism. Instead, Belen found a thriving and welcoming community of small local businesses and organic farms. Volunteering with a local organization to plant garden beds in a food desert, Belen felt my hope for a future where caring about others and the earth was the priority restored and dedicated free time to studying topics like food sovereignty and permaculture as well as skills like worm composting and food preservation. Belen knows they have only scratched the surface and is eager to learn much more from peers and the land over the next few months.
Marion Madanguit
After graduating from engineering school, Marion spent a year traveling to learn from other people working in community to address the intersecting crises our world faces. During that time, she learned about efforts in Cambodia, Thailand, and the Philippines to protect local livelihoods, restore natural ecosystems, and create alternatives to capitalist consumption. She felt most inspired by her time at Pun Pun Organic Farm, where she learned about and practiced organic farming, seed saving, and simple living. Marion considers local and organic agriculture to be a direct movement towards building a socially and environmentally just future, and she hopes to use her time as a fellow to reconnect with the land and its fruits and learn how to live in reciprocity.
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.
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.
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.
Food Systems Fellows
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.