Staff
Caesare` Assad, Director of Food Programs & Head Chef
Chef Caesare Assad is a native of Oklahoma. She has a romanticized affinity for nature and is often found tasting things that ‘look’ edible. Her concentration deficiency and overactive imagination are balanced by a commitment to running, biking, and overall exertion. Caesare’s culinary interest peaked early, as the 1989 Watermelon Seed Spittin’ World Champion. Her parents are also great home cooks and made dinner a nightly experience. As a collegiate student of painting and philosophy, she began drawing inspiration by experimenting with the culinary medium. Like a bull in the china cabinet, she worked her way up the culinary ladder, eventually stumbling upon her dear friend and mentor, Native American Chef Loretta Barrett Oden. “Loretta gave me a direction, taught me about wines and other libations, indigenous foods, sustainability and biodiversity.” Caesare’s scope of experience is vast, as she has endeavored to explore as much of this great art form as possible. She seeks to bring people into harmony with one another and nature through healthful and diverse ingredients. Most recently, Caesare has spent time working in restaurant development and consulting in Cape Cod. Her continual thirst for challenges and artistic freedom landed her in DC at Vegetate Restaurant as Executive chef, from which she is currently taking a sabbatical to reconnect with the bounty of the land and people at Whole Communities.
Email: caesare (at) wholecommunities (dot) org
Adrian Ayson, Director of Operations
Adrian has been a leader in environmental education for over twenty-five years. Before joining Center for Whole Communities, he served as Director of Education at the Massachusetts Audubon Society and at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science. In those capacities he guided the over-all educational strategy, long range planning, and vision for nature centers, and school, family and adult programs. After beginning his career as Program Director for New York City’s Urban Park Rangers, he went on to work with many environmental organizations large and small. As an environmental education and interpretive planning consultant, Adrian developed master interpretive plans and curriculum materials for museums, nature centers and botanical gardens. Over the years Adrian has served as President of the New England Environmental Education Alliance, and President of the Massachusetts Environmental Education Society, and was a long-time editor of the New England Journal of Environmental Education.
Email: adrian (at) wholecommunities (dot) org
Maria Echevarria, Director of Educational Programs
Maria grew up in and around NYC and has had the good fortune of traveling and living in many wonderful places including Argentina, South Korea, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, France and California before settling down in lovely rural Vermont. Maria’s parents are from Argentina, where her father and extended family now live and this probably contributed greatly to her love and fascination with languages and all things international. Her professional life has been eclectic but always encompassed some form of intercultural work. Maria has also always had a strong interest in social and environmental sustainability and is so grateful to have found an organization that embraces both. She loves animals but unfortunately most furry ones make her sneeze. Maria lives with her partner, and loves reading, yoga, riding her bike, spending time outdoors and trying to simplify her life. She also loves traveling but recognizes that it is not always terribly sustainable, or simple for that matter! Maria hopes to become a decent knitter one day.
Email: maria (at) wholecommunities (dot) org
Julie Erickson, Intern
Julie has long been captivated by the relationship between people and the natural world, and particularly the challenges of conservation in other parts of the world. She is a recent graduate of Middlebury College with a degree in Environmental Studies-Conservation Biology and hails from a small town called Colrain, just over the Vermont border in Western Massachusetts. As an undergrad, Julie helped study aquatic weevils as a biological control for the invasive aquatic plant Eurasian Watermilfoil, became a passionate and educated climate activist, interned through the Nature Conservancy in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, and spent a semester abroad studying coastal ecology in the Zanzibar Archipelago of Tanzania. Despite her love of traveling and learning about different people, cultures and places (and how they are connected), she values and understands the importance of being rooted in - and to some degree sustained by - a local community. She is therefore very excited to be living and working in the Mad River Valley for the summer and fall of 2008. She thinks it is very important to learn and experience first hand the most fundamental and intimate human work of growing food and building/maintaining the physical structures that allow us to live the complex lives we do. She is also greatly enthused by the work of the Center for Whole Communities and feels honored to be able to meet all the incredible people that visit Knoll Farm. Julie enjoys identifying birds by their calls and trees by their leaves or buds. She is also a bit of a closet computer nerd who enjoys playing with data, especially using geographic information systems. She loves hiking, biking, nordic skiing, pickup soccer, and most other outdoor activities.
Email: julie (at) wholecommunities (dot) org
Peter Forbes, Co-Founder and Executive Director
Peter Forbes is a writer, photographer, farmer and conservationist. A student of the relationship between land and people, he’s worked throughout the world to record and protect our human relationships with the land. Peter's life-long pursuit is to be a witness and storyteller of the bond between people and the land, and to translate what he has learned into a new form of leadership. Peter is recognized across North America for building bridges between sectors, coalitions and organizations and for nurturing a new land movement integrating land health, social justice, and human spirit.
Peter co-founded Center for Whole Communities after eighteen years leading conservation projects for the Trust for Public Land. Peter helped to protect threatened portions of Thoreau's Walden Woods; he launched a program to protect and revitalize urban gardens and farms across New England; he helped to add 20,000 acres of wild lands to New Hampshire's White Mountain National Forest, and he created the Good Life Center in Harborside, Maine, to promote the life ways of renowned land and social activists Helen and Scott Nearing. Through the success of more than one hundred conservation projects, Peter earned a national reputation as being a champion of a new brand of community-based conservation where the health of the people and the health of the land are viewed as equal.
In 1998, Peter became TPL's first national fellow and devoted himself to researching and writing about how individual and community relationships with the land can become the seeds for broader social change. In 2001, Peter founded the Center for Land and People, a program of the Trust for Public Land, to help re-define the success of the conservation movement as a force in creating a more tolerant and joyful human culture.
His photography and essays have appeared in many books and he has given hundreds of keynote addresses around the country. Others have written of Peter's thinking and storytelling that he is "a national treasure whose groundbreaking work is a stunning reminder of why land conservation is still so important." He is the editor of Our Land, Ourselves: Readings on People and Place and he is the author of The Great Remembering: Further Thoughts on Land, Soul and Society (TPL/Chelsea Green, 2001). His essays have also appeared in Coming to Land in a Troubled World (Center for Land and People/Chelsea Green) His photographs of homesteader and social activist, Bill Coperthwaite, are published in "A Handmade Life", which won first prize in 2003 from the Independent Bookseller's Association for most inspiring story.
Peter was honored in 1998 as the "Environmental Friend of New England," the highest award given to an individual by the Environmental Federation of New England, a coalition of 38 environmental groups. In 2005, Peter received the inaugural Land and People Award from Trust for Public Land. Peter has served on the board of directors of many organizations, including the Center for New American Dream, Vallecitos Mountain Refuge, and the Good Life Center. He lives and farms with his wife and two daughters in the Mad River Valley of Vermont.
Email: peter (at) wholecommunities (dot) org
Cordelia Hall, Intern
Cordelia Hall sprang forth from the golden hills of the Finger Lakes in Western New York. She grew up at the Rochester Folk Art Guild, an intentional community supported by organic agriculture and folk crafts. She attended Boston University and studied International Relations and Environmental Science while working on organic agriculture initiatives and teaching pre-school in a Boston public school. Her land- and community- based upbringing inspired her to leave Boston to travel the world in search of other ways people live in harmony with the earth and each other. She studied abroad through the International Honors Program "Rethinking Globalization," travelling to England, Tanzania, India, New Zealand and Mexico and has worked on organic farms in the United States. She has an obsession with learning new skills, making the internship at Whole Communities the perfect spot for her, where she is currently learning new things at the rate of a small child. She also loves to bake bread, learn old-fashioned methods of housekeeping and farming, and sing folk songs any old time. Her life goals are to always live in an interdependent community, sing every day and someday learn to play the banjo.
Email: cordelia (at) wholecommunities (dot) org
Debbie Krug, Assistant Chef
Debbie Krug is a recent environmental studies graduate of the University of Vermont, and joins us in the kitchen helping in the creation of fancy local feasts. A native of the Northeast, she has spent her life learning the ways of the forest and natural ecology through writing, painting, and wandering. An advocate and an ally for the marginalized, Debbie comes to us in the spirit of activism and directs her passion towards bringing local organic Vermont food to the table and empowering everyone to take responsibility for what they put into their bodies. She has been known to threaten ‘picking up and becoming a local foods chef’, and now she has gone and done it. Most recently, Debbie has cultivated her connection with place by hiking Vermont’s Long Trail, and become more of a global citizen by studying sustainable living, spirituality and Ayurvedic cooking in an ecovillage in Auroville, India. She draws inspiration from her supportive community of family and friends, and her awe of the natural world and our place in it.
Email: debbie (at) wholecommunities (dot) org
Libby McDonald, Program Coordinator
Libby is responsible for the logistics of the programs at Center for Whole Communities. Before coming to Center for Whole Communities, Libby did an internship at The Murie Center in Moose, Wyoming. Originally from Michigan, she graduated from the University of Vermont in December 2005 with a degree in environmental science. During her time in college, she studied natural and cultural history abroad in Ecuador and British Columbia.
Email: libby (at) wholecommunities (dot) org
Meghan McGeary, Director of Development
Meghan comes from Pennsylvania and has a degree in Philosophy and minored in Anthropology and Poetry. Her fundraising career started in 2000 as a TeleFund caller at her alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh. She went on to work at Pitt in various development positions, from managing the phone campaign, to running the direct mail and faculty and staff campaigns, and finally managing annual leadership giving, including personal solicitation up to $100,000 and creating Pitt's first-ever young alumni giving society. Having grown up in Philadelphia and spending 9 years in Pittsburgh, she decided to leave the city for a more mountainous region. That brought her to Plymouth State University where she headed up the annual giving program. During her time in New Hampshire, she often visited Vermont and fell in love with the state and moved here not long after. She found a way to further connect with the land and the community when she accepted the Director of Development position at the Vermont Land Trust. From there, she joined Center for Whole Communities. When not at work, Meghan spends time hiking with her chocolate lab, throwing pottery, organic gardening, foraging for wild edibles, learning about herbal medicines, stretching and relaxing through yoga, reading, traveling, and has recently taken interest in metal forging and rustic furniture building.
Email: meghan (at) wholecommunities (dot) org
Kevin McMillion, Office Manager
Growing up I lived in several places around the country, including Maryland, North Carolina, Hawaii and Maine before falling in love with Vermont in 1996. Growing up in a variety of places with stunning natural beauty, I’ve always had a love for nature, water and rugged landscapes.
After graduating from the University of New England, I spent several years guiding whitewater rafting trips in Northern Maine, living in a tent for five months of the year, spending hundreds of hours on the river guiding trips and fly fishing. I started coming to Vermont during the winter months in 1995 and moved here for good in 1997.
I enjoy working for small grassroots companies, making an effort to support healthy lifestyles. I love life in Vermont, truly appreciating what each season has to offer. I live in Waitsfield with my wife and two daughters.
Email: kevin (at) wholecommunities (dot) org
Taz Squire, Land Steward and General Contractor
Taz Squire is a...carpenter, carver, car and bike mechanic, welder, photographer, advocate for social and racial justice, race car aficionado, cyclist, skier, climber...a good old-fashioned Renaissance Man. And did we mention he has a soft spot for classic Austin Mini wagons and dingo dogs? He's one of those rare people who can fix most anything, build most anything, bike or ski most anything, and is simultaneously always on the lookout for new interests and challenges.
Taz loves working with his hands, close to the land and community. As a child growing up in Maine, he worked with is father and formed the foundation for the building and machinery skills he possesses today. He spent many years off the grid in Downeast Maine with a mentor, Bill Coperthwaite (above-mentioned social activist, educator, and author of “A Handmade Life”).
Bill forged his own path on his own land, creating a life and lifestyle based on simplicity and self-reliance, always grounded in the majesty and utility of that which is made by one’s own hands. With Bill, Taz acquired skills in experiential education, yurt building, hand tool use, carving, trail building, and an understanding of and reverence for the land. Taz has also been a student in more traditional educational settings at the University of Maine, Machias and Naropa University, Boulder, where he focused on Peace Studies.
Over time, Taz has worked as a carpenter, snow maker, cook, goldsmith, timber framer, park ranger, and bike mechanic. For many years, he spent falls and springs at the Mountain Institute, and summers at Farm & Wilderness, doing carpentry, maintenance, and program delivered experientially. He eventually committed full-time to Farm & Wilderness as Physical Plant Manager and one of the five COOs. He remained there for 15 years.
Taz has been involved with Center for Whole Communities since its inception, by taking part in the initial visioning process for its future direction. He is excited to now be an active and present participant in the work of Knoll Farm and Whole Communities.
Email: taz (at) wholecommunities (dot) org
Laura Sackton, Intern
Laura Olive Sackton is a writer, gardener and a lover of all things food. Her passion for the land has shaped her life from an early age, and she rejoices in living, eating and working with the flow of the seasons. As a writer, she strives to express her wonder and love of the natural word, and through words, to share with others the lessons she has learned from digging carrots and working in the rain.
She grew up outside Boston, but fell in love with Vermont at the same time she fell in love with farming, when she attended The Mountain School in Vershire. Since then, she’s never been comfortable in a formal educational setting. Though she learned a great deal from her time at Oberlin and Sterling College, her true education has been the many hours she has spent on the land – weeding and planting on a small, organic CSA in Weston, MA; studying folk art in the hills of North Carolina; harvesting sugarcane in Ghana; and rambling alone in the woods of New Hampshire.
She is thrilled to be back in Vermont, and while at the Center for Whole Communities, she hopes to continue her practical education in homesteading and farming, as well as come to know the place as deeply as she can. When she isn’t working, she can be found scribbling in her journal, baking bread and making pie, swimming in all weather, singing folk songs and hiking the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont.
Email: laura (at) wholecommunities (dot) org
Helen Whybrow, Co-Founder and Director of Publications
Helen Whybrow is the co-founder of Center for Whole Communities and directs the Center’s publishing program and communications. Before moving to Knoll Farm, Helen worked as a developmental editor for W. W. Norton and was for six years the publisher of an imprint of books on natural history, travel and New England called Countryman Press. Over the years she has edited hundreds of books related to land and people, including titles by Eric Freyfogle, Tom Wessels, Helen Nearing, Eliot Coleman, and many others.
Helen also hires and manages our incredible retreat staff each summer, runs our farm internship program, and takes care of the food production gardens. She co-hosts many of our retreats and teaches the farming and gardening aspects of the curriculum. A student of permaculture, organic agriculture, and holistic management, Helen works to bring these disciplines into the way we farm and live on the land at Knoll Farm and the way we teach and model for those who come here. Her interest is in continually exploring how our intersection with the land can be more profound, meaningful and healthy; and how our practices of living on the land can provide nourishment while building biodiversity and fertility.
Helen is on the board of NOFA-VT (Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont) and is a co-founder of the Vermont localvore project which promotes local, sustainable food production.
Email: helen (at) wholecommunities (dot) org