Faculty
We are very proud of our faculty, which is comprised of some of the nation’s best writers, educators, provacateurs and meditation teachers. Each retreat is led by one host, one meditation teacher and at least one person playing the role of “yeast” — someone who helps the group to rise by synthesizing, provoking, and providing insight.
Adrienne Maree Brown
Adrienne Maree Brown is the Executive Director of the Ruckus Society. She also serves on the boards of Wiretapmag.org, the Brower Center, the Allied Media Conference, and National Healthcare-NOW. Also known as a co-founder of the League of Young/Pissed Off Voters, Adrienne was co-editor of the youth organizing collection How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. As a writer, singer, and organizer, Adrienne has been involved in the growth of many organizations, most recently the New Orleans Network, the Future 5000, and the Arctic Indigenous Alliance. She believes actions speak louder than words, she's trying to live that way.
Mohamed A. Chakaki
Mohamad A. Chakaki grew up playing and learning in the sand and surf on both sides of the Arabian Peninsula, and then on the edges of eastern forests and city streets in and around Washington, D.C. His interests lie where the lines blur between East/West, city/nature, art/science, theory/practice, and so on...
As a PhD student at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT, Mohamad’s research explores the connections and disconnections across campus planning and curriculum design in the new campuses being developed as partnerships between American universities and host countries in the Arab Middle East. Mohamad holds a Masters of Environmental Management with a focus on Urban Ecology and Environmental Design from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and undergraduate degrees in Religion and Biological Sciences from The George Washington University. Mohamad’s passion for nature and for people led him to several years of professional training (and personal development) in parks and gardens across the US, with the Peace Corps in Central Africa, and with the United Nations in Syria. Before starting at MIT, Mohamad spent three years consulting on environment and community development projects in both the US and the Middle East. Mohamad was a co-founder of DC Green Muslims and is a Senior Fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program.
Anushka Fernandopulle
Anushka Fernandopulle lives in San Francisco and has been involved in movements for social justice throughout her life. Anushka has practiced
meditation in the Theravada Buddhist tradition for over 18 years in the US, Sri Lanka, and India and teaches at various dharma centers around the United
States. She also works as an organizational development consultant; her work in this area is informed by a B.A. in social anthropology/comparative
religions from Harvard University and an M.B.A. from the Yale School of Management. Anushka enjoys hiking, music, creative arts, and local politics.
Carolyn Finney
As a professor at University of California, Berkeley, Carolyn Finney explores how difference, identity, representation, and power play a significant role in determining how people negotiate their daily lives in relation to the environment. Although Carolyn pursed an acting career for eleven years, a backpacking trip around the world and living in Nepal changed the course of her life. Motivated by these experiences, she returned to school after a 15-year absence to complete a B.A., and M.A. in international development. She recently completed her Ph.D. in geography at Clark University in Massachusetts and is a Canon National Parks Science Scholarship recipient. Working with other individuals, community groups, and environmental organizations, her research seeks to broaden our understanding of African Americans and the environment. As a Fulbright fellow, she has also researched the impacts of tourism and modernization on Nepalese women and the environment. In 2005/06, she was a Newhouse/Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Wellesley College in Massachusetts in Environmental Studies and Humanities.
She was particularly honored to serve as a commissioner on the Second Century National Parks Commission this past year along with Sandra Day O’Connor, Sylvia Earle, John Fahey of National Geographic Magazine and other distinguished individuals. She has recently been chosen by Secretary Salazar to continue that work on the National Parks Advisory Board. Carolyn’s first book manuscript, Black Faces, White Spaces: African Americans and the Great Outdoors, is presently under review.
Peter Forbes
Steven Glazer
Steven lives with his wife and two daughters in Thetford Center, Vermont. Director of the award-winning Valley Quest program, he is the editor of “Valley Quest: 89 Treasure Hunts in the Upper Valley” and “Valley Quest II: 75 More Treasure Hunts in the Upper Valley”; the co-author of “Questing: a Guide to Creating Community Treasure Hunts”; and author of “The Heart of Learning: Spirituality in Education”. Steven received his MA from the University of Chicago in 1986, and has worked with Valley Quest since 1999, helping more than 100 school and community groups study and share their natural and cultural treasures. Prior to joining Valley Quest, he spent seven years at The Naropa Institute, where he co-founded Naropa’s School of Continuing Education and co-directed Naropa’s landmark Spirituality in Education Conference (1997).
Toby Herzlich
Toby is a facilitator and trainer with a background in community development, organizational excellence, conflict resolution, and participatory strategic planning. Her work focuses on developing leadership within progressive nonprofits, supporting values-based planning in grassroots organizations, and cultivating visionary leadership among women and young adults. With a practice aimed toward the diverse needs of multicultural groups, Toby's participatory methods emphasize dialogue and collaborative problem-solving, fostering collective intelligence toward sustainable solutions. Toby is a co-designer and trainer of "Cultivating Women's Leadership," a program for women working toward social change and environmental sustainability, and has worked in war-torn areas of the Middle East and the Balkans to create networks of emerging women leaders. Based in Santa Fe, her clients include not-for-profit organizations in the Southwest as well as national and international organizations, environmental consensus-building groups, arts organizations and public arts agencies, foundations, and city, state and federal policy-makers. Toby is a Senior Trainer with the Rockwood Leadership Program. She chairs the board of the Ocamora Retreat Center and is on the faculty of the Academy for the Love of Learning, both in New Mexico, and is also on the faculty of the Center for Whole Communities in Vermont. Recent clients include UNESCO's Creative Cities Alliance, Bioneers, the Wilderness Society, and CODEPink Women for Peace. Toby is an avid gardener and telemark skier, and loves to take in the views from high mountaintops.
Wendy Johnson
Wendy Johnson has lived and practiced Zen and organic horticulture at Green Gulch Farm for more than 30 years. A lay-ordained dharma teacher in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, Wendy is the author of the book Gardening at the Dragon's Gate (Bantam Press). A passionate environmental activist, Wendy has been involved in ancient forest protection, restoration ecology work, and the establishment and protection of numerous public organic gardens in the Bay Area. Wendy has taught many retreats including Mission Retreats for the Trust for Public Land. Wendy is a wife and mother of two children.
Cynthia Jurs
Cynthia Jurs has practiced in the Tibetan Vajrayana and Zen Buddhist traditions for 25 years and in 1994 received dharma transmission from Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh to teach Engaged Buddhism. She directs the Open Way Sangha in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which draws from all schools of Buddhism as well as other wisdom traditions to teach an approach to living in awareness in relationship to the Earth through dedicated practice, ceremony, retreat and pilgrimage. Since 1990 Cynthia has been facilitating a Tibetan practice to bring healing and protection to the Earth by filling and burying Earth Treasure Vases in places of need around the world. Her husband, Dr. Hugh Wheir, founded an organization she also helps direct called Animal Alliance, which is dedicated to addressing the imbalance between under-populations of endangered species and over-populations of domestic animals and wildlife and restoring harmony to the inter-dependent relationship between humans, animals and our shared environment with current projects on Indian Pueblos in Northern New Mexico, in Mexico and South Africa. Originally from Northern California, Cynthia has lived in New Mexico since 1987 and grows flowers and fruit and vegetables on 7 acequia-fed acres at the base of the Sangre de Christos.
Stephanie Kaza
Stephanie is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont, where she teaches religion and ecology, Buddhism and ecology, environmental justice, ecofeminism, and unlearning consumerism. She is a long-time practitioner of Soto Zen Buddhism, affiliated with Green Gulch Zen Center, California; she has also studied with Thich Nhat Hanh and Joanna Macy. Stephanie is the author of The Attentive Heart: Conversations with Trees, meditative essays on deep ecological relations with trees, and co-editor (with Kenneth Kraft) of Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, classic and modern texts supporting a Buddhist approach to environmental activism. She is also vice-president of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies and a member of the International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter group and serves on the board for the Center for Respect for Life and the Environment. In 2002 she received the Kroeps-Maurisch teaching award for excellence at the University of Vermont.
Matt Kolan
Matt finds his home at the edge of a Limestone Bluff Cedar-Pine Forest on the eastern shores of Lake Champlain. An avid naturalist and educator, Matt spends much of his time designing educational experiences that attempt to reconnect and realign human patterns with natural rhythms and cycles. As an adjunct faculty member at the University of Vermont, Matt teaches natural history, traditional skills, and environmental problem-solving. As a staff member for the PLACE (Place-based Analysis and Community Education) Program, he works with communities to rediscover and tell the stories of their town from deep time to present. Matt also works as an educational and ecological consultant for a variety of organizations and is currently combining his passion for ecology and education in an interdisciplinary PhD program where he is hoping to better understand the best practices and principles that guide design of educational systems toward healthy, sustainable, whole communities.
Melissa Nelson
Melissa Nelson, Ph.D. is a cultural ecologist, writer, educator, researcher, and indigenous rights activist. Since 2002, Melissa has been an assistant professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. For the past twelve years she has served as the executive director of The Cultural Conservancy (TCC), a twenty-year old native non-profit organization based in San Francisco. Before SFSU, Melissa taught ecological psychology and environmental justice courses at the California Institute of Integral Studies and served as editor for the Ecopsychology Newsletter. Melissa received her Ph.D. in cultural ecology with a designated emphasis in Native American Studies from the University of California, Davis. Her teaching, research, and community activism is dedicated to decolonization and cultural recovery, environmental protection and restoration, and the revitalization and celebration of community health and cultural arts. She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Tribe.
Kavitha Rao
Kavitha Rao is the co-founder of Common Fire which seeks to build a diverse and powerful movement of people with a shared commitment of creating a more just and sustainable world, starting with themselves. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the largest and oldest interfaith nonviolence organization in the world, and is the lead facilitator for FOR's Nonviolent Youth Collective, leading workshops and week-long anti-oppression and nonviolence trainings for young adults. Kavitha is a yoga teacher thrilled to share with others this practice that has fueled and sustained her own activism, helping her to ground her work from a place of love and creative action rather than merely anger and reaction. She has worked with grassroots organizations around the world and is humbled by the immense commitment and vision she has witnessed from people unwilling to accept that the violence, injustice, and poverty that may surround them is the only way things have to be.
Enrique Salmón
Enrique Salmón (pronounced sahl-mohn), is a Raramuri (Tarahumara). He has dedicated his studies and work to Ethnoecology and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in order to better understand his own and other cultural perceptions of landscapes, philosophy, and place. Enrique has a B.S. from Western New Mexico University, an MAT in Southwestern Studies from Colorado College, and a PhD. in anthropology from Arizona State University, where he studied how the bio-region of the Raramuri people of the Sierra Madres of Chihuahua, Mexico influences their language and thought. Enrique has published several articles on indigenous ethnobotany and traditional knowledge. A former program officer for the Greater Southwest and Northern Mexico regions for the Christensen Fund, Enrique is now the Director of American Indian Studies Program, Department of Ethnic Studies, Cal State University. He is also an accomplished bassist playing Jazz, Latin Beat, and Avant Garde Freestyle sounds.
Santikaro
Santikaro is the founder and lead teacher at Liberation Park, an educational center near Chicago that serves those interested in Buddha-Dhamma. Liberation Park seeks to cooperate with all those dedicated to a peaceful & just society grounded in contemplative & spiritual practice near Chicago. Santikaro came to this work from extensive experience living and training in Thailand, which began when he served in the Peace Corps for over four years. From 1985-2003, he trained as a Buddhist monk, living at Suan Mokkh Monastery in Southern Thailand for 15 years. He was abbot of Suan Atammayatarama and translated and edited Mindfulness with Breathing and Heartwood of the Bodhi Tree.
Deborah Schoenbaum
Deborah is Senior Director of Programs and Development at the Social Venture Network (SVN). SVN is a nonprofit association of over 500 socially responsible CEOs, investors, and nonprofit leaders committed to building a just and sustainable planet. SVN members have turned their values into action, and, in the process, changed the way the world does business. Deborah is responsible for maintaining and improving the quality of member services, events and communication, while expanding the current network of members and increasing diversity (gender, age, race, ethnicity, and business sector). In former management positions at the Conservation Corps North Bay, the Nature Conservancy, and the Trust for Public Land, Deborah has spent the last 10 years working for organizations that align directly with her personal values: environmental protection, social equity, public policy and education, environmental justice and youth development. This has afforded her with not only the opportunity to commit fully to her work, but to represent on these issues with heartfelt passion. In addition to her work, Deborah has always engaged in community advocacy and political activities. Since 2008, she has served on the Board of Directors for the Urban Creeks Counsel which works to educate citizens and agencies about creeks, and advocates for creek protection through public process via its Creeks in Communities program. She has been a member of the Center for Whole Communities’ faculty since 2003. Deborah lives in Novato, California with her husband, Mark and two daughters, Elizabeth and Sarah.
Mistinguette Smith
Mistinguette Smith grew up in the shadow of steel mills in Cleveland, Ohio, where her working-class grandparents taught her to grow food in small corners of land. Since 2002, she has worked to reconnect people and food in right relationship. At the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts she developed Target: Hunger, a program to address the root causes of hunger in urban and rural communities, and served on the Holyoke Food Policy Council. She is an award winning community organizer who uses house parties, writing groups, online communities and community theater to reveal unsuspected connections between disparate people and groups. With formal training as both a poet and an administrator, Mistinguette works as a management consultant, designing programs that can measure their effectiveness for economic justice, food security, and community wellness organizations. Holding conflict and contradiction with ease, she lately calls both rural Massachusetts and South Harlem home.
Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees
Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees is a Maka Wicasa (earth person) guided by the Mystery, the Earth and the creative impulse. Her work has been built upon her relationship with the earth and with her training with elders from her own African, Native American and European heritages. Her work with individuals and groups has been fed by her relationship with the high desert of Arizona and New Mexico, where she has spent much of the last 17 years. She has developed Seven Directions Practice, an Earth-centered spiritual technology that enlivens and enhances our connection to Earth wisdom traditions, over the past 30 years with the support and help of many indigenous elders. She has carried the practice to prisons in both the U.S. and New Zealand, to universities and health care facilities, and to the Christchurch City Council and Department of the Environment, in New Zealand, to help them deal with Maori culture issues and the negotiations of the Treaty of Waitangi. She founded The Center for Seven Directions Practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico for its continued development and support of the community of practitioners. She has held Scholar in Residence positions at Miami University in Ohio and the Cleveland Institute of Art, where she focused on the validity and use of indigenous wisdom in academic curriculum and organization. Her long relationship with New Zealand and the Maori people began when she was sponsored there by Pu Hau Rangi Trust, a Maori ethno-botanical trust, as a recipient of the Lila Wallace International Artist Award. She is currently living in California and learning to read a new kind of sky.
Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey
Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey is an artist, friend, brother, son and uncle holding it down in his home town of Holyoke, MA. He is a program consultant for stone circles, an organization committed to sustaining activists and strengthening the work for justice through spiritual practice and principles. With the notion that complete embodiment of his ideals lies somewhere in the dance between relentless struggle and "inspired laziness," he tries to keep it breezy and help himself and others fall into alignment with a revolutionary Way of being. Jesse is a board member of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, a war-tax resister, and a man who loves sitting around [which some folks call meditation].
Tom Wessels
Tom Wessels is a professor of ecology at Antioch University New England where he was the founding director of the masters degree program in Conservation Biology. Tom considers himself a generalist with interests in forest, desert, and alpine ecosystems and the interface of culture and landscape. He is former chair of the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation which fosters environmental leadership through graduate fellowships and organizational grants. Tom is an ecological consultant to the Rain Forest Alliance's SmartWood Green Certification program where he helped draft green certification assessment guidelines for forest operations in the northeastern states and adjacent Canada. His books include: Reading the Forested Landscape, The Granite Landscape, Untamed Vermont, and The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future.
Helen Whybrow - Host
Larry Yang
Larry Yang, MFA, MSW, LCSW, teaches meditation retreats nationally and has a deep interest in creating access to teachings of spiritual liberation for diverse multicultural communities. Larry has practiced the Buddha-dharma extensively in the US, Burma, and Thailand, with a six month period of ordination as a Buddhist monk under the guidance of meditation master Ajahn Tong. He is a core teacher and leader of the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, CA. Larry’s article, “Directing the Mind Towards Practices in Diversity” was included in Friends on the Path: Living Spiritual Communities, by Thich Nhat Hanh. He is a co-editor of Making the Invisible Visible: Healing Racism in Our Buddhist Communities, developed for building inclusive, multicultural communities within spiritual practice. Larry has contributed to the groundbreaking anthology, Dharma, Color, and Culture—a volume that provides the perspectives from practitioners of color across the entire spectrum of Buddhist traditions.
Born to and raised by immigrant parents from Shanghai, Larry has explored culture, race, gender, orientation, and the experiences of difference and commonality for most of his life. He maintains a strong commitment to himself to be guided by his curiosity, regardless of the cultural complexities that arise. He has been a National Park Ranger in the desert southwest and northern California, a trained forest fire fighter, an award-winning graphic designer represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a psychotherapist specializing in clinical work across different cultures.
Our work has been deepened by many teachers and facilitators over the years, and we have been honored to have them serve on our faculty and contribute to our learning. We are deeply grateful to them.
Marge Bruchac
Scott Chaskey
Roberto Chené
Johari Cole
Mark Coleman
Mike Connelly
Gloria Flora
John Francis
Bill McKibben
Curt Meine
Carolyn Raffensperger
Scott Russell Sanders
Doreen Schweizer