Based in Reno, NV, Neil Bertrando manages a 1.3 acre homestead with his wife Katie and the help of many in the community. His passion is enriching bioregions by building community and broadening the local genetic resources of practical plants and animals to relocalize resource supply networks. He strives for collaboration in his work and runs RT Permaculture, a Permaculture consulting, design, and education business. In his teaching and design he applies Keyline Design, Permaculture and Holistic Management as interconnected systems approaches to managing the complexities of ecosystems. While he lives in a temperate arid climate, over the past 12 years, he has gained experience working in wide range of climate and cultural contexts such as Hawaii, Haiti, Minnesota, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, and California. He has an MS in Environmental Science from University of Nevada, Reno, where his research focused on effects of the urban corridor on stream health and regional nutrient cycling. In design and development he has worked properties from 1/10th of an acre to 100+ acres.

Loren Luyendyk is a Certified Teacher of Permaculture, with over 15 years of practical experience in Permaculture Design, ecological farming, sustainability, and horticulture. He has a degree in Botany from UC Santa Barbara, and is a Certified Arborist and Master Gardener. He has experience with Keyline Design, Holistic Management, Natural Building, Biodynamic Farming, and The Soil Foodweb. His teaching has taken him across the globe, where he has spent extensive amounts of time sharing and learning with local cultures. Loren has taught permaculture in the USA, Central America, New Zealand, and Australia. He is the owner of Santa Barbara Organics, a permaculture design and land management business through which he designs and installs permaculture systems for residential and farm lands. Loren also started the Global Permaculture Design Group  with the goal of increasing the visibility and professionalism of permaculture globally. He is the founder of the non-profit organization Surfers Without Borders, which promotes practical solutions to ocean pollution through sustainable design. Loren is inspired by Nature. To regenerate the earth while providing our needs is his goal, while creating community around it.

Jeremiah is a certified Permaculture Designer and is an accredited and certified Rainwater Catchment Professional through ARCSA (American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association). He has taught and consulted on several projects in the USA, Africa, Central America and Asia. Prior to establishing San Isidro Permaculture, Jeremiah was a partner at Living Structures, Inc., a permaculture-based design/installation green building firm in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Established in 2000, San Isidro Permaculture is a design and installation company focused on water catchment, grey water systems, native and edible plant landscapes, erosion control, and land restoration. San Isidro Permaculture has served Santa Fe and the surrounding area working for the private sector, federal and local governments, the film industry, and commercial projects.

Director of Organizational Resilience

Chris co-leads Sustainable Economies Law Center’s Housing, Commons Governance, and Money & Finance Programs, and coordinates SELC’s grant writing, grassroots fundraising, and internal governance. He is particularly focused on participatory and polycentric governance structures for more just and resilient economies. He practices Aikido, is committed to racial justice, and once traveled from Japan to West Africa by land and sea.

Carmen is a Permaculture Designer and Environmental Scientist who has been  dedicated to protecting water, land and people through her work for the past 16 years.

Carmen has always walked in two worlds. Carmen grew up on the Navajo Reservation in Northern Arizona and in the urban jungle of Southern California.  Her work has focused on water and air quality programs for Tribal nations in Northern Nevada and California. Always an “edge walker,” she has been working to find the balance between good science, traditional knowledge, personal healing and cultural evolution. As a water quality scientist, she has been working to shift the community consciousness about the critical importance of watershed protection in these critical times. Carmen focuses on raising awareness about the power of working in collaboration with the cycles of nature, rather than against them. Her focus is on sharing vital information about water retention landscaping and wise design strategies with tribes, land planners, and scientists. She is driven by the vision of supporting the work of revitalization of Native communities through building relationships that nourish land and life for the benefit of all beings.

Will Wiltschko is a graduate of UCLA with a B.A. and an M.A. in Political Science. At UCLA, Will worked as a student organizer for civil rights and studied the theory and philosophy behind nonviolence. He was a legal intern with the ACLU in Southern California, where he planned community outreach strategy within the state of California, fighting school districts in response to D.J. v. State of California on issues of equitable access to English Learner programs. Will was also recently a staffer on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Presidential campaign, where he was the lead field organizer in Southwest Virginia. He ran operations out of the Southwest Virginia regional field office, where he trained and recruited hundreds of new volunteers.

Bob Randall, Ph.D. was the founding Executive Director of Urban Harvest, Inc. in Houston, TX. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Permaculture Institute of North America (PINA). His Southeast Texas food gardening book is in its 12 edition. He has been teaching about growing fruits for 30 years and has chaired an annual fruit tree sale that raised $160,000 in five hours.

Arthur Deice is the owner of Environmental Pollution Solutions based in Sonoma County, provider of water quality services, pollution prevention services and other environmental services to industrial, commercial, construction and agriculture sectors including the cannabis industry.

Hank Herrera is President & CEO of the Center for Popular Research, Education & Policy (C-PREP), a non-profit community based organization. C-PREP serves vulnerable communities with participatory action research, training, technical assistance and policy. His work specifically focuses on food justice and building community resilience. He recently formed New Hope Farms, a network of small farms linked to a network of small corner stores selling only healthy food, using a cooperative model of ownership. The purpose of this project is to grow and sell healthy, affordable local food; to create sustainable, living wage jobs for community residents; and to develop the social, community and economic benefits of a local food enterprise network.

Hank co-founded Dig Deep Farms & Produce, a project of the Alameda County Deputy Sheriffs Activities League that he also managed. He participates in action research for the Food Dignity Project, a five-year study of how five communities in the US build sustainable community food systems to reduce food insecurity, funded by the Agriculture Food and Research Initiative of the USDA. Hank is a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and a Kellogg National Fellow. He practiced psychiatry long enough. He plays the alto saxophone; writes poetry and makes photographs. He lives in Oakland, California, where he enjoys biking and walking along San Francisco Bay at Cesar Chavez Park.

Ana-Marie Jones is the Executive Director of CARD – Collaborating Agencies Responding to Disasters, a nonprofit located in Alameda County, California. Created by local community agencies after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, CARD trains and supports nonprofits and their special needs clients in disaster preparedness, response and recovery activities. In her tenure, she has re-written and redefined CARD’s services and curriculum to be based on community building, economic empowerment and leadership development philosophies.

Before joining CARD in April 2000, for three years Ms. Jones worked for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services Coastal Region on projects supporting community organizations and people with special needs. She was also the acting Executive Director of the Northern California Disaster Preparedness Network, a 5-year funding initiative dedicated to creating emergency preparedness and response resources for vulnerable and underserved communities.

Ms. Jones has served on several emergency preparedness, and response planning programs and committees, including the Alameda County Bio-terrorism Planning Project, the Alameda County Operational Area Council, and the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) Working Group for Alameda County. She is Co-chair of the Nonprofit Roundtable for the Oakland Chamber of Commerce and is a strong supporter of the 2-1-1 initiative – serving on the 2-1-1 Advisory Group for Eden I&R, the information and referral agency of Alameda County. Most recently Ana-Marie Jones joined the Working Group on Citizen Engagement in Health Emergency Planning, an initiative of the UPMC Center for Biosecurity.

In November 2003 and in January 2005, at the request of the Japanese Central Government and Japanese research institutes, Ms. Jones toured Tokyo and Kobe sharing an alternative approach to disaster preparedness (no fear or threat-based messages) with government, emergency management, university and nonprofit leaders. In March 2005, she joined the faculty of UC Berkeley Center for Infectious Disease Preparedness as a guest lecturer.

Ana-Marie Jones is a passionate advocate for ending America’s disaster victim cycle and building resilient communities, where even the most vulnerable members will survive, thrive and prosper in the face of disasters and emergencies.