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Annahata Combi is an artist, yoga teacher, herbalist, filmmaker, permaculturalist and aspiring musician who grew up in in a international meditation community and in the Redwood forests on the Pacific Ocean in the Bay Area. She designed her own B.A. interdisciplinary degree in Cross-Cultural Social Work and Sustainable Development from University of Redlands and Johnston Center for Integrative Studies. She has been traveling, living, and working in a variety of ecovillages, intentional communities, permaculture and biodynamic farms/gardens and healing arts/yoga/meditation centers in California, Oregon, Hawaii, New York, India, Costa Rica, and Canada sharing her gifts and collaborating with passionate healers, activists, and farmers. She is a cinematographer, editor and social and environmental documentary filmmaker.

She recently made films focused on Mind/Body/Spirit Wholeness and Sustainability in the Volunteer Services program at Loma Linda University Health. She is Earth Activist Permaculture Design certified from O.U.R. Ecovillage on Vancouver Island with Starhawk. She is a certified Nosara Vinyasa, Hatha, and Self Awakening Therapeutics 300-hour RYI Yoga Teacher. She is a certified practitioner in Pranassage, which synthesizes Thai yoga massage and breathwork. She is a Children’s Program and staff yoga teacher at Omega Holistic Institute in New York. Annahata was a environmental science outdoor education elementary and middle school teacher for City Kids Goes Outdoors and Roots & Shoots in Redlands, CA.

She worked as a expressive arts and spoken word facilitator at Our House Youth in Crisis Runaway/Homeless shelter and Music & Art Changing Lives in Redlands, CA. She facilitated Expressive Arts Therapy and herbal botanical gardening for an Ayurvedic medicinal plant garden at Women’s Empowerment Center in Auroville Ecovillage in Southern India. Recently, she was a workshop coordinator and assistant to village manager at Envision Festival and part of the Temple of Consciousness Lightning Team at Lightning in Bottle Festival. She is one of the core team Soluntionaries co-organizing the Blooming Biodiversity Tour.

Contact: annasimonecombi@gmail.com

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Effie Rawlings was born in California and moved to her family’s seed corn farm in Illinois as a child, just in time to witness her aunts, father, and grandmother’s final struggle to keep their business alive in a rising tide of corporate domination of the seed industry.  Her affinity for agroecology and cooperative farming was shaped by her experiences as a volunteer at Sisonke School in South Africa, and as a student organizer at UC Berkeley, where she joined the fight against privatization and skyrocketing tuition.  Her interests found a nexus at the Gill Tract Farm, where she joined other students and community members in their 20-year struggle to protect the historic farmland from being paved for commercial “development”.  Today, she helps collectively farm 2.5 acres of the Gill Tract‘s northern acerage, an innovative collaboration with the UC College of Natural Resources.  She continues to organize with Occupy the Farm, protesting the paving of the historic Gill Tract’s southern acerage.  She studies social permaculture in South Berkeley, where she has shared in the stewardship of a 25 person housing co-op called Coorperative Roots for the last 6 years.  She organizes nationally with the US food Sovereignty Alliance, and internationally with the Friends of the Landless Workers Movement (MST).  When she’s not OD’ing on consensus processes, Effie likes to sing harmony round the fire, read the tarot, and practice archery.

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Julian serves as Director of Education and Outreach for Green For All. His career is fueled by a strong belief in authentic movements that are powered by people. To this end, he’s engaged thousands of young people in the climate movement, by going on tour with Drake and Wiz Khalifa, and by organizing Green For All’s College Ambassador program, which cultivates environmental leaders at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. He launched Green For All’s Fellowship program, working with seasoned organizers from all over the country and the innovative Green The Block campaign, aimed at bringing sustainability to urban neighborhoods through culture and service.

In 2014 he started the Green The Church campaign, bringing hundreds of African American churches into the climate movement. He’s passionate about training leaders and activists, especially helping them use their personal stories in service of this work. In 2011 he co-founded The Million Person Project to further this work and support leaders within the Green For All network and beyond.

In 2015, Julian was recognized by Huffington Post as one of “10 Leaders reshaping the Environmental Movement.” His work has been featured in BET.com, The Source Magazine, Wiretap Magazine, and many others.

José is the Director of Equity and Strategic Partnerships under Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf. In this role, José serves as senior advisor to the Mayor, with the responsibility of creating, coordinating, and facilitating public/private/ philanthropic partnerships that foster equitable opportunities and benefits for the people of Oakland.

Prior to joining the Mayor’s Office, José served as Chief Executive Officer of Inner City Advisors (ICA) from 2004 to 2015. He led ICA to becoming a nationally recognized, award-winning organization for its work on scaling small businesses and entrepreneurs as a way to create Good Jobs, especially for people with highest need. In the ten years with ICA, he oversaw a portfolio of companies that created over 5,000 jobs, creating over $150 million in wealth for local residents and collectively generating almost $200 million in revenue. He also created a platform for hundreds of professionals to participate by contributing over $25 million of total pro bono investments into the ICA mission. His innovative thinking led ICA to launching Fund Good Jobs – an investment fund focused on using capital to influence the creation and retention of quality jobs – and the Talent Management Group – an innovative approach that is reshaping the workforce development sector.

José has built a reputation as a visionary leader, strong manager, innovator and relationship-builder who builds mindful and creative organizational cultures that yield high impact and results. José is passionate about promoting a fundamental change in the way communities and all its residents benefit from economic development efforts. He is a leader that has convened public, private and community people and resources to solve many community and business problems.

José is a BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) Fellow. José serves on the Board of several organizations including Fund Good Jobs, Net Impact, SPUR Oakland and the YMCA of The East Bay. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from UC Davis, and Entrepreneur Management Development Certification from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

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JT has lived in four different intentional communities for the past 11 years – Santa Barbara Student Housing Co-op (Biko, Manley), Berkeley Student Coop (Lothlorien), and Cooperative Roots (Fort Awesome). He is excited to start a new permaculture community in the Portland area in the next few years. His life philosophy is heavily influenced by Buddhism, anti-war activism, social justice, environmental justice, occupy wall street, occupy the farm and permaculture. He was born in Shanghai, China, moved to the US when we was fifteen. He had academic training in Physics, Neuroscience, and Computer Science. He’s also a songwriter/producer passionate about creating conscious and transformational music.

Lindsey Uluwehimailani Morriss is on a mission to ignite embodied awakening and effective group collaboration focused on evolving our selves and our world for greater purpose, harmony and connection. Lindsey has co-produced multiple embodied dance events, worldwide conscious flash mobs, and rituals and has lead groups on emergence meditation, conscious evolution and connecting with nature throughout the Bay Area and Hawaii.

She is currently the Program Coordinator for the 2015 Building Resilient Communities Convergence and was the Cultural Director of The Global Summit (2014) and co-producer of last years Bay Area HiveMind. She is a passionate Dancing Freedom facilitator teaching the embodied practice of living oneness. She is also the creator of BirthDance 2012, a cosmic movement, meditation and dance event honoring our birth as a collective humanity. As the founder of Spirit Path Healing & Dance, Lindsey assists individuals in awakening their greatest potential through intuitive insights, energetic balancing and evolutionary counseling.

Bonnie Borucki has been a member of Transition Berkeley since 2011 and active in helping to organize crop swaps, movie nights, and panel discussions on urban agriculture, alternative economies, and moving beyond cars. She is currently the chair of the Berkeley Climate Action Coalition Land Use Group.
Bonnie received her PDC form Merritt College and has taught gardening classes with elementary students and seniors in assisted living facilities. She is also an artist and graphic designer, designing plans for permaculture landscapes. Merging her longtime interest in connections between people, plants and pollinators with her community, Bonnie currently coordinates activities and workshops in the Ashby Community Garden and is a founding member of We Bee Gardeners. The mission of We Bee Gardeners is to support our local urban community by improving the soil and providing pesticide-free habitat for birds, pollinators, plants, and humans.

2015 Convergence Panel: Transition 101: State of a World in Transition

Susan Juniper Park is an Oakland-based activist and community organizer engaged at the cross roads of food, ecological and economic justice efforts.  She is a proponent/practitioner of appropriate ecological technologies, regenerative farming/gardening, honoring ancestral knowledge and permaculture design (although she sometimes finds this last label problematic).  Her current activism includes land defense with Occupy the Farm, anti-gentrification work with Economic Development Without Displacement Coalition, intersectional identity politics, and building resilient (AND equitable) place-based communities.

By day, she does development work for the Ruckus Society–an organization that supports and uplifts grassroots fights against climate, ecological, corporate and state injustices though Direct Action trainings, capacity building and strategic campaign support.  Previously she ran a grassroots economic development program for a food justice organization, Phat Beets Produce, in Oakland.  She is also in the extended Movement Generation family, has studied social permaculture with Starhawk and holds two PDC’s.

Susan considers herself to be a wannabe farmer, whole systems thinker, healing practitioner, and a covert revolutionary.  She immigrated from Korea as a child, and after a short stint in SoCal, has been living in the Bay Area for 20 years.

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Liora (Alejandra Liora Adler) has been active in the field of social permaculture, with a focus on community and event organization since her studies in Psychology and Education in the 1960’s.  Her hands-on experience led her to participate in a traveling theatre community (The Illuminated Elephants) that left California, USA for a two year tour in Mexico ending with her co-initiating Huehuecoyotl Ecovillage (Mexico) in 1982.  She is also the co-founder of la Caravana Arcoiris por la Paz, a mobile ecovillage which traveled in caravan from Mexico to Brazil overland over 13 years beginning in 1996.  Liora was an integral part of this project for seven years and was a lead organizer for an 800 person gathering, Call of the Condor, which took place in 2003 in Machu Picchu, Peru.   She was instrumental in the creation of the Ecovillage Network of the Americas, the Ecovillage networks in Jamaica and Cuba, and served on the Board of the Global Ecovillage Network from 2000-2004. She was one of the New York UN representatives during that time.

Having lived in ecovillages and intentional communities for most of her adult life, she has a first hand knowledge of the joys and challenges and has offered presentations and workshops on Ecovillages as well as Community Participation and Decision Making globally.  Together with Andrew Langford, she founded Gaia University, now into its 9th year, a non-conventional university dedicated to supporting peoples’ self-initiated action learning pathways in the fields guided by Permaculture ethics (transition and pluriversity). www.gaiauniversity.org. She currently lives with her husband on an almond orchard in the Capay Valley of CA, and alongside her Gaia U work will assist him in the demonstration of the use of permaculture techniques for the regeneration of almond and other nut tree orchards.

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Guatemalan by birth, Pedro Rodriguez has been exploring the connections between seeds, plants, food, nutrition, health and diet related diseases for more than half of his life. Pedro has been vegetarian for 18 years, owner, manager and passionate chef of the vegetarian-vegan-healthy food restaurant El Infinito and a big fan and promoter of traditional gastronomy as well as the consumers to farmers local networking outreach. He is also promoter and supporter of the slow food festival in his home city Quetzaltenango, and founder of El Infinito Cultura Permanente, an urban sustainability demonstrative house. 

With experience in the field of nutrition and indigenous superfoods, Pedro has created recipe books and work shops to help improve the nutritional deficit of the people with very limited resources living in the rural areas of Guatemala. He has also participated and collaborated with a number of organizations creating, improving or expanding current programs to fight malnutrition in Guatemala. I.E. Cooking classes for the indigenous people utilizing their own ingredients, indigenous superfoods from their areas and familiar to their cultures and the traditional kitchens and utensils they have. Implementing Indigenous plants like Chaya (cnidoscolus aconitifolius) or Chan (Salvia Hispanica) and Amaranth (Amaranthus) as an incredible support for improving nutrition and strengthening the immune system of the Guatemalan kids of the rural areas.

More recently Pedro has been working with Project NuMundo in the dreaming stages and planning of a great impact center that aims to contribute to the local indigenous communities of Lanquín, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, with an educational approach to permaculture, nutrition and the hole relation of food-health seed to plate. Nutrition is in a way a part of an inner permaculture, which will always be sensitive to the qualities and quantities of our diet, but it is also ultimately a strong political posture that can have a massive and rapid impact in the ways of our society.

Lesley Moore (MBA, MSW, PDC) is a strategic planner, writer, consultant, educator and facilitator with 15+ years experience as a fund development professional with grantwriting and regenerative resource expertise working with social entrepreneurs, grassroots groups, and community- and ecosystem-wide movements and partnerships to achieve social change and social justice through capacity and movement building; and systems, policy and infrastructure change. She is a board member of the Cob Research Institute and part of Starhawk’s yearlong Advanced Facilitators Course for collaborative groups. She lives in the Derby Watershed in the SF Bay Area-East Bay.

Ryan Rising is a community organizer and permaculture educator based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. After organizing Pushing Through the Pavement: a Permaculture Action Tour with The Polish Ambassador in the Fall of 2014, Ryan co-founded the Permaculture Action Network and has worked with festivals and artists like Lightning in a Bottle and Rising Appalachia to mobilize concert-goers and festival attendees to install permaculture systems and create community spaces that move us further on the transition to a just and regenerative world.

Permaculture Action Days have brought out hundreds of people at a time after concerts and before music festivals to plant public food forests, build urban farms & community gardens, install rainwater catchment systems, and construct greenhouses & earthen buildings. Having organized more than 50 Permaculture Action Days across the country and taught numerous courses and workshop spaces before and within festivals and gatherings, Ryan works at the edge of culture and ecological justice to catalyze the growth of a broad and diverse network set on taking action to build a better world. Visit the organization’s website to learn more about Ryan’s work and the Permaculture Action Network.

2016 Convergence Workshop: Permaculture Action Network: How We’re Organizing and How To Get Involved

​Thea Maria Carlson is Co-Director of the Biodynamic Association. She is a facilitator, farmer, educator, and artist, with roots in California and the Midwest. Her diverse experience includes biodynamic and organic farming; teaching gardening, nutrition, and beekeeping; designing, building and managing urban community and educational gardens; and organizing strategic communications trainings for nonprofit leaders. Thea earned a B.S. in Earth Systems from Stanford University, a permaculture design certificate from Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, and is trained in the Art of Hosting and consensus facilitation.

Sarah Mackota is a soul activist whose medicine is dance, ritual and mindful integration on the personal and societal level. Completing her Dancing Freedom training in 2010, she has facilitated dance journeys in Berkeley, San Francisco, Hawaii, Black Rock City, India and Santa Cruz. Certified Yoga Instructor, Reiki with Shamanism practitioner and Death Doula, she has an in depth knowledge of the physical and energetic bodies. She effectively guides others to explore the inherent wisdom that lives within each of one of us. She is dedicated to wholeness, healing and the deeper connection of all of consciousness.

Sara McCamant is a long term local food activist, garden educator and seed saver. She helped co-found the West County Community Seed Exchange in Sebastopol, CA, one of the earliest seed libraries and seed gardens in the country. She worked with Seed Matters, an initiative of the Clif Bar Family Foundation, coordinating their Community Seed Toolkit program. She is the Garden Manager at Ceres Community Project.

Robin Liepman (Bloom) is a co-founder and co-organizer of the Blooming Biodiversity Permaculture Tour (www.BloomingBiodiversity.org). He is a world traveller, here to re-weave the dream of the modern world into a vibrant balanced existence. Bloom was born from the warm coastal womb of central California in San Luis Obispo, educated by the fairies and tree people at the University of California Santa Cruz with a degree in Psychology and Cognitive Science, (and a special focus on life, the universe and everything,) and initiated into the intergalactic tribe of awakening beings during his six months of travel through Central America, becoming initiated into the modern day mystery school via volunteering at an endless stream of transformational festivals. He then went on a spiritual pilgrimage through Peru and Bolivia, emerging with a strengthened sense of life path and purpose, re-visited Costa Rica, and is now on Vancouver Island in Canada for his Permaculture Design Course/Earth Activist Training with Starhawk and friends. He recently co-organized and co-lead the “”Blooming Biodiversity”” permaculture tour, traveling of the North American West Coast, Hawaii (Big Island, Maui & Kauaii), and Peru, with a team called “Solutionary Production.”” This tour was a journey of healing the world through holistic integrative permaculture activations worldwide. Bloom has a solo music project (www.BloomSounds.org) and also has a music project called Blooming Anahata (www.BloomingAnahata.org) with his partner Anahata.
Bloom is dedicated to co-cultivating a thriving, equitable, regenerative, healthy and vibrant existence that works well for all beings.

2016 Convergence Workshop: Embodying Permaculture

Rebecca Newburn is the Co-Founder of Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library, a free seed lending library located in the Richmond Public Library in Richmond, California. She did her first Permaculture Design Certificate with Christopher Shein, one of the founders of BASIL, the first seed library and inspiration for Richmond Grows. She studied seed saving at Seed School with Bill McDorman of the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance. Rebecca developed a “create a library” model that has helped hundreds of seed libraries open around the world. The sister seed library list and shared resources from seed libraries around the world are at seedlibraries.net, which is a site she developed and maintains. She is a leader in the National Save Seed Sharing Campaign that advocates for our right to share seeds and is working with a group to create an international seed library organization.

Robert Kourik started his organic maintenance and landscape design company in 1975—long before the word sustainable “existed”. Since that time his designs, consulting and books have focused on organic and sustainable gardens, water management, drip irrigation and edible landscaping. Published (Metamorphic Press) eight books. Including: Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape – Naturally, 1986. Authored six other books. Including: The Lavender Garden, (Chronicle Books, 1998).

2017 Workshop: Good Fungi, Happy Plants

Marissa Mommaerts is Director of Programs and REconomy Project lead for Transition US, part of the international Transition Network. Marissa is the co-author of two recent reports on the new economy movement, “Weaving the Community Resilience and New Economy Movement,” based on a series of interviews with new economy leaders across the US and published by Post Carbon Institute; and “25 Enterprises that Build Community Resilience.” Her vision is to empower people and communities with the tools and information we need to take back our economic and political power.