Abudu Nininger

Project Showcase: Akwaaba Urban Food Forest in LA

Abudu is a urban farmer, natural builder, garden artist, lover of fungal dominant compost & collective liberation. Specializing in fruit tree care, he spends most of his days working with the Fruitsitute, and tending land & community at Wildseed Farm. He is passionate about helping to restore & re-energize a conscious relationship between people, plants, soil & our many relatives of diverse expressions. Akwaaba Urban Food Forest is his current community empowerment project. You can watch the video and read more about the Akwaaba project on the fundraiser page here.

Brad Lancaster

Project Showcase: 1/8 acre urban permaculture site in Tucson

Brad Lancaster is the author of the award-winning Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond and co-founder of DesertHarvesters.org. Since 1993 Brad has run a successful permaculture education, design, and consultation business focused on integrated regenerative approaches to landscape design, planning, and living. In the Sonoran Desert, with just 11 inches of annual rainfall, he and his brother harvest about 100,000 gallons of rainwater a year on an eighth-acre urban lot and adjoining right-of-way. This harvested water is then turned into living air conditioners of food-bearing shade trees, abundant gardens, and a thriving landscape incorporating wildlife habitat, beauty, medicinal plants, and more. The goal of his book series and overall work is to empower his clients and community to make positive change in their own lives and neighborhoods—by harvesting and enhancing free on-site resources such as water, sun, wind, shade, community, and more. It’s catching on, as evidenced by tens of thousands of practitioners and demand for Brad’s work around the world.

Brenton Kelly

Water Ethics, Water On The Landscape, Earthworks, Living Soils, Compost, Beekeeping

Brenton Kelly was born in Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia. By his first birthday he saw the peaceful liberation and birth of the nation of Zambia. By his tenth year he had witnessed a variety of civil & revolutionary conflicts across Africa. His father was a Voice of America radio corespondent who then took his family over to Southeast Asia to cover the communist insurgency in Vietnam. The world was as big as domesticated elephants and was filled with sustainable handcrafts like the banana leaf to-go wrappers around the fresh roasted squid being sold from the bicycle powered street vendor in our neighborhood. These were some of the last truly functional subsistence economies and culturally intact communities seen by the open eyes of youth. The world population has more than doubled since then but Brenton still seeks inspiration from those impressionable experiences in Africa and Asia. In 1980, Brenton came to Southern California to attend UCSB. With a BA in Environmental Studies & Studio Art, he went forth to make beauty of the world. The Isla Vista Recreation & Park District proved a great place to practice the art of land stewardship. For ten years he managed the IVRPD grounds crew and 30+ acres of organic public open space; including a public events theater, community gardens, beach bluff top play grounds & passive use conservation lands with a State funded vernal pool restoration project. In 1998 Brenton, with old friend Matt Buckmaster, bought Island Seed & Feed from founder (and their good friend) Phil Boise. Island Seed and Feed is the south coast organic (read: Permaculture) headquarters for the farm & garden. For the next ten years it served well as an outlet for Brenton’s desire to share the knowledge behind least toxic low impact human activities. He became a self proclaimed compost evangelist. “Let there be a worm box for every kitchen & classroom”. Island always had the best customers; all looking for healthy solutions, not toxic chemistry for their homes & landscapes. Then Warren Brush & Paul Swensen came in with the news that they had closed on 450 acres in the Cuyama Valley. A Store account was opened in the name of Quail Springs and very good things have come of the relationship. In 2008 Brenton and his wife, Jan Smith, moved to Quail Spring to help advance the food production systems and program offerings, by farming and teaching. Brenton has served on the Board of Directors of Quail Springs as Treasurer and is the bookkeeper for the farm. He brings to his teachings over 30 years of experience in soil building, gardening, non-toxic land management and animal husbandry. His passion for land regeneration has led him toward the work of Bill Zeedyk and Craig Sponholtz, and in 2011 he studied with Craig, and began to implement this work through projects and course offerings at Quail Springs Permaculture, and the Quivira Coalition. “It’s our responsibility to understand and mimic the patterns and the processes of the natural world and to integrate this into our ethics and behavior.” –Brenton Kelly

Daniel Parra Hensel

Teaching: Permaculture Design, Permaculture Foundations

Daniel Parra Hensel is a full-time permaculture educator, consultant and designer. In 2015 Daniel joined the Environmental Horticulture department as an adjunct faculty member at Santa Barbara City College where he teaches two permaculture design courses. Daniels' work is focused on teaching political agroecology which explores the political, economic and ecological challenges in our food system and society. His passion lies in ecological justice and aims to co-create mutually beneficial alternatives, strategies and solutions to local challenges that fall at the intersection of ecological degradation and social inequity. Daniel co-teaches two classes in the Environmental Horticulture department; Permaculture Design: Resilient Community Design and Advanced Permaculture: Ecological Landscape Design and Regenerative Agriculture. Both courses explore ecological literacy, social justice analysis and community organizing. Daniel has a passion for place based pedagogy with a teaching philosophy focused on disability justice, thoughtful communication and conversation, and practical application of concepts taught in his courses. Daniel is a first generation North American with his family heritage from Colombia, Argentina and Spain. Daniel has had the privilege of traveling to and experienced many parts of the globe, shaping his core values and the way he connects and empathizes with others. His unique background, and immersement in different languages and ways of life has been the main driver for his dedication to a career in service and advocacy. This has led him to international development work in Kenya and Uganda, to permaculture design programs in Australia, Colombia and California, and to coordinating a Santa Barbara based youth ecology and social justice empowerment program. From 2016 - 2019, Daniel was a Board Director for Quail Springs Permaculture and operated as their Vice Chair from 2018-2019. In 2019 he was accepted into the Leading From Within Kathrine Harvey Fellowship, 2019/20 Cohort. Daniel is grateful to be an active participant in the global justice and ecology movement and fully embraces the opportunity to work with a diversity of people from around the world.

Danielle Stevenson

Teaching: Growing Your Own Mushrooms, Waste & Bioremediation

Danielle is an environmental scientist and applied mycologist with 10+ years of experience in research, design, implementation and management of projects that solve complex problems- and develop sustainable solutions- within food systems, ecological systems and community-level health. She works with innovative, applied scientific approaches that bridge ecological remediation, restoration, waste management and biotechnology to develop interdisciplinary teams of industry, governmental, academic and community organization partners for greatest impact. She is passionate about education, outreach and science communication and has given hundreds of talks, workshops, and presentations across North America and internationally. Danielle works with soils, fungi, plants, microbes, waste and and shares her work through online maps, blog posts, articles and other writing, videos and collaborations with visual and performance artists. Two representative projects of her own founding are Healing City Soils program, which offers free soil metal testing for farmers and maps soil quality data, and DIY Fungi, which offers education and resources about mushroom cultivation for food, medicine, remediation and waste management. Danielle is currently a PhD student in Environmental Toxicology at the University of California, Riverside, where she studies how certain fungi can protect food crops from toxic metals and enhance phytoremediation as part of the Soil Biogeochemistry Group.

Jeffrey Reidl

Lead Instructor

While earning his Bachelors in Ethnoecology with emphasis on Biocultural Diversity Jeffrey became interested in learning deeper, more integrative ways of understanding and interacting with the world in an ethical and ecologically sound manner. Jeffrey completed his PDC in Austria, and later continued his training and education at the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia. Jeffrey deepened his understanding of Ethnoecology with a Master's degree in Global Sustainability, where he researched how trees and forests impact public health and address environmental justice, while mitigating climate change and providing vital environmental benefits and services. Jeffrey has taught and worked with small-holder farmers, NGOs and community-based organizations around the world, mainly in East-Africa, to create resilient communities and healthy agro-ecosystems. After hearing stories from other Permaculture farms around the world, Jeffrey joined Quail Springs in spring 2017. He currently lives in Ojai, converting a conventional orchard into more diverse and climate appropriate agro-forestry systems using regenerative practices.

Lexi Spaulding

Teaching: Elements of Community Design

Lexi is led in her work by her belief that communities should direct their own futures, her love of this natural world, and the power of people. Lexi has been a huge fan of Quail Springs and their beautiful work since she was first introduced in 2014 while working with the Community Environmental Council in Santa Barbara. She was lucky enough to attend both the International Development PDC and the Social Permaculture Course at Quail Springs in 2017. She left with that rosy, inspired, full-of possibility glow that everyone does leaving a QS training and since then the strategies, ethics, and interconnections she learned on the land and from the community have seeped into almost every aspect of her work and daily life. Lexi studied Environmental Economics and Policy at Berkeley and was steered towards community-led work by a summer internship in Morocco. She previously served as the Projects Coordinator and Regenerative Systems Lead at Mama Hope where she created and ran programs that connected Mama Hope’s partner grassroots organizations and Global Advocate Fellows with the resources and training to build out the visions of their communities and make their work more regenerative. The lessons she learned while working with grassroots community organizations across East Africa has deeply informed her the justice-based lens she brings to working with communities and her focus on imbuing the values of a collective into its every aspect and interaction in its work. She always leaves Quail Springs' land bursting with ideas and hope, and is very grateful to have served on the Board since June 2017 in order to help continue spreading that magic to as many people as possible. In her consulting role facilitating Quail Springs' leadership transition in the fall of 2019, she is greatly inspired by the potential to amplify the great work the organization already brings to the world by creating the conditions for easeful visioning and organization-wide leadership. Lexi believes knowledge, hope, nature connection, and community can and will create the thriving, abundant world of tomorrow and people just need to learn and feel that they can be a part of it.

Lindsay Allen

Teaching: Urban Agriculture, Rooftop Farming, Agroforestry

Lindsay Allen is a farmer, educator and activist from Boston, Massachusetts. She has been farming for the past 11 years and currently works with Higher Ground Farm as the Operations Director and as the Farm Manager of the 7,000 square foot Rooftop Farm at Boston Medical Center. In addition to rooftop farming Lindsay holds a Masters in Agroforestry and is also a Permaculture Design instructor and a guest lecturer at Tufts University. When Lindsay is not teaching or growing food, she can be found happily experimenting with fermentations, communing with chickens, spending time outdoors, cooking for and with loved ones and continueing to learn and grow as an anti-racist human.

Marta Gaunt

Teaching: In the Quail Springs Garden

Marta grew up with a love of trees and wild places, and a fascination with the dark fecundity and mysterious denizens of peat bogs and muddy tide flats. She has been sowing seeds, talking to snails, and digging in dirt for as long as she can remember. Many years ago she left a PhD track in Spanish Literature to pursue a career in professional cooking, where she mastered the art of transforming parsley into a fine dust and cooking the entire head of a pig. With the beauty of haute cuisine also came a sobering look into the underbelly of our industrial food system. Frustrated by the damage and disconnect she witnessed there, Marta began a deep dive into wild food foraging, permaculture, ancestral skills, and eco depth psychology. She attended Alderleaf Wilderness College's year-long naturalist training and completed her Permaculuture Design Certificate there, taught by Dave Boehnlein. Marta loves permaculture for its systems thinking and its experimental, connective, and intersectional approach. She is excited to be in conversation with the desert and to keep asking how we as humans can be in balance and right relationship with the rest of the world.

Morgan Visalli

Project Showcase: 2021 PDC Alumni Site Tour

Morgan is a regenerative garden designer and ecologist with over a decade of experience growing food. She loves helping people create ecological gardens that benefit both people & the planet. After completing a Master of Environmental Science and Management degree at the University of California Santa Barbara, she worked in marine science research and conservation for several years before making her way to Quail Springs Permaculture as a work-trader. There, she completed a Permaculture Design Course, and fell in love with goats. She now teaches people how to grow food and compost, and creates permaculture and regenerative garden designs for clients through her business, Grow with Mo, based in Ojai, CA.

Natalie Buckley-Medrano

Teaching: Patterns In Nature & Applications in Design, Pruning Trees, Integrated Animal Systems

Driven by the profound awareness of our society's growing lack of connection to the natural world and food production, Natalie concentrated her university studies on both urban planning and land use law as well as the effects of urban development, food industry demand, and climate change on marine and coastal ecosystems while attaining her bachelors degree in Environmental Studies from UCSB. After college, these passions led her to complete her Permaculture Design and Green Gardener Certifications and to work professionally in agriculture, horticulture, and arboriculture. Aside from independent garden design, she farmed animals and vegetables in New Zealand, Southern California, and Boston, practiced tree propagation and nursery production at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, and – to mix it up a bit – apprenticed on a cob house build at Spirit Pine Sanctuary. Natalie has also gone deep in the study of permaculture: completing a PDC through the Sustainable Vocations program at Quail Springs, an Advanced Permaculture Design course with Lisa Fernandes at the Resilience Hub in New England, and a Permaculture Teacher Training with Pandora Thomas and Lisa DePiano. She has been teaching at Quail Springs’ PDCs since 2017. The Quail Springs crew is excited about Natalie becoming another powerful female voice leading permaculture forward.

Nicholas Holmes

Teaching: Rainwater Harvesting & Greywater Systems

Nicholas Holmes is an ecological designer-builder with a passion for all things nourishing. He is co-founder of The Nourishing Tree, a mixed-use center for healthy & sustainable living located in Joshua Tree, CA, and runs his own design-build company, Holmes Ecological Design & Construction, as well as Solstice Eco Building Supply. For the last 10 years Nicholas has been based in the Mojave Desert community of Joshua Tree, CA, working professionally as a consultant, designer and builder on a wide range of sustainable building projects in the Western U.S. and Denmark. The majority of his work involves structures, including buildings that shelter and nourish, and the visible and invisible structures that support regenerative life in buildings and the landscape that surrounds. Areas of focus in Nicholas’ work include passive solar/ climate-adaptive/ energy-efficient building design & construction, non-toxic & healthy building materials & systems, adaptive re-use of salvaged materials, rainwater harvesting buildings & earthworks, and greywater irrigation systems. Nicholas received degrees in Architecture and Sustainable Development from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and continues to broaden and deepen his education, training and certifications in sustainable systems design & construction. He’s completed training in rainwater harvesting systems design & construction with the American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association, become a certified Greywater Installer through Greywater Action, and become a certified Permaculture Designer through Quail Springs Permaculture and the Permaculture Research Institute.

Oscar Carmona

Teaching: Gardening 101

Oscar Carmona is a consultant and educator with over 35 years in small-scale, regenerative food production and sustainable landscaping. He serves as an adjunct faculty member at Santa Barbara City College where he co- created and has taught the Green Gardener Sustainable Landscaping Certification Program for the last 20 years and summer term 2021 will be teaching a new, Small Scale Home Food Production course.

In addition to teaching, Oscar owns and operates Healing Grounds Nursery which grows seedlings using Biodynamic principles and methods and offers them as part of his consultation services to help individuals and groups grow the healthiest, most nutritious food possible.

Oscar has worked as the Urban Farm and Garden Programs Manager at the Community Environmental Council in Santa Barbara. He created one of the first school gardening programs in the area, along with gardening therapy and work programs for the differently abled and adults with mental illness.

Sarah Brooks

Teaching: Community Design (Quail Springs Case Study)

Inspired by permaculture and concerned about the imminent crises of the planet, Sarah left Seattle and a ten-year career in business consulting, entrepreneurship, and data analytics to learn more about growing food and living in connection with the land. Three months of working on permaculture farms in New Zealand led to nine months of immersive nature connection study with the Anake program at Wilderness Awareness School. During that year Sarah completed her Permaculture Design Course, which included a visit to Quail Springs to see permaculture in action. She was struck by the heart and integrity of the people living and working at Quail Springs, and by the unique beauty and challenges of this high desert canyon. Sarah is excited about the potential world-changing effects of reconnection: to our food, to our communities, and to the land. She is on a journey of remembering her own belonging to the more-than-human community, and of living a more soul-rooted and ecocentric life. Sarah loves to sing, to talk about dreams, and to cook and eat and laugh with friends and family.

Sasha Rabin

Teaching: Natural Building, Housing Advocacy, Appropriate Technology

Sasha first came to Quail Springs on a cold snowy night in early 2008 to visit friends who had recently started calling the place home, and the warmth of the people there brought her back. She is passionate about creating a beautiful life, including the structures that house us for so much of our time. This passion leads her to practice those things that help us remember who we really are and why we are here – activities and creations which remind us of our connections to each other, our food, our shelter and the earth. At Quail Springs, Sasha enjoys the feeling that there is another way to be in the world, and loves how beautifully this is shared and planted like seeds within the site’s many guests. Sasha Rabin fell in love with natural building in 2002, when she began her building career with an apprenticeship at the Cob Cottage Company. Since then she has taught extensively through organizations that she co-founded, Seven Generations Natural Builders and Vertical Clay, and through collaborations with The Yestermorrow Design Build School, The Canelo Project, Cal-Earth, The Solar Living Institute, and Quail Springs Permaculture. Teaching natural building has brought her as far as the Permaculture Research Institute (PRI) Jordan and PRI Kenya. Sasha currently sits on the Quail Springs board of directors, as well as the Cob Research Institute. After living at Quail Springs for a decade, she has relocated back to northern CA to be closer to family. She also runs her own natural building organization, Earthen Shelter, and although she enjoys the act of building, her true passions lie in the teaching and sharing of natural building with others. Sasha was drawn to natural building due to her interest in the impact that shelter has on our lives and what it means to live in beautifully created homes, of natural non-toxic materials. Building a non-toxic home is a profound experience. When people create shelter together their lives are changed forever through connections with one another and the shelter itself. Just as people are inspired when learning how to grow food, people are inspired when creating the structures we depend on for comfort and health.

Susan Cousineau

Teaching: Science and Permaculture

Growing up farming in a remote mountain valley in British Columbia, Canada, Susan’s early years were influenced by an eclectic mix of gardeners, environmentalists, farmers, and loggers. She completed a BSc in ecology and MSc in evolutionary biology, with a focus on infectious diseases. These studies opened the gates to field research in Costa Rica, Amazonian Peru, western Canada, and East Africa — in addition to bioinformatics and mathematical modelling. Throughout, her goal has been to find ways to tie together ecological restoration, global health, and food security. Her permaculture journey began in 2012 with a Permaculture Design Certificate in Jordan, after which she returned to Canada to work on farms (pastured pigs and poultry; organic fruit and berries); on design and installing edible landscapes; and in nature-based youth education. In 2015 she moved to her current site with husband Laine MacTague, where they currently raise a mix of small livestock, tend a ¼ acre food forest, and raise a toddler. Since completing multiple REX/Regrarians trainings with Darren Doherty (2016; online 2017, 2018) and becoming involved with Slow Food USA through the Microbiome Project (2017), she has focused on the intersections of nutrient density, soil and gut health and economics to support locally regenerative food systems. She has taught in several iterations of Quail Spring’s Resilience Development PDC, and is driven by learning and sharing practical approaches to addressing big world health problems.

Vivien Sansour

Teaching: Seed Saving as Culture Keeping

Vivien Sansour is an artist, storyteller, researcher and conservationist. She uses image, sketch, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations and to advocate for seed conservation and the protection of agrobiodiversity as a cultural/political act. Vivien founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library as part of this work with local farmers, and has been showcased internationally, including at the Chicago Architecture Biennale, V&A Museum in London, Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, and the Venice Art Biennale. A culinary historian and enthusiastic cook, Vivien works to bring threatened varieties “back to the dinner table to become part of our living culture rather than a relic of the past”. This work has led her to collaborate with award winning chefs, including Anthony Bourdain and Sammi Tamimi. Born in Jerusalem, Vivien lives in both Bethlehem, Palestine and Los Angeles, USA. viviensansour.com

Warren Brush

Permaculture Foundations, Permaculture Design, Trees and Forests, Food Forests, Earthworks

Warren Brush is a mentor, storyteller, a certified Permaculture designer and teacher, as well as a husband, a father and a grandfather. He has worked for over 25 years in inspiring people of all ages to discover, nurture and express their inherent gifts while living in a sustainable manner. He is co-founder and a tender of Quail Springs Permaculture, Regenerative Earth Enterprises, Sustainable Vocations, Wilderness Youth Project, Casitas Valley Farm and Creamery and his Permaculture design company, True Nature Design. Warren works extensively in Permaculture education and sustainable systems design in North America, Africa, Middle East, Europe, and Australia. He has devoted many years to mentoring youth and adults to inspire and equip them to live in a sustainable manner with integrity and a hopeful outlook. His mentoring includes working with those who are former child soldiers, orphans, youth, young adults, families and indigenous peoples worldwide. He teaches courses including: Permaculture Design Certification, Permaculture for International Development, Train the Trainer, Consultancy Training, Rainwater Harvesting Systems, Ferro-Cement Tank Building, Spring Rejuvenation, Compost Toilet Systems, Water for Every Farm, Drought Proofing, Earthworks, Ecological Restoration, Cultural Mentoring, Introduction to Permaculture Systems, Food Forestry, and Origins Skills among other offerings.