Board of Directors

     Gavin Raders is a co-founder and volunteer-executive director of Planting Justice, a social justice activist, and a permacuture demonstrator/teacher. He dedicates his time to practicing permaculture wherever he can, having gone through extensive training with some of the most inspiring and effective permaculture teachers in the world: Geoff Lawton, Penny Livingston-Stark, Brock Dolman, Darren Dougherty, and Nik Bertulis. Before his stint as an intern at the Regenerative Design Institute, he studied cultural anthropology at UC Berkeley, and organized on a range of anti-war, anti-nuclear, environmental and human rights issues both on campus and off. He has knocked on nearly 30,000 doors in California, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada as a community organizer with Peace Action West.

     He comes to permaculture and ecological design through a social justice framework which recognizes the right of all people to peace, security, housing, healthy food, clean water, jobs and healthcare, and the rights of future generations to a just and livable world. For this to happen, he believes that Americans need to understand and respect the intimate connection and the shared fate we have with all people and all life on this planet, and organize effectively on the local level to come up with replicable and effective solutions to the range of hardships and oppressions we currently face. When families, communities, bio-regions, and nations work with nature instead of against her to provide their own sustainable food, water, and energy, this not only gives them freedom of self-sufficiency, but also makes them less likely to try to violently take it from another. He is still riding on the inspiration and jolt of passion he experienced in India, studying and advocating for the right to water and against its privatization by massive water corporations (such as Coca-Cola). You can read the paper he published on the subject here:

And come to a FREE weekly Urban Permaculture class taught by Gavin every Wednesday from 7 to 9:15 PM at the brand new Berkeley Sustainability Institute at 2130 Center Street in Downtown Berkeley

Andrew grew up in Ohio and got his BA in Environmental Studies from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. In Ohio and Pennsylvania, he was exposed to a variety of Midwestern agricultural systems, both conventional and organic. Andrew's degree in Environmental Studies led him to a job with the Bureau of Land Management in Wyoming where he worked to produce digital maps of aspen stands, whose recession across the Western US has been poorly understood. After the completion of this assignment, Andrew moved to Boston where he co-founded ConsumerConscience, a wiki-based website devoted to ethical consumerism. Soon thereafter, Andrew moved to the Bay Area and began working with the Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture as a volunteer. Andrew built the new Planting Justice website and he continues to bring technology solutions to Planting Justice that increase our capacity to do our work. In his free time, Andrew builds websites for other non-profits, playing ultimate frisbee, rock climbing, and chasing after his dog.

Ryan is a Bay Area writer & activist focusing on issues of sustainability, social justice, and travel. He is part of the team at Oakland Local and also writes for Terrain Magazine, Green Options, Matador Change, and Ethical Traveler. He is particularly passionate about food justice and sustainable food systems, alternative economic models, sustainable transit, the global south, and challenging excessive corporate power, obscene militarism, and environmental racism.

Hailing from Iowa, he grew up around two grandfathers who farmed soy, corn, and hogs and family members who are avid ‘fardners’. He is only now understanding that lineage and returning to those roots in the earth--ironically in the midst of the city. He is unsettled by the fact that when he visits the Midwest it is very difficult to eat healthy, local, or organic—in the heartland! Isn’t something wrong when it is easier to get Guatemalan tomatoes from the local Wal-mart than from a local small farmer? Understanding that the current agribusiness model is unsustainable, he is interested in better ways to do it. How can we feed ourselves and reconnect to our food while honoring the growers, the land and water, our health, and our communities in a way that is fair and sustainable?

He feels we have to not only dig up the root of systems of injustice and power, refusing to cooperate, but also plant the seeds of positive alternatives and cultivate them. Sometimes that means literally planting seeds–growing gardens in our yards, schools, prisons, and our communities. Sometimes it means planting seeds of information, seeds of art and music, seeds of peace, seeds of justice, seeds of alternate ways of being and thinking that little by little spread, germinate, and grow into that transformed world that so many of us envision.

Prior to moving west, he taught in the Humanities Department at a community college in Ohio for 5 years. Holding degrees in philosophy (B.A.—Indiana University) and humanities & comparative religion (M.A.—Miami University of Ohio), he taught courses in the history of religions and philosophy and created courses in Environmental Ethics and World Religions: Peace and Violence.

He is currently working to develop a series of companion travel guides focusing on environmental, social justice, and human rights issues and the communities organizing around them in various countries (starting with Mexico, Guatemala, and India). He is also interested in developing a collective media project that serves as a Bay Area news and community hub for developing a local, just, and sustainable economy. Notwithstanding his commitment to the local, he has been blessed and burdened with tireless travelin’ bones. When he’s not engaged in ink-slinging, traveling, or social change-making, he can be found sipping yerba mate, organic gardening, scuba diving, and exploring California’s abundant natural beauty. He maintains a blog at Pull the Root.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanvanlenning
http://vanlenning.wordpress.com
http://pulltheroot.wordpress.com
http://twitter.com/vanlenning

Pi'iali'i Lawson (Pi’i) is a practitioner of Lo'i Kalo(Wetland Taro Farming), an indigenous cultural custom, which takes place at his family’s ancestral land Ka 'ili o Pu'ueo, Waipi'o Valley, Hawai'i, under the tutelage of his grand-uncle. As generational Kalo(Taro) Practitioners and Farmers in Waipi'o, Ka 'ili o Pu'ueo serves as a learning site of sharing and passing on knowledge of traditional Hawaiian lifestyles to many local families, organizations, and institutions in the State of Hawai'i and beyond. Pi'i also studies the art of Hula and Ulana Lauhala(Pandanus Weaving), two other important traditional Hawaiian customs . He is a MA student in the Social and Cultural Anthropology Department at The California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and also holds a BS in Criminology and Criminal Justice with a minor in Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. Currently living in South San Francisco, Pi’i is also the in-house Lauhala Weaving Practitioner and Instructor at the Kaululehua Hawaiian
Cultural Center. He has also worked with the Napa Valley Aloha Festival in 2008 and 2009 as a presenter at the Cultural Education booths.

Rony is a long-time resident of Berkeley, CA. He is married and has three grown children. For more than 30 years he worked in major biotechnology corporations as a research scientist specializing in molecular biological investigation of bacterial, fungal and plant systems and also in development of human diagnostics and therapeutics. In the last four years he dedicated his time to volunteering and working for social justice and communitarian causes in the Bay Area.

While still working in research he returned to school in 2003 to obtain an M.B.A. and worked for a while in biotech business development. His educational and work experiences in corporate America prepared him for social activism because they allowed him a deeper understanding of the workings of capitalism, American style. He was not at all surprised to witness the predictably near collapse of the American financial system last year.

Working to end our militaristic approach to solving the world’s problems, he joined Peace Action West, of Oakland in mid-2006. This is where he met Haleh and Gavin and where he gained some experience as an organizer.

He believes there is a real need to bring change to America after eight long, suffering years of the Bush Regime. His background as a biologist and activist and his roots growing up in a communal farming environment in Israel could be useful in supporting Planting Justice. Now he sees that in all those years, working with the land, raising chicken, rabbits, goats, cows and sheep and providing food for the community formed the foundation for his strong belief in returning to peaceful naturalism as a way of life, especially in urban areas. He senses that there is a great thirst for finding a way to cultivate a more just social order. Naturally, his personal history compels him to contribute to Planting Justice’s social agenda and to participate in making its vision a reality.

Leah currently serves as program manager for Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture (MESA), a non-profit organization facilitating an international farmer-to-farmer exchange program on behalf of sustainable agriculture. Leah grew up on a family-scale non-production farm in the redwood forests of Arcata, Ca. and has lived in the Bay Area for the last 10 years where she moved to pursue a degree in Environmental Policy and Spanish at UC Berkeley. She has spent much time abroad in South and Central America as well as in Bangladesh working on behalf of social, environmental and food justice initiatives. As a result of her travel and work experiences she gained insight into international agriculture systems and the value of socio-ecologically mindful practices and unconventional multi-stakeholder collaboration. Leah’s past non-profit experience includes working in program development for the International Institute for Bengal Basin to address water rights and pollution mitigation in Bangladesh, India and Nepal and with East Bay Sanctuary Covenant where she worked in translation and fundraising on behalf of indigent refugees seeking legal guidance. Her latest project is launching Ag-vocate.org- a web portal to promote civic philanthropy in the direction of local small-scale agriculture. In her surplus time she teaches yoga to at-risk teens with the Art of Yoga Project and is trained in facilitation and conflict mediation.

Josh Sbicca has been working as an activist and a scholar since 2001. He graduated from Santa Clara University with a BS in Sociology and Political Science, but during those years and the two years after graduation he worked on everything from anti-war and labor struggles, to environmental issues. He is currently working as a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Florida. As a participatory researcher, he gradually has been learning from communities in both Florida and California how they are pro-actively creating sustainable urban environments that directly challenge status quo models of social organization, economics and urban planning. He believes that communities have a right to self determination regarding decisions that directly impact their ability to live in an increasingly polluted and unhealthy world. The political framing of food justice by those in the alternative food and farming movement carves out rhetorical and lived spaces for communities and organizations to build alliances across ideological, racial and economic boundaries. Therefore, it is Josh's hope that by balancing both academics and activism, he can more fully actualize the vision he has for this world - a vision that at core is prioritizing solidarity, justice, diversity, and sustainability.