Brendan (he/him) is a hapa father, husband, writer, rites of passage guide, and ecological educator with fifteen years of experience working with youth and adults in a variety of contexts, including as a public school teacher. He is the founder and director of Watershed Schoolhouse, a nature-based microschool in Northern California that integrates justice and community work with nature-based education and academics. He previously served as co-director of The Ojai Foundation, a land-based non-profit in Southern California. He holds certifications as a Wilderness First Responder, Permaculture Designer, North America Wildlife Tracker (Level III), Council Trainer, and Type II Wildland Firefighter through his engagement with cultural and prescribed burns. He lives with his wife, Shay, and son, Kian, in ancestral Mechoopda homelands in Chico, California.

Darcy Ottey (she/they) is a facilitator, educator, cultural strategist, and ritual practitioner. The descendant of Quaker settlers, British coalminers, and Ukrainian peasants, land-based cultural practices have been part of Darcy’s life since she took part in a Rite of Passage Journeys program as a youth. Now in her mid-40’s, Darcy identifies as a queer, white, class privileged, able-bodied woman. Through projects including Re-Calling Our Ancestors, Nourishing Futures, and Rites and Responsibilities, Darcy devotes her life energy to deconstructing dominant pathways into and through adulthood and offering healing alternatives rooted in ancestry, body, land, culture, and accountable relationships. She loves dancing (especially under the full moon), learning to make Slavic folks dolls, and preserving food and plant medicines. Her work is informed by her training in popular education, somatics, rites of passage, leadership, nature connection, and transformative justice. Darcy’s first book, Rites and Responsibilities: A Guide to Growing Up, was published in 2022 by Lost Borders Press.

Joannah was born in the Philippines and raised in Appalachian Ohio, in the United States. She is an Indigenous Filipina-US community organizer and culture bearer with passion for Indigenous advocacy, social justice, and defense of IP land and water sovereignty. A former community organizer for many years in the US, she now lives in the Cordillera mountains of the Philippines, in neighboring tribal lands. She works with her father and community to revitalize and teach Indigenous culture & traditional living through the Ifugao Center for Living Culture, which they founded together, and she loves traveling to teach and learn with Indigenous siblings around the world. She also has a tendency to say yes! to crazy opportunities and experiences on short notice, leading to ever changing backgrounds when she logs into video conferences. She is a bookworm at heart, but also loves bushwhacking through the woods, and being outside in general, far from humans.

Shay Sloan Clarke is a white American descended from northeastern Ireland, where the mountains meet the sea. As a student of justice and equity, she is committed to healing, repairing and reimagining social fields. She is co-editor of the book Protecting Wild Nature on Native Lands and co-author of “Cross-Cultural Protocols in Rites of Passage: Guiding Principles, Themes and Inquiry.” Shay is a practitioner of rites of passage, circle and embodied anti-racist practice. She loves nurturing communities of practice and ongoing inquiry. Her professional roles have included rites of passage practitioner, guide, trainer, convenor and facilitator; Consultant and Educator; Program Manager for Native Oceans; Founding Director of the Indigenous & Community Lands & Seas program for The WILD Foundation and World Wilderness Congress; Executive Co-Director of The Ojai Foundation; and Executive Director for the Global Center for Indigenous Leadership & Lifeways. Shay bridges worlds, working for inner and outer system transformation, be it bridging the movements for wilderness conservation and Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, or supporting folx to strengthen their direct relationship with place and ancestors through research, practice and ceremony. Whenever possible, she gets clay covered in the ceramics studio or the garden with her son, Kian. When not working, Shay explores the Sacramento River Watershed in the unceded traditional homelands of the Mechoopda peoples, where she currently resides, in Northern California. 

Shula (she/they) is a community ritualist, Jewish educator, and trans theologian. Shula lives as a white settler on Nipmuc Land, and traces their ancestry from diasporic Ashkenazi Jewish peoples from the Danube and Dnieper watersheds. She is neurodivergent, working-class, chronically ill, and transgender, with citizenship and education privilege. They serve movements for flourishing and collective liberation through her work with Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education and as the Program Director for Taproot. Shula is an apprentice of bird-language, the tarot, and stretching strudel dough.

David Bryan, J.D., Ph.D., is a career educator who has taught at the middle school, high school, and university levels at various institutions in the United States. In 1995 he co-founded New Roads School, a unique independent school in southern California, where he served as a faculty member, the Founding Head of School and President from 1995 until he left in 2013 to found his own consulting business and teach at the University of California at Santa Cruz. More recently he was the inaugural director of The Center for The Common Good, a joint venture of The Herb Alpert Foundation and New Roads School, to incubate creative innovation in business, education and community partnerships. Bryan currently does special projects for the Herb Alpert Foundation, and he consults privately with several California based not-for-profit and for-profit businesses on matters of board and workplace organization, employee training and online education, and generational workplace dynamics. He is also an active content creator and co-producer for his podcast, Curiosity Invited. Bryan is currently the Chair of the c3 and c4 boards at Los Angeles based Brave New Films and is a director on the board of Motorcar Parts of America, a publicly traded company where he serves on the Nominating and Governance Committee.

Erin Selover is a Dharma teacher with over 20 years of Buddhist practice and teaching. She currently works with individuals as a spiritual strategist. Since 2018, her passion has been distributive governance and needs-based gift economics.
She has complemented her Buddhist practice and studies with studying and experimenting, at times intensively, with Miki Kashtan and the Nonviolent Global Liberation community.
She is a residential retreat teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California and co-teaches the annual, “Womens and Nonbinary Folk Nourished by Women-Center Spaces Retreat.”
As a white settler of Irish descent on indigenous lands, these past decades she has been in deep inquiry about the way power and privilege function within modern societies, as well as the complex history of her Irish ancestors.
Integrating all these threads, she co-stewards a meditation community integrating the Celtic Wheel of the year and Buddhism within needs-based gift economics and distributive governance systems.
In addition, She is a Licenced Marriage and Family Therapist with training in Somatic Experiencing and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.

Margo comes from the traditional Yurok village of Morek, and is an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe. She is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Cultural Fire Management Council and co-lead of the Indigenous People’s Burn Network. She graduated from Humboldt State University and resides on the Yurok reservation in far northern California. She gathers and prepares traditional food and medicine, is a cultural fire practitioner, a basket weaver, regalia maker. She previously served as the Indian Education Director for the Klamath-Trinity Joint Unified School district. She is a mom, and a grandma.