Our People
In Alphabetical Order
Jenna Bradford
Jenna grew up in the Sacramento River delta in California, swimming, climbing trees, searching for animals along the water’s edge, studying their ways, and always looking for excuses to be outside. She received her B.A. in Environmental Studies and Bioethics from Loyola University in Chicago. Before becoming a teacher, Jenna worked on farms in Colorado, designed and sewed clothing, and studyied plants through an herbalism apprenticeship with Wildroot Botanicals and an ethnobotany immersion with Raven’s Roots Naturalist School. Jenna taught 5th and 6th grade at Paonia’s North Fork School of Integrated Studies. She is excited to continue with some of her current students on this adventure. Jenna loves teaching because she loves learning and loves to share that enthusiasm with others.
Sophie Browner
Sophie is so excited to learn and grow as a Groundwork fellow this season! Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she studied Speech Pathology and Studio Arts at University of Pittsburgh, where she fell in love with the surrounding forests of Pennsylvania, and began to immerse herself in the environmental world through hiking, camping, and learning with friends and teachers. Though she found community in both Cleveland and Pittsburgh, she was seeking an alternative path to the one that loomed post graduation. She spent a year traveling and working on Permaculture farms, and felt a newfound simplicity and connectedness with this way of life. Sophie enjoys walking barefoot, creating macrame jewelry, playing music, and making tea for friends from her ever-growing collection of herbs. This season, Sophie is hoping to slow down and look within herself, her fellow community members, and the land to help her understand and work towards a vision of the world that inspires her.
Espoir Delmain
Espoir DelMain is a farmer, educator, and dance maker. Hailing from the northwoods, the great lakes, and the mississippi river in what is now known as Minnesota, she is new to the Groundwork team this year. Farming has brought Espoir across the nation in all kinds of farms and she also has worked as a wilderness guide and she makes site specific dances wherever she goes. She is excited for this new experience at Groundwork as Veg Manager. Espoir started farming at Dickinson College Farm where she was a student farmer and then an apprentice, from there she kept ending up in a garden wherever she lived. By way of working abroad programs in Western Africa, Espoir has worked at CSA farms, flower farms and fruit farms in the midwest. Espoir revels in the experience of growing, eating and preserving food and is so grateful to be a part of everything Groundwork is building. She especially loves getting creative with fellow farmers and thinking of all the ways to cook the veggies. Espoir is most likely to go jump in a river after a day of farm work.
Nikki Hill
Nikki is a seasoned tumbleweed who has been engaged in an ongoing, experiential inquiry of the dynamic weavings of ecological relationships for the past 18 years. She can be found in a diversity of habitats throughout the Western U.S., from remote wild places and feral haunts to boardrooms and stakeholder halls where land management protocols are written. Nikki holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental science and botany and started this journey with a focus on ecosystem restoration. Disillusioned with a focus of eradication as healing, (where herbicides are utilized as the primary tool for restoration), she sought solace in fostering direct connection as a small scale farmer.
For the past nine years she has been living semi nomadically, gathering seeds and tending wild plants, with a focus on plants that benefit from or rely on human disturbance. Nikki’s inspiration for teaching comes from a reclaiming a sense of belonging unfolding curiosities that continue to inspire her include reclaiming the role of human seed bearers, cultural landscape awareness, beneficial disturbance theory, assisted plant migration and remembering the ultimate mystery and joy of this dance. Nikki is a certified Wilderness First Responder.
Kelly Moody
Kelly grew up in rural southern Virginia in tobacco country, working at her family’s nursery business. She earned a B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies, Anthropology at Christopher Newport University in Virginia in 2009, focusing on globalization of culture and land relationships, environmental ethics and ‘east-west’ comparative philosophies. After that she worked on and ran organic farms, studied with various herbalists, gardeners, permaculturists and ecologists from Vermont to Ohio, North Carolina, California, New Mexico and beyond. She has also spent countless hours in self-study working with plants on public land across the U.S. west. She is the main facilitator behind the Ground Shots Project and Podcast, a work that explores cross-ecological and societal intersections. Kelly is a certified Wilderness First Responder.
Ramphai Noikaew
Ramphai lives half of the year in Colorado and half at Pun Pun Organic Farm in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand where she enjoys sharing her knowledge of sustainable living practices and the tradition of seed saving with visitors from all over the world. She facilitates many workshops teaching permaculture principles at the farm and elsewhere in Thailand. In her free time she can be found gardening, doing yoga, biking, hiking, or simply being out in the wilderness. She loves sharing her love of cooking organic food because she strongly believes that food is medicine. Ramphai believes that we can enjoy life in the present moment, everywhere we go, we grow by wisely developing our inside as well as out, and we find peace by letting go. Education is not just to be found in classes and universities. It is outside, in the natural world.
Allie Olson
Craft has been a constant for most of Allie’s life. Her mom taught her to sew when she was seven and the craft has grown into a passion that encompasses creativity, body positivity, and care for the planet. Allie creates pine needle baskets, weaves, sews, and uses plants to naturally dye cloth and fiber. Allie spent many years working with sewing pattern design. She co-founded Indiesew (a marketplace for indie sewing patterns) in 2013, and managed that company until late 2019. Allie also sells her own pattern line online here. Beyond being a crafter, weaver, dyer, and sewist, Allie is a passionate warrior for Earth. Most of her time outside of her studio is spent outdoors gardening, trail running, or skiing.
Fern Sarquiz
Fern Sarquiz grew up in Montpelier, Vermont on the unceded land and ancestral territory of Abenaki. She grew up amongst the maples, pines and birch trees. Fern Holds a B.A from Prescott College in Social Justice and Adventure Education. Her studies and mentors helped guide her towards understanding the complex political, ecological and social landscapes of life through a lens of interconnectedness. The work Fern is engaged in is critical, it involves carefully questioning and detangling the long projects of Colonialism and Capitalism. She believes that in the face of uncertainty and particularly unsettling times we must learn how to divest from systems that are meant to keep us separate from each other and the land. She believes in praxis that acknowledges the uncomfortable tension and friction as a prelude to the flame of change that can spark new growth. She sees the potential for deeper care by examining our relationship to the ecology of a particular place. Fern is most curious about the ways in which people discover a sense of belonging within themselves and in connection to the land and non-human world. Fern leads with her curious hands and her energetic heart; She loves to play, dance and clown around. As a new member of the Groundwork Team, Fern is looking forward to co-collarborting a story of song and seed. She is particularly passionate about the stories and songs that the plants tell us. She encourages all of us to give our ears a good cleaning and make a plant friend to listen to. Fern was a 2025 food systems fellow, and is returning in 2026 as our assistant farm manager.
Wild The Woodworker
Wild is a woodworking artisan creating custom-made tree furniture with reclaimed materials and local hardwoods. Wild left a career as a wildlife biologist to pursue woodworking, and has developed his craft to rely as little as possible on the timber industry, opting instead to use discarded orchard wood, fallen trees, and other reclaimed materials to create his beautiful furniture. You can see a gallery of his work on his website, Menagerie Woodworking.
Pieter Van Winkle
Pieter is a father, husband, hobby rancher and youth mentor. He has worked in the business world as an executive coach, sales manager and real estate investor. Pieter believes passionately in the power of youth mentorship — in particular nature-connected, community-supported rites of passage. He is committed to helping foster experiences for our valley youth that helps prepare them for the rapidly changing world they will soon inhabit, lead and transform. Pieter is also a potter who uses clay he gathers from the Earth and processes himself. He lives in Paonia with his wife Emma and their son Wendell.
Jeff Wagner
After a university education didn’t provide sufficient answers, Jeff began seeking answers to the big questions that weren’t answered by academia: how we might reimagine U.S. society in the age of climate change, and what it means to be a responsible human in an unraveling world. For over a decade, Jeff sought answers outside the mainstream: living at wolf sanctuary in the Colorado mountains, leading NOLS expeditions across North America, and facilitating cross-cultural semesters in the Andes, the Amazon, the Himalaya, and the great Mekong River Basin. Jeff’s biggest focus has been teaching to the cultural roots of environmental issues, and helping students both experience and examine different ways of life that can be applied as cultural activism at home in North America. As a person dedicated to questioning the mindsets stemming from settler-colonialism, Jeff finds inspiration in the communities working to maintain and strengthen relationships with the natural world and with the sources of food, water, clothing, shelter, and meaning. Jeff likes walking slowly, weaving fabric and baskets, and growing beautiful varieties of heirloom seeds. Jeff founded Groundwork to help people pursue the goal of becoming ancestors that their descendants will be proud to tell stories about. Jeff is a certified Wilderness First Responder.
Acknowledgements
Our educational farm has been our biggest project since 2021. We want to acknowledge everybody who has contributed to the farm over the years to. make it what it is today:
Megan Davey: Food Systems Fellowship Mentor, 2024-2025.
Forrest Gillies: Farm Manager, 2024-2025.
Sophie Browner: Assistant Farm Manager, 2025.
Ramphai Noikaew: Assistant Farm Manager, 2022-2023.
Kollibri terre Sonnenblume: Farm Manager, 2023.
Gregory Pettys: Food Systems Fellowship Mentor, 2022-2023.
Angelica Calabrese: Food Systems Fellowship Mentor, 2021.
Parker Pflaum: Food Systems Fellowship Mentor, 2021.
Kevin Witkow: Food Systems Fellowship Mentor, 2021.
Keshet Miller: Food Systems Fellowship Mentor, 2021. Co-founder of Food Systems Fellowship.
Jeff Wagner: Farm Manager, 2021-2024. Co-founder of Food Systems Fellowship.
Food Systems Fellows
2026: TBD!
2025: Ally Pecego, Fern Sarquiz, and Robin VanHouten.
2024: Sophie Browner, Kate Goldwater, Belen Lopez, and Marion Madanguit.
2023: Mia Borger, David Dearmore, Mattea Goetz, and Quinn Van Buren.
2022: Sylvie Shaya and Anthony di Martino.
2021: Ben DiNoia, Quentin Freeman, Blake McClain, Gabby Raymond, Paige Silverstein, and Bailey Walker.