Team

Thomas lives onsite and works with the team to ensure all participants and visitors find a welcoming home at the Institute. He supports the land and facilities, helping to create an environment that facilitates the life-affirming work happening here. As a photographer, filmmaker, contemplative juggler, and teacher of movement awareness, Thomas seeks to inspire a sense of wonder and delight in our relations with Earth and Other.

Sommer started working with us in October 2018. In addition to her work with the Whidbey Institute, Sommer loves spending time with family. She’s a homemaker with a six-year old stepson, Reece, and a partner, Jason. They have two dogs and a cat, and enjoy baking, cooking, board games, and movies.

After many years as a Whidbey Institute program participant and volunteer, Cathy joined the staff to work on database and fundraising projects. Her past work in eco-outreach and regulatory compliance connected businesses, communities, and agencies to practical changes that make a difference. Cathy’s husband, daughter, son-in-law, and grand-dogs help ground her passions and hopes. She’s a board member at Sound Circle Center, a Waldorf adult education institute. Rowing on Seattle’s Duwamish River helps keep her happy. Engaging in ways to be a better human keeps her humble and inspired.

When she’s not at the Whidbey Institute keeping our office in order, Madisun runs her own brand of community merrymaking as a freelance events coordinator and operates a non-profit program under the Whidbey Island Arts Council. In her free time, she can be found on a nearby farm with her husband, a rescued street-to-farm dog, and four hilarious ducks.

Holly is a mission oriented, passionate, and experienced business strategist. Her academic and professional expertise ranges from industrial engineering, manufacturing, and marketing to economic development, business development, and grassroots network development.

Lety’s professional interests range from science and marine biology to climate action and social service work. She is passionate about food security and affordable housing as it relates to homelessness, and explored both during a previous position with a community land trust on Orcas Island. She has extensive international living and travel experience, including as a translator for the Kuna Yala Indians in the San Blas islands during a colleague’s climate impact writing project. She is a proud mom who considers raising an amazing young woman to be her greatest accomplishment, and shares that her daughter is currently attending UW.

Nick first came to the Pacific Northwest 49 years ago as part of the US Coast Guard’s icebreaking service. He has made four trips to the Antarctic and two trips to the Arctic, and has also served as a lighthouse keeper on Lake Superior. Since leaving the service, Nick has worked in the hospitality business here in the Puget Sound region, opening and renovating hotels. He and his husband recently moved to Clinton. He is a father to a 34 year-old son and shares his home with a  four-year-old Australian Cattle Dog named Oliva. Nick enjoys the sea, traveling, and gardening.

Benjamin works to support the care of the land and facilities at Whidbey Institute. His work weedwacking, cleaning outdoor spaces, caring for trails, and more helps ensure that visitors can feel at ease when on the land, and by extension encourages fruitful experiences in this place. His ever-growing breadth and depth of knowledge in the life sciences and land stewardship and his experience on small farms and gardens are early-career expressions of his commitment to invite more intentional, healthier relationships with our ecological home. Ben lives close to Whidbey Institute and, when he’s not gardening or exploring the forest, he spends time reading, cooking, and sharing meals with his close friends and housemates.

Beno lives according to a simple philosophy: “if you take care of what’s in front of you, close by, then by extension you’re helping to take care of the world.” Beno has been involved for decades as a volunteer and for several years as a staff member, serving as a handyman/go-to-guy with extensive skills, a creative outlook, and a contagious attitude of honesty, service, and dedication.

Jules is a practicing herbal scientist, mindbody movement arts practitioner, and owner of Wild Standard Botanicals. She stewards the educational indigenous and medicinal plant and food garden for the Whidbey Institute and develops nature-based education programs for all ages, including students of our local Waldorf Schools. She has been facilitating integrative health coaching, herbal science and medicine, movement arts, and mindbody education for over a decade and holds a pre-med BS in Herbal Science from Bastyr University.

Bryan McGriff grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He and his family currently live in an intentional, multi-generational community in Port Townsend, WA. Before joining the Whidbey Institute, he worked in Waldorf education as an administrator and teacher. Developing healthy communities and collaborative forms of working together were tenets of his previous work, and Bryan is eager to support and learn from his colleagues and the Whidbey Institute’s wide network of transformational leaders.

As a trail runner, Bryan is looking forward to exploring the forests and campus and joining their conservation. Along with family game nights, He also enjoys playing Ultimate Frisbee and appreciates the inclusive values of the sport. He will usually have a disc on-hand for a quick throw!

Marta’s background is in the performing arts. She is a certified facilitator of Movement-based Expressive Arts and holds a masters in psychology. Her work history is an eclectic mix which includes Sign Language interpreting, co-founding Calyx Community Arts School, coordinating hotline volunteers for the Abused Deaf Women’s Advocacy Services, managing the Power of Hope summer camp, choreographing musicals, landscaping, and short-term stints in China, Dominican Republic, and Nepal. She has taught expressive arts classes to students of The Freedom Theatre in Jenin, Palestine.

Yadi grew up on a family farm in Puerto Rico, where she developed her deep love of the archipelago’s forests, beaches, and natural places. She moved to Washington State nine years ago to pursue a doctoral degree in Naturopathic Medicine and a master’s in Acupuncture. In addition to caring for her own body, mind, and spirit, she loves to support others in doing the same. Yadi spends time in nature to stay grounded and connected, and says that she felt called to visit this land often even before joining our staff team. 

In this transitional period of Yadi’s life, she feels fortunate to support the Whidbey Institute’s ongoing work to promote individual and collective health and care for Mother Nature. 

As a member of our housekeeping team, Rose helps keep our spaces clean, fresh and inviting! She is active in the arts, including singing and visual arts. She also sews, both at home and in her role with the Whidbey Institute. Most of Rose’s childhood was spent on Whidbey Island, and she still lives nearby with her cat Jasper, one of her most beloved friends.

Board member Casey Dilloway first encountered the Whidbey Institute in 2012 as part of a students-in-service program with the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (now part of Presidio Graduate School). He has been visiting Whidbey for as long as he can remember despite growing up on an entirely different island in Hawaii. Casey spends his professional time working for a leading wealth management company in Seattle, where he lives with his partner Shane.

Board member Cole Hoover is a coach, facilitator and entrepreneur interested in the future of learning and using business principles to increase social and environmental impact.

Cole currently serves as the Director of the MovingWorlds Institute, a global learning community empowering professionals to use their skills to increase social and environmental impact.

Jenna brings over 15 years of leadership and facilitation experience to the board, having worked to support individuals, teams, organizations, and networks through various projects and evolutions. Jenna is passionate about people-centered HR, personal and organizational change, curriculum and program design, facilitation, coaching, network weaving, and fostering learning communities of practice. At the heart of her work is diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Jenna is happiest when she is leveraging these values to build systems and structures that allow all people to thrive in the workplace.

Board member Kate Snider is principal and owner of Floyd|Snider, an environmental consulting firm and B Corp.  She is a certified mediator and former Seattle Girls’ Choir board chair. For the Whidbey Institute, she has played a key role in fundraising, event production, and strategic leadership throughout the last decade. She led the process to put our 108 acres into a permanent conservation easement, update our site development plan with the County, and Has been stewarding our Site Evolution process throughout expansion of the cabin village, new caretaker cottage, and as we complete Commons construction.

Board member Hilary Wilson is Event Wrangler Chief and Community Sourced Capital Product Development Manager. Hilary combines artistic energy with business acumen, macro sensitivity with attention to detail, and a knack for relationship building with an eye for strategy. She has a B.F.A. degree from the California Institute of the Arts and is a graduate of the MBA program at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute.

Appletree Garden Steward

Mara Grey is a botanist, Celtic harpist, storyteller, master gardener, and author of The Lazy Gardener and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Flower Gardening. Mara has studied Scottish Gaelic for many years, and enjoys experiencing the world from a multicultural perspective. She values the role of storytelling in work and life. 

Executive Chef

Christyn has a great reverence for food as an integral part of a healthy, balanced life. She has had a long career in fine dining and hospitality as well experience and travel in global vegetarian cuisine. In addition to running the Whidbey Institute kitchen, she owns Raw Indulgence, a gourmet organic raw meal service on Whidbey Island.

PHOTO © RAWINDULGENCE.KITCHEN

Forester

Bob frequently comes to the land for a day or a week at a time to build trails, remove hazard trees, clear windfall, and support our land care team with his labor, skill, and wisdom. “My personal belief has been that everybody who’s any good at anything ought to float a certain amount of that talent on the water,” he said. “Since the thing I’m best at is being a sort of a forest handyman, that’s what I’ve got to donate.” Bob is also skilled as a machinist, model railroader, and student of nature.

Web Designer

Matt McDowell designed and maintains our website, working closely with our team to understand our organization’s audience and needs, shape content decisions, and provide great design solutions as well as ongoing technical support. He lives in Langley with his wife and two sons, and provides design and consultation services to a number of other organizations and businesses in our community and around the nation.

photo © McDowell www.screenthumb.com

Sharon Betcher, M. Div., M. Phil., Ph.D., works as an independent scholar and writer.She has specialized in disability or “crip” theology, environmental theology, including an emphasis on emergent urbanism, and progressive Christian, secular, and post-religious theologies. Sharon received her B.A. (1978) in Religion from Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD, and her MDiv (1982) from Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN.  She later studied with Dr. Catherine Keller at the Graduate School of Drew University, receiving her PhD in 1998. While at Drew she served as teaching associate at the Theological School, then moved to Vancouver, BC, where she taught at Vancouver School of Theology (2000-2012).

Larry served as the first dean of the Community College of Vermont and taught at Lesley, Norwich, and Columbia Universities. A member of the founding group of the Whidbey Institute, he was an Associate Director and faculty member from 1997 to 2006. He is the double-award winning author of Mentor: Guiding the Journey of Adult Learners, and co-author of Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitment in a Complex World. He helped develop and facilitate several current and former Institute programs, including Powers of Leadership, Leadership for the New Commons, and Cascadia Climate Collaborative.

Kate Davies, M.A., D.Phil. has worked on environmental issues for more than 35 years. In the 1980s, she set up and managed Toronto’s (Canada) Environmental Protection Office and in 1990 she established a successful environmental policy consultancy. In 2002, she became core faculty at Antioch University Seattle and in 2007 she was appointed director of its Center for Creative Change. She served in this role for 3 years, taking an early retirement in 2016. Kate is also clinical associate professor at UW. Her first book, The Rise of the U.S. Environmental Health Movement, was a top ten book on sustainability in 2013. Her second book, Intrinsic Hope: Living Courageously in Troubled Times was published in 2018.

Diana is Senior Lecturer Emeritus at the Evans School of Public Affairs, UW. She has spent 20 years as a department director at the City of Seattle—most recently as director of Seattle Public Utilities. Diana has received several awards regionally and nationally for outstanding civic leadership. Diana served on the Institute board for 6 years and is both an alumna and a former teacher of Powers of Leadership. Along with Larry and Sharon, she led the Institute’s Leadership for the New Commons, a program which has since informed many of the Institute’s programs and practices.

Sharon’s publications include Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex World (2005) and Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Emerging Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith (2011). She served for 16 years in faculty and research positions at Harvard University in the schools of Divinity, Business, and the Kennedy School of Government, and now teaches at Seattle University. She served on the Institute’s founding Board, and as Associate Director and faculty. She helped develop several current and former Institute programs, including Powers of Leadership and Leadership for the New Commons.

Johnny is a retired professor of biology at the UW with a specialty in neuroscience, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and recipient of two Fulbright Fellowships for teaching in India and a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in England. He co-founded and co-directed the UW’s Program on the Environment and authored My Slovakia, My Family: One Family’s Role in the Birth of a Nation as well as over 60 research papers and book chapters. He served 6 years on our board and was the main organizer of the annual Lyceum Lecture Series, a collaboration of the Whidbey Institute with other organizations.