Meet the Team

Founder, Co-director

Program Consult and Presenter Coordination

Aimee partners with organizational leaders to design events that foster authentic, inclusive engagement across lines of geography, privilege, and culture. She also serves as a neutral convener, offering facilitation and public participation design. Her work spans 20 years in international sectors—from civil society to governments and the United Nations—supporting innovative social change in both conflict areas (such as war or disaster) and stable settings, with a focus on human rights, community protection, quality of life, and the restoration of the health of our planet.

Publicity & Social Media Coordinator

Thea is an ecological restoration technician for ERAS (Ecosystem Restoration Artistry Systems), a photographer, printmaker, and muralist. She’s also the one behind all the online engagement we’ve had leading up to (& during) the Convergence!

Presenter Support Coordinator

Hybrid Funding & Program Development Manager: With over twenty years of experience—from organic farming, folk medicine, bio-remediation, and green building consulting to natural product stewardship, event coordination, grassroots administration, and regenerative grants—she brings a broad, lived understanding of ecological systems and community-centered resilience.

Communication, Logistics, Outreach + Web Design support

Anna has been part of the Friends of the Trees community since 2017, helping weave together many of the behind-the-scenes pieces that keep projects, events, and outreach moving forward. Deeply involved with the 2019 Global Earth Repair Conference.

She is passionate about community building, connecting people to plants, wildcrafting, growing herbs and food, and exploring the backcountry. Founder of Ramble Botanicals, a small wildcrafting herbal business.

Online Convergence Organizer - Lead Production & Operations

Ryan Rising is the founder and director of Eco Social Action and Eco Social Design.

Bringing principles and practices from two decades of grassroots movement organizing, food sovereignty, ecological design, and land regeneration, Ryan teaches facilitation training and guides organizational design and strategy.

Ryan co-founded and directed the Permaculture Action Network, a worker self-directed nonprofit that mobilized 15,000 people to hands-on days of action throughout 64 cities, building out hubs of land-based autonomy and ecological regeneration. The action network built 100+ urban farms, community gardens, public food forests, and other sites in solidarity with local community organizations.

Ryan is a co-founder of the Omni Commons, a community center and collective space in Oakland, CA that recently achieved permanence; and of the Gill Tract Community Farm, an urban farm distributing thousands of pounds of free food and medicine annually. Ryan recently served as the Executive Director of Rhize, a non-profit organization growing and distributing free food through mutual aid projects.

A facilitator of the first General Assembly at Occupy Wall Street in NYC and a long-time facilitation trainer, Ryan has brought decision making and governance design to a myriad of organizations including the NonProfit Democracy Network, Climate Sensitive Infectious Disease Network, and Ecosystem Restoration Camps, the Thriving Resilient Communities Collaborative, and the NorCal Resilience Network.

Website maintainer, Newsletter sender

Chrys Ostrander was born in 1957 and raised in upstate New York. In the late 1970's, he went to college in Maine at the College of the Atlantic that is an alternative college offering a degree in Human Ecology. He would have been part of the class of 1980 had he not dropped out to join a communal organic natural foods bakery in Bar Harbor where he became an advocate for organic foods and critical of the industrial food system. Chrys moved to Washington State in 1990 from California where he had been a student, tofu maker, member of an organic produce distribution workers' collective and farmworker on a collective farm during the 1980s. In 1990, he and his small family settled at Tolstoy Farm in Davenport, WA, the oldest surviving non-religious intentional community in the U.S. and lived there for 20 years. During that time he operated a 4-acre certified organic micro-farm and contributed produce and labor to the Tolstoy Farm Marketing Collective. From 2009 to 2013 he managed a 35-acre non-profit educational farm in Cheney, WA. Chrys raised dairy goats for 20 years, has taught organic farming and gardening and became active in sustainable & regenerative agriculture and food system advocacy & policy work. In 2022, Chrys moved to the far Northeast corner of Washington state to join his friend Bezaleel Israel with the intent of establishing a 20-acre permaculture eco-village, land trust and farm. https://bzfarm.org

Tech Coordinator - Onsite

Musician/ music producer by passion, jack-of-all by trade. Carpenter, engineer, and friend to all.

Work Trade Coordinator

Cynthia is a mystic, artist, and teacher whose intention is promote wholeness of body heart and mind through sound therapy, energy healing and intuitive spiritual guidance.

Registrar

Earth Mama Goddess! I love to get my feet dirty!

Fort Worden Housing Coordinator

I’m happy to be helping people settle into Fort Worden housing so they can focus on the event. In my regular work, I collaborate with organizations to design and share science and sustainability learning experiences for adults. I’m especially interested in ecology, regenerative agriculture, and how the systems we design can better integrate with natural systems. Outside of work, I spend a lot of time in the garden, exploring green home building, and working on fiber arts projects.

Founder/Director New Old Time Chautauqua

Paul Magid is a founder of the infamous Flying Karamazov Brothers and the New Old Time Chautauqua. He is also a playwright. He teaches Native Law and history. He plays woodwinds and runs a theatre in Europe. He is a practioner of Tikkun Olam.