Rich Earth Institute

Board of Directors

Do you like what the Rich Earth Institute is doing? Would you like to get involved, and help us navigate our growth and future possibilities? Please consider joining our Board of Directors! Fill out this form to indicate your interest. 

Natalie Lounsbury

Natalie is a research assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire in the department of Agriculture, Nutrition, and Food Systems where she studies cropping systems ecology. She has spent nearly two decades studying ways to integrate cover crops into cropping systems to reduce tillage and herbicide use and improve nutrient cycling. She has a B.A. from Cornell, an M.S. in Soil and Watershed Science from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from the University of New Hampshire. Prior to graduate school, she worked as an organic vegetable farm manager and an organic inspector and for an environmental organization in Washington DC as a research associate. She has a passion for science communication and working with farmers, and currently serves as a guest host for the No-till Market Garden podcast, on which she featured the work of Rich Earth.

Bradley Kennedy

Bradley is a former Rich Earth staff member and is delighted to remain part of the Rich Earth team by serving on the board. During her two years on staff as a research associate, she helped develop several successful research proposals including SARE, FFAR, and NSF SBIR, in addition to conducting research and co-authoring several reports and other publications. She holds an M.Sc. in Agronomy from the University of Copenhagen, where she studied manure management, and a B.S. in Natural Resources from Cornell. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Environmental Science & Technology at the University of Maryland.

John Hatton

John is a Realtor and Sales Manager at Berkley & Veller Greenwood Country Realtors. John has been in sales and customer service for his working career, now in real estate, before in the natural foods industry. John serves now and has served on a number of Boards of Directors, and brings his interest in visioning and governance to the Rich Earth Institute. He lives with his wife, Kate, and their two wonderful young adults, Tyler and Guthrie, on a small farm in Westminster, and tries to find enough free time to ride his road bike.

Nadav Malin

Nadav is a long-serving former member of the national LEED Faculty, he is an experienced trainer and facilitator, convening the network of architecture firm Sustainable Design Leaders and teaching diverse groups about LEED and green building. As president and CEO of BuildingGreen, he oversees the company’s industry-leading information and community-building websites BuildingGreen.com and LEEDuser. He also served as executive editor of GreenSource magazine throughout its highly decorated seven-year run. Nadav also led the team that created the U.S. Department of Energy’s High Performance Buildings Database, and continues to oversee BuildingGreen’s responsibility for ensuring the quality of case studies and collecting meaningful data on actual building performance.

John Woodland

John Woodland is a graduate of Marlboro College and Vermont Law School. He lived on South Pond during the summer and, for a couple of years, as a winter caretaker at Camp Neringa. He practiced law on the Southern New Jersey seacoast for 24 years. During this time he served as General Council for a small bank, as a school board member and a deputy mayor. He also served as a volunteer EMT and firefighter. John did a lot of scuba diving and sailing off the mid-Atlantic coast during this time. Retiring early, he and his wife traveled the country serving as campground hosts before resettling in Montana where they raised dairy goats, built their own house from a kit and John again became active in the community. John took a job working for the Town and Rural Fire District as fire chief, a position he held for 10 years. He also became Hospital District Board Chair. These positions included writing and managing several grants for the Fire Department, taking on the hospital position in the middle of a financial crisis and successfully passing bond issues for the department and the hospital. In Montana, John served as a co-chair of 350 Montana. We now serves as Volunteer Coordinator for Third Act Vermont. The combination of wildfire smoke and a realization that they needed to find an area with better resources and better access to those resources drove John and Patty to return to Vermont in 2021 where they settled in Brattleboro.

Ellena Baum

Ellena Baum is a naturalist, educator, and farmer based in Greenfield Massachusetts. She currently works as a co-manager at Yellowbud Farm: a tree nursery growing improved staple tree-crops without any synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, and using select fertility inputs including pasteurized human urine provided by Rich Earth Institute! Since 2009 she has participated in numerous training programs in permaculture and community-based ecological design which have informed her holistic approach to land management and education. Over the last decade she has combined her love of land and people by engaging youth and adults on the farm and in the woods with Grow Food Northampton, Hitchcock Center for the Environment, and Leapfrog Programs. Ellena is currently a Climate Adaptation and Mitigation Fellow, and she is continually learning best practices for adapting agriculture for greater resilience in a changing world.

 

Former Board Members:

Peter Abell, Marion Abell, Jennifer Atlee, Ashley Bahlkow, Molly Dowd, Mike Early, Emily Fabel, Ben Goldberg, Melissa Hays, Ethan Hazzard-Watkins, Julia Jandrisits, Conor Lally, Rebecca Rueter, Konrad Scheltema, Tatiana Schreiber, Ellen Williams, Drew Adam, Catherine Bryars, Rosi Olivan Pliego, Jane Diefenbach, David Cedarholm, Dan Marks