Support

Haunani Orsillo

Co-Manager of the Kitchen, Co-Organizer for the Arts and Celebration Festival

lives at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage with her 9-year-old daughter, Elle, husband, Dave, and chihuahua, Mister. She is known for her celebratory cooking as well as her constancy in making breakfast for anyone who shows up, and her deep nurturing of others as the village massage therapist. Nani grew up as part of a traditional, large extended family in Hawaii. Because of her family background, she has community in her bones; moving to Dancing Rabbit three years ago felt like coming home (even if it was a less than idyllic climate!) She got her first event planning experience organizing family reunions for hundreds, and has brought that experience to the community, helping plan Land Day celebrations, Solstice rituals, and the annual winter retreat.

In addition to her massage training, Nani has been a Reiki practitioner and non-denominational minister for a decade. Even under the high pressure situations of cooking for large groups and occasionally helping resolve conflicts, Nani maintains a sense of balance and peace that will serve her well in her Ecovillage education work.

 

Ted Sterling

Co-Manager of the Kitchen

Joining a vegetarian student cooperative in Berkeley in 1994 and work on organic farms on both coasts starting in 1996 in Maine are probably the two incidents that contributed most to Ted’s current food-centered life. About that time he learned to cook, and to appreciate the full range of tastes in the world through widely scattered world travel. He also grew ideologically drawn to self-reliance and an ecologically focused life, especially in food and shelter. He served as kitchen manager for his coop of 55 students for a year and a half, in the bountiful California food scene.

Now in his tenth year of association with Dancing Rabbit, Ted has become a natural builder, gardener, communitarian and father, practicing all these and more in his everyday life. He collaborates with his partner Sara, whom he met here as an intern in 2001, in all those endeavors, and along with their daughter, they share a rich culture of food, from planting and harvest to preservation and fermentation of all sorts. They built their home and a cooperative kitchen together, and employ most natural building styles in their hybrid structures. Ted looks forward to sharing Dancing Rabbit’s rich food and building culture with the ecovillage education course students, filling bellies with food and knowledge.

Sandy Griffin

Co-Orginaizer for the Arts and Celebration Festival

is a graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute. She has extensive teaching and workshop experience, leading the Dances of Universal Peace, kirtan, insight meditation, and assorted art and theater games. She has taken part in many Interplay and Contact Improv events and has attended Zentangle and Zen writing workshops. As a new resident of Dancing Rabbit, Sandy is currently writing and illustrating Enkidu’s Drum, a retelling of the ancient tale of Gilgamesh in graphic novel form. She is also studying the works of Chellis Glendinning (author of My Name is Chellis & I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization) and Stanislav Grof (creator of Holotropic Breathwork). Sandy’s goal in teaching is to work with input from participants to draw from all these assorted wellsprings and together learn to silence our inner critics and let flow the limitless creativity that is our birthright!

Sandy’s life experience is wide ranging, from having been part of a commune in the 70’s when she had not yet graduated high school, to homesteading and birthing her four sons at home, unassisted. She has stayed plugged in to alternative culture through the years through her work in the arts, regularly attending Rainbow Gatherings and being firmly committed to her own growth. She is in the process of moving to Dancing Rabbit, where she hopes to bring regular kirtan and Dances of Universal Peace.

 

Mandy Creighton

Marketing and Development Coordinator

has a background in all aspects of non-profit development and small business management. She has the ability to design and implement sustainable methods to help small to medium-sized businesses and community organizations succeed. She has strong analytical skills, combined with the ability to coordinate the efforts of a team to meet organizational goals. She is a self-motivator with high energy and an ability to multitask. She graduated with a degree in Business Administration from Hope College.  In 1999, she traveled to Central America with a group to experience and learn about sustainable community development and has had dreams of living sustainably in community every since.

In 2008, Mandy was handed a copy of the EDE Mandala, and had an instant positive response to it. She had just begun a 3-year, many thousand miles bike-packing journey around the United States to visit and document over 100 sustainable communities and make the documentary film, Within Reach Movie. She carried the mandala with her all through the journey and regularly pulled it out as a reference to help ground her experiences, and is excited to pass on the depth of her learning and inspiration to others as they consider taking the course.

Since coming off the road and moving into the editing phase of the film project, Mandy and her fiancé Ryan have lived in an aspiring ecovillage, Hummingbird Community in Cleveland, NM. Mandy has served on the fundraising and marketing teams, as well as continued to serve the larger movement through work on the Within Reach project, public speaking, and supporting start-up projects with marketing materials, websites and consultation support. She continues to seek new ways to become more educated and involved in sustainable living through hands-on experiential learning opportunities ranging from permaculture courses, natural building workshops, compassionate communication seminars, reading a variety of literature, and by simply living it! In order to take the next step, she moved to Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in December 2011.

Joan Underhill Shagbark

Course Administrator

Joan Underhill Shagbark lives at Red Earth Farms, a neighbor and sister community to Dancing Rabbit. She homesteads alone on six acres and currently enjoys a three-sided shed as her only shelter. Her interest in community was spurred by a chance internet search back in 2007, when she found Acorn Community in Virginia. since then she has spent more time living in community than out of it, and finds time in ‘the mainstream’ hard to handle and not worth the struggle compared to the thrill of an outdoor life surrounded by like-minded folks. Joan’s passion and focus is on living the most primitive, sustainable, and comfortable life possible. to
this end she has planted the better part of a forest garden and is in the process of experimenting with various primitive shelters to keep her healthy and safe without being too ‘indoors’. her interests spread wide, from basketry, hide tanning, permaculture, and pottery to personal adornment, creating local culture, native-grass thatching, and getting lots of sleep.

 

The secret is that Joan is lazy and seeks a life that can be sustained with minimal work and maximum enjoyment. Don’t call her an efficiency expert – she doesn’t go for details and spreadsheets. She goes for long walks; bikes instead of cars; wood, clay, and stone instead of metal and plastic; and hard work done with friends rather than by machines. Joan’s dream is to provide for herself completely from her local bioregion, to store food in hand made vessels, carry heavy loads in hand woven baskets or hand hewn carts with wooden wheels… these are the things of her future. She delights in exploring new relationships with the plants,
animals, and land with which she makes her home – after all, it’s these relationships that will provide our medicine, shelter, comfort, and ultimately our survival.

 

Joan looks forward with excitement to the challenge of providing the logistical ‘comforts of home’ to students seeking to shift their worldview, getting folks here, making sure all our needs are provided for, while at the same time providing that wiggle space that lets you shift in the direction of your dreams is what she loves best.