Teachers

Ma’ikwe Schaub Ludwig

Course Director, World View and Ecological Dimensions Coordinator, Teaching Staff for all Dimensions

is the author of Passion as Big as a Planet which brings together her main passions: sustainability, spirituality and personal growth, and community. Ma’ikwe’s life is about healing the divides our culture creates: between beauty and practicality, spirituality and action, service and love of life, reverence and humor, and hard work and healthy boundaries. The EDE curriculum has been a powerful tool for her to refine her thinking on sustainability and begin sharing a deeper understanding with others. In 2007-2008, Ma’ikwe served as the Lead Teacher for the first US delivery of the full ecovillage education curriculum in New Mexico and is very excited to be able to bring the full course back to the US this year with an amazing staff of companions.

 

Ma’ikwe began teaching sustainability courses 20 years ago while on the staff of Project Grow Community Gardens in Ann Arbor, MI. Since then, she has worked for a half dozen non-profit organizations doing outreach and creating educational programs for a wide range of ages. In 1996, she joined her first Intentional Community and has lived in and developed communities ever since. She currently lives at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage with her 14 year old son, where she built her own strawbale home, helps create new social systems and facilitates a lot of meetings.

 

For the last decade, Ma’ikwe has been a volunteer and staff member for the Fellowship for Intentional Community, and a regular contributor to Communities magazine. She currently manages the FIC’s bookstore, Community Bookshelf, and serves on the Oversight Team for the organization. Much of her teaching work these days is through Dancing Rabbit and at intentional community conferences around the US. In her intentional communities activism, she draws on experience living in seven different communities over 15 years, and helping to start three of those projects.

 

Ma’ikwe has birthed two children at home, the second a daughter for some close friends (and fellow ecovillage activists) who can’t have kids of their own. The adoption and subsequent alternative family creation (staying deeply connected to her child without actually raising her) has been an amazing experience of service, as well as redefining what love means. That experience has sent a lot of ripples into her life, questioning deeply held cultural assumptions about the limits and risks of acting from love.

 

Her work with communities has led her to the understanding that we can’t create real sustainability without the ability to cooperate well and a willingness to become different beings. Out of this lesson, Ma’ikwe teaches consensus, facilitation and cooperative group dynamics, often alongside her husband and long-time mentor, Laird Schaub. Her early activism work around ecology, gay rights and gender and race equity focused mainly on trying to get others to change; now she focuses more on personal growth as a key piece in embodying the change we want to see in the world, both individually and collectively. Her latest role in life is serving her community as an ordained minister, grounding her work in a mix of Buddhism, paganism and a general love-of-life–ism.

Contact Ma’ikwe:

• (maikwe at ecovillageeducation dot us)
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Alyson Ewald

Social Dimension Coordinator, World View, Social and Ecological Teaching Staff 

is a co-founder of Red Earth Farms, the six-year-old homesteading community in Missouri where she lives with her partner and young daughter. She serves on the board of directors of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage and the Scotland County Farmers’ Markets, and is an advisor to The Altai Project, a nonprofit supporting environmental efforts and indigenous groups in Siberia. Alyson has completed an Introduction to Permaculture course and has been trained as an English teacher, an Alternatives to Violence trainer, a Restorative Justice Circles facilitator, and a facilitator of group meetings and workshops. She is fluent in Russian and has been arrested in three countries for nonviolent direct action.

 

After receiving her BA in English from Bates College in 1990, Alyson lived and worked overseas in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, and Croatia for nine years. During that time she taught both English and Russian, received the highest grade on her Certificate in TEFLA, coordinated cross-cultural exchange programs for students and environmental professionals, led workshops on consensus, nonviolence, and facilitation, and founded and taught a leadership and skill-building program for antinuclear activists. She spent a summer as part of a mobile multicultural community called the Sustainable Europe Tour, walking on stilts, singing in a solar-powered band, and reclaiming streets from Slovakia to Slovenia.

 

She returned to the US after an unsuccessful but enlightening attempt to found an activist community in Croatia. Since then she has been fundraising, organizing and leading programs to support environmental activists in Russia through Sacred Earth Network, a deep-ecology-based nonprofit in Massachusetts, and The Altai Project, which she founded through Earth Island Institute in San Francisco. As part of this work she has organized and led numerous Russian-American professional exchanges, facilitated workshops in solar power and strawbale building at an off-grid community in the Altai mountains, and visited two Russian ecovillages. She also edited two issues of Communities magazine.

 

After a year at Twin Oaks, she has now lived for nearly a decade in Rutledge, Missouri, first at Dancing Rabbit, where she was a member of an income-sharing subcommunity, and since 2005 at Red Earth Farms. At the age of 39 she bore her child naturally at home with help from her partner, doula, and midwives. She serves the community by facilitating consensus meetings, mediating conflicts, co-counseling, baking sourdough bread, writing policy, offering workshops, growing food, playing ultimate frisbee, teaching interns, performing in musical productions, and helping to raise the village’s children. Her life and teaching are firmly grounded in deep ecology, permaculture, and loving kindness.

: alysonewald at gmail dot com
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Laird Schaub

Economic Dimension Coordinator, Economic and Social Teaching Staff, Course Facilitator

lives at Sandhill Farm, an income-sharing rural community in northeast Missouri which he helped found in 1974. He homesteads there, has raised two kids, and has developed a flair for preserving food and celebration cooking. He is also the Executive Secretary of the Fellowship for Intentional Community, a network organization he helped create in 1986, and which serves as a clearinghouse of information about North American communities of all stripes. For the last 14 years, Laird has been the FIC’s lead fundraiser.

 

At Sandhill, Laird helped start both of the community’s main businesses-the manufacture of sorghum syrup and tempeh-and he has decades of experience in value-added food businesses. As a networker, he created a self-insurance pool whereby income-sharing communities share risks to cover health costs. Starting with just a dream in 1986, that fund now has assets in excess of $500,000, and Laird was the program administrator and loan negotiator until stepping down in 2009.

 

Laird is an impressive embodiment of right livelihood: multiple times through his adult life, he has identified something that is needed, not being currently done, and that he’s inspired to do. After making up the position as a volunteer, he’s been able to demonstrate the value of the work and then get it funded on an ongoing basis. As a result of honing this ability, the mix of his work life contains a high percentage of things he really enjoys doing and are congruent with his core values. With all of his cooperative economic experience to draw on, Laird served on the economic dimension staff for the first full US delivery of the ecovillage education curriculum in 2008.

 

Laird is best known in the US as a cooperative group process consultant and teacher. After 24 years in the field, he has been focusing much more heavily on writing and teaching the last eight years. In particular, he’s pioneered a two-year program in facilitation training that is mostly based on coaching students facilitating live meetings, and has turned out a number of professional consensus-oriented facilitators. He’s written hundreds of pages of material for that course–which has been delivered four times, with three other trainings now underway–and is a regular contributor to Communities magazine. All that writing is currently—slowly—being reshaped into his first book.

Email Laird at: laird (at) ic (dot) org

Tony Sirna

Ecological and Economic Teaching Staff

is a co-founder of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. During his 17 years working with Dancing Rabbit he has had a hand in almost all aspects of ecovillage design and implementation. In the physical realm he has built two strawbale homes, installed multiple off-grid electrical systems, converted vehicles to run on vegetable oil, helped design the Dancing Rabbit Common House, designed and built roads and drainage within the village, designed and built a roof water catchment system and cistern as well as a constructed wetland for grey water, and has served on the village’s Land Use Planning committee for years. He is currently working on creating village scale energy systems including a micro-grid with the potential for village scale wind, PV, and solar thermal systems.

 

Socially, Tony is an experienced facilitator and mediator and serves on the DR Process Team and Conflict Resolution team and has been instrumental in developing the systems, policies, and culture at Dancing Rabbit. His willingness to crunch the numbers has been a boon to DR both in terms of ecological analysis and financial and economic planning.

 

Tony’s community experience extends far beyond Dancing Rabbit. He has served on the board of the Fellowship for Intentional Community since 1997, was the project coordinator on two print editions of the Communities Directory, and has managed the Intentional Communities website and Online Communities Directory since 2004. His FIC work has given him encyclopedic knowledge of the communities movement and his travels have taken him to dozens of communities throughout North America.

 

When Tony is not making spreadsheets or researching renewable energy he can be found on the Ultimate Frisbee field, in the dance hall blues dancing with his partner Rachel, or listening to the Grateful Dead while cooking Ethiopian or Indian food for his co-op. He is fascinated by the natural world at Dancing Rabbit and takes pleasure in birding and nature walks.

 

Sara Peters

Morning Program Co-Coordinator, World View, Social and Ecological Teaching Staff

In her daily life, Sara endeavors to expand health and healing in her mind, body and spirit. She has been practicing yoga and exploring various forms of energy work for over 12 years. Central to her yoga practice is an element of honoring self, community, the Earth and the Universe. It is her goal to offer students time to listen to the messages their bodies have to share and open to the deep connections that can be found through looking within. Energy work can be another way of exploring these things.

 

Since moving to Dancing Rabbit 8 years ago, Sara has designed and built multiple buildings, tended a huge garden that feeds her family and others in the village, birthed a daughter, and become a midwife’s apprentice. She is excited to share her varied knowledge in these areas with folk attending the ecovillage education course at Dancing Rabbit.

Ted Sterling

Ecological Teaching Staff

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.

Mark Mazziotti

Ecological Dimension Teaching Staff

Mark Mazziotti grew up in New Jersey, studied studio arts at the University of Pittsburgh and got a masters in communications design from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Then he packed up his VW Rabbit and drove to San Francisco where he spent 16 years as an art director for Public Media Center. During this time he helped nonprofit organizations shape campaigns on issues such as environmental protection, social justice, women’s advocacy, corporate responsibility, and AIDS education. As rewarding as this was, staring at a computer for so long made his head spin, so he started to search for a way to get outside.

 

In 2003 Mark went to a natural building gathering in New Mexico where he was baptized in the mud and born again. Cob building (mud, sand and straw) was taking root thanks to a Welsh teacher named Ianto Evans. The revival of straw bale building was about ten years old and growing strong. Mark saw in these materials the possibility to develop a holistic livelihood that included his interests in art, architecture, social justice and education.

 

In 2004, Mark apprenticed with Michael Smith and Daryl Berlin at the Emerald Earth Sanctuary in Boonville, CA. Over the past eight years he has worked with some of the most respected folks in the natural building community, teaching and building in places ranging from Sedona to South Africa. He has experience with many building techniques including straw bale, cob, adobe, earth bag, earthen floors, earth and lime plasters, living roofs, reciprocal roofs, pallet trusses and conventional carpentry.

 

Little did he know that a tiny town in Missouri would be his destiny. But that’s where you’ll find him. Building community, building a homestead, and building a family. Whenever he gets a break Mark can often be found heading up the band for community square dances. He plays guitar, banjo, ultimate frisbee and ice hockey, practices Vipassana meditation, loves to swim in cold water, and is very excited about the cordwood sauna that he’s currently working on.

 

Jeff Clearwater

Economics Dimension Teaching Staff

Jeff Clearwater has been playing, working and creating in the field of intentional community and appropriate technology for many years with a special passion for whole systems design and how communities create and share wealth. Jeff received a B.S. degree in Solar and Alternative Energy Engineering from the Evergreen State College in 1979 and went on to be an integral part of the creation of the present solar and electric vehicle industries through the founding of 5 renewable energy design and installation businesses and serving on the Boards of 7 not-for-profits over 34 years.

 

Jeff cofounded and presently serves on the Council for the Ecovillage Network of the Americas (ENA) and was Ecovillage Director at Sirius Community for 6 years.  Jeff helped found Living Routes, Study Abroad in Ecovillages and has provided appropriate technology and renewable energy consulting, design and installation for ecovillages, rural villages, governments and sustainability projects all over the world including Nepal, Sri Lanka, Columbia, Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, Sweden, Turkey and Spain. Jeff has taught sustainability through the United Nations’ CIFAL program and taught appropriate technology and new paradigm economics in permaculture and ecovillage design courses in numerous venues over 16 years. Jeff now strives in his learning and teaching to go beyond sustainability into regenerative and new paradigm knowledge, wisdom and practices.

 

Though still very active in the renewable energy world, Jeff’s present passion is illuminating a new paradigm for community economics – believing strongly that ecological sustainability and regeneration cannot be reached in the context of the present economic system. Grounded in the study of sacred economics and a life-long love of imagining post-capitalist futures, Jeff is now on tour developing and presenting “Community Economics as a Path of the Heart” – a work that strives to make visible and evolve the inherent wisdom of intentional community economic systems and apply it to the world at large.

 

When not actively engaging in intentional community work, Jeff finds himself in wilderness – intentionally losing his mind along the rivers and beaches of northern California or hiking the trails of the Pacific Northwest. He also finds time to visit his daughter and 3 grandkids to love them up and be reminded of who the real teachers are.

 

Jeff is presently part of a intentional community formation group on Ashland, OR and also (somehow) finds time to tour ecovillages in the U.S., Canada and Europe exploring community economics and social dynamics while also managing to install a solar energy system or two.

Jeff’s passions can be explored at www.visionarycommons.org  – jeffc at ic dot org

Sandy Griffin

World View Teaching Staff

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.

Alyssa Martin

World View teaching staff

is a Certified Professional Midwife who has been blessed to attend women in birth since 2000. After living and practicing in Colorado and Oregon, she brought her homebirth practice to Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in 2006. Alyssa not only serves women and families in the tri-communities area of Rutledge, MO, but also serves the wider population of NE Missouri. Seeing birth and death as part of a fluid continuum, Alyssa has also explored the role of midwife for the end of life transition. Alyssa attended a hospice volunteer training in 2003, currently hosts the “Day of the Dead” ritual/celebration at Dancing Rabbit, and has had her own share of life experiences involving death.

 

In addition to practicing as a midwife, Alyssa has also helped trained new midwives and currently has her first long-term apprentice. Alyssa, her partner, Bear, and their 4-year old son, Zane, recently moved into their new strawbale home, the second house she helped design and build. Beyond her work, Alyssa enjoys playing ultimate frisbee, gardening, cooking, exploring spirituality, living sustainably and circling with women.

Bill Pfeiffer

World View Teaching Staff, Practicum  Leader

Bill  Pfeiffer is a maverick deep ecologist and cultural engineer.  In 1990, he founded Sacred Earth Network (SEN), a visionary  not-for-profit  environmental advocacy group.

With SEN he  traveled extensively  in Siberia and North America collaborating with indigenous elders and shamans on a wide variety of issues.  He kept asking  the question: how can people live differently  so we stop destroying the Earth?” Whenever he returned to his forest base in central Massachusetts he led numerous shamanic, “culture change”  workshops attempting to answer that question. He brought decades of counseling and meditation experience into the mix, and the results–evidenced by the glowing testimonials of the participants– were remarkable. Their positive experience was the catalyst for the book he is currently writing; Wild Earth, Wild Soul: A Manual for an Ecstatic Culture.

Cathy Pedevillano

World View teaching staff

Cathy Pedevillano is Shamanic Healer and Teacher, Visionary Lightworker, wildlife biologist and founder of Heart Of Shamanism. Cathy is committed to sharing the teachings and practices of shamanism to bring balance and healing to the world. Through her work, she supports people in becoming more connected, conscious, whole and empowered. For the past 20 years, she has facilitated individual and group healing sessions, shamanic trainings, classes, workshops, JourneyCircles and travel to sacred sites. She has empowered hundreds of people to transform themselves and their lives and find their true calling. Cathy is based in western Massachusetts and also has a healing practice in New York City.

 

Cathy developed the curriculum for a 3-year Shamanic Training called “Awakening Your Power, Passion and Truth” which she currently teaches. She also co-created a co-leads a workshop called “Healing Self, Healing Earth” which combines deep ecology processes with shamanic journeying and ritual. Cathy is a trained facilitator of “Council of All Beings” workshops and has worked with Joanna Macy and John Seed.

 

Cathy awakened to her shamanic path twenty-two years ago during a time of intense spiritual growth. The teachings and practices of shamanism accelerated her own healing journey and resonated with her at a deep soul level. Cathy was told by an Ecuadorian shaman that she was “born a shaman” meaning she came into this life with many of her gifts intact, and had been a shaman in other lives. She was born with a caul, a thin veil over the body, which in some indigenous cultures is a mystical sign of psychic powers.

 

In the early 1990’s, Cathy was a shamanic apprentice for three years with Jim and Sherry Husfelt’s “Spirit of the Warrior” training. During that time she worked with Salish shamans Vince and Mom Stogan, Lakota Elder Grandfather Wallace Black Elk, and
shamans in Hawaii and Mexico. She has also worked with Brooke Medicine Eagle and John Perkins. Cathy studied energy healing with Anamika Neitlich, Clearing Work with Suzanne Robinson and LuMarian Healing with Elizabeth Lawrence. Her clairvoyance and healing abilities have been recognized by Altan Erdeni, a Siberian Shaman and Anna Maria Perez, an Apache/Mayan/Aztec Medicine Woman. Cathy has received much wisdom from the teachings of native cultures but most of her guidance comes from her Higher Self, Spirit Guides and Mother Earth.

 

Cathy began her professional life as a wildlife biologist, receiving a B.S. and M.S. in this field. She has worked as a wildlife biologist, wetlands scientist and environmental educator for a variety of state, federal, and private organizations such as the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Massachusetts Audubon Society, and Northfield Mountain. She has also taught outdoor leadership and teambuilding programs to children and adults. For eleven years, Cathy worked as a consultant to Sacred Earth Network, a nonprofit environmental organization, where she coordinated several exchanges of indigenous people from Siberia and the U.S., initiated a project to help save endangered snow leopards in Eurasia, and taught deep ecology workshops.

 

Cathy is committed to peace and healing for herself, the Earth and all beings. She believes that through the revival of ancient shamanic practices and an Earth-honoring worldview, we can create a more harmonious and sustainable existence on planet Earth.

 

To Contact Cathy: cathy (at) heartofshamanism (dot) com

www.heartofshamanism.com