Rachel works to support those longing for change to imagine and grow all sorts of worlds. She helps artists and change-makers design spaces, systems, practices, and other encounters, all with a focus on creating systems that embody justice, access, and pleasure. Some of the ways she does this are as an educator, writer, gardener, seed-and-story saver, permaculture designer, artist, friend, sibling, daughter, descendant, community animal, and ecosystem member.

Rachel has always been interested in our capacity to create little worlds, right where we are. For over a decade, Rachel has studied and taught ecological gardening and farming, systems thinking, resilient design processes / change-making, writing & performance, permaculture, group facilitation, maker & homesteader crafts, and embodied nature connection skills. She loves to share and collaborate on these skills with people of all ages. She holds a master’s degree in Social Innovation and Sustainability from Goddard College, where her graduate work developed a framework of “Re-Storyation Design” for re-imagining the stories that live their way into our systems.

Rachel is a white, queer, bisexual, chronically ill, cisgender woman, currently residing in California’s bay area on unceded Ohlone land. She believes passionately in the necessity of, and relationship between, the pragmatic and the imaginative; in the senses as the bridge between self-body and world-body; and that we cannot talk about/with land and community without talking about justice, liberation, and thriving in the human and more-than human realms.

In the winter of 2012, Rachel had an unexpected conversation with a pottery kiln in the Sierra foothills. They chatted about what we might do about dish ware in the next world, and so the seed for an Index For The Next World was born.

Rachel brings her underlying theory of change to I4NW. It includes repair/reparation for the past, intervention/presence in the present, and re-imagining/re-implementing future systems and stories now, towards the thriving of all.