my story
Born and raised in Hickory, North Carolina, I moved to Richmond, Indiana to attend Earlham College for my undergraduate degree. As a student, I worked at both the Richmond Friends School (RFS) as a classroom and after school assistant, and the Joseph Moore Museum, our very own on campus natural history museum. I thought I would become a field scientist, traveling the globe and studying ecology. I changed my mind when I started working in the preK/K classroom at RFS. There, the lead teacher had a background in field biology, but she used it to ground many natural history, gardening, and cooking projects with her students. This, I decided, was what I wanted to do—teach.
Four years later, I graduated having studied field biology in Peru, Tanzania, and at the American Museum of Natural History’s Southwestern Field Station and interning at several garden education non profits. After several months working on That Guy’s Family Farm in Clinton County, Ohio, a position with FoodCorps in Guilford County brought me back home to North Carolina. Under the supervision of former Guilford County Cooperative Extension Director Karen Neill, I spent two years working in four title-1 elementary schools—managing their school gardens, teaching hands-on NC standards-aligned gardening and cooking lessons, and connecting local produce to their cafeterias.
In 2014, I secured a teaching position in the permaculture gardening program at Greensboro Montessori School (GMS). In my first year, I was charged with extending the permaculture program to the after school classrooms. Mostly working with children ages 3-6, I successfully demonstrated an ability to captivate students through hands-on learning with the help of Greensboro Montessori’s incredible edible landscape.
In my tenure at GMS, I earned my Permaculture Design Certification from Dr. Charlie Headington and Abby Piner, using it to design new and existing learning spaces around campus. I was promoted to Lead Environmental Educator after only two years. My days at GMS consisted of teaching children aged 3-12 outdoor, ecological, garden-based “seed-to-table” lessons following Montessori philosophy. I also led the environmental education team toward meeting weekly, monthly, and yearly goals for campus garden management, curriculum, and special events, and participated in the maintenance of 3 main campus gardens, totaling about an acre of managed land. I managed our annual programatic budget and was consistently awarded grants that sustained and supported the student experience of the gardens. I engaged volunteers and families in garden programming, including workdays and ongoing volunteer opportunities.
I left Greensboro in fall of 2019 to live in Durham, North Carolina with my partner (a Montessori P.E. teacher). I currently work at Montessori School of Durham as Director of Auxiliary Programs. I am also a graduate student in the Agriculture and Extension Education program at NC State University. I enjoy biking, kayaking, birdwatching, beekeeping, gardening, and babysitting my toddler niece.
