Staff

Founder and Director of Wild Abundance; Instructor for Permaculture & Gardening, Carpentry & Natural Building, Homesteading, Foraging & Medicine Making, Women’s Empowerment, and Primitive Skills.

Natalie is the visionary behind Wild Abundance, as well as the founder, director, and a primary instructor for many classes. She also dreams up new classes, is a big part of curriculum development, manages the campus, designs buildings, and takes beautiful photos for the website. Natalie is passionate about teaching and sharing skills to help all kinds of people live in an empowered and Earth-centered way. This includes her staff, and the skills of running a cooperative and sustainable values-based business.  

In 2008 Natalie founded the Firefly Gathering, an earthskills gathering focused on bringing people together to teach and learn. Under Natalie’s management, Firefly became the most well-attended event of its kind in the country, and the only one that was led by a woman. Natalie felt a strong desire to see the impact of sharing these skills with people throughout the year, not just at a once-a-year event, so in 2010 she founded Wild Abundance. 

At its inception, the school was a one-woman show with the goal of teaching people important skills (and earning enough of a living to keep doing that). As Wild Abundance has grown and matured, Natalie has embraced her role as a leader and an ecologically and socially minded business person (this has been challenging, given her anti establishment, anti-capitalist, and anarchist background). She now works collaboratively with her beloved staff to create and innovate so that Wild Abundance can be wildly successful at embodying and spreading its core values and grow it’s influence as an inspiring force of positive change in the world.  

Natalie and her family live at the Wild Abundance homestead campus in the Southern Appalachians. She balances her time between managing the logistics of the school, teaching, tending the garden, building, playing with her daughter and partner, visiting wild places, connecting with her community, and basking in the beauty of nature. Click here to read more about Natalie’s life and adventures. 

Marketing and Project Manager

Amy is a former suburbanite who’s found solace in the rolling hills of rural Appalachia. She joined the Wild Abundance team in January 2018 and is energized by working to spread the word about this special school and empower others with Earth-based knowledge. She’s honored to support Wild Abundance in its mission to teach skills that are our birthright as human beings inhabiting planet Earth.

Blog and Newsletter Writer, Instructor for Nutrition, Gardening, and Wildcrafting

Chloe writes for Wild Abundance’s blog, newsletter, and website.  In addition, she cooks for some classes, teaches a few others, and jumps in to help out with management and strategy. These roles give her a welcome outlet for the knowledge and excitement she perpetually cultivates around land-based living and a positive future for the planet.  Along with working at Wild Abundance, Chloe magically juggles co-managing a 23 acre homestead and small-scale dairy, parenting, lifelong learning, and maintaining meaningful relationships.  She majored in Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz.  There, she deepened her inborn passion for real food and social justice. For 10 years before landing at her own homestead in Western North Carolina, she explored many manifestations of “sustainable community” all over the world.  In addition to growing and preparing food, she loves cultivating, foraging and utilizing medicinal plants and mushrooms.

Administrator and Bookkeeper

Hannah grew up in the city of Boston, but eventually moved to a much smaller, rural town in Western Massachusetts.  There, she fell in love with sustainable farming and a do-it-yourself lifestyle.   She also found a sense of hope in the extensive and thriving social networks of grassroots farmers, artists, musicians, and activists in her community.  This inspired her to learn more about sustainability and DIY living.  She wanted to grow her capacity to make positive changes at a community level.

When Hannah moved to Asheville to learn more about permaculture, she stumbled upon Wild Abundance.  While she came for the permaculture, she found much more than that.  Wild Abundance’s inspired and passionate mission that’s deeply rooted in real community really spoke to Hannah.  Furthermore, she found the organization overrun with wise and experienced folks who live what they teach and are just great people on top of that.  To Hannah, Wild Abundance represents all the things that make her hopeful that positive, personal, and community-level change is possible and already happening.  What started out as a work-trade relationship to help her cover the cost of classes turned into a career move.