Juliana Bedoya
Born in the Colombian Andes, Juliana Bedoya is a community-engaged environmental artist who supports individuals and community groups to establish their own cultural significance through skill sharing, including all stages of ethically harvesting and processing raw plant materials for art-making and environmental art practice. Respectfully using ancestral skills and traditional knowledge that navigates across cultures, and mainly working with garden trims or the so-called “invasive plants”, this work also aims to support local ecological restoration that fosters native ecology. Through Plants Are Teachers, she invites individuals to seek opportunities to creatively connect with their local landscape while cultivating reciprocal relationships with the land and people. Providing educational opportunities as entry points to interact with plants as teachers and more-than-human beings who carry intrinsic knowledge, Juliana invites people to explore different technologies to interrelate with the territories they inhabit for an ongoing search for relationship with the natural world.
plantsareteachers.org / @julianabedoya /@plants_are_teachers
Jordan Benner
Jordan is a professional forester and forest ecologist with a PhD from Simon Fraser. Through his role as an advisor with the Nanwakolas Council over the past decade, Jordan provides technical and strategic support to member First Nations. Much of this work focuses on generating knowledge about the status, trends, and distributions of culturally important forest resources in the member First Nations’ territories and then using this information to develop stewardship strategies. Jordan was born and raised on Quadra Island but currently lives in Cumberland. He also loves picking and eating mushrooms!
Kent Brothers
Kent Brothers is an amateur mycologist who has had a keen interest in biodiversity in general and macrofungi in particular for 25 years, not only in the Pacific Northwest but also in the neotropics. Through guided walks in forests he enjoys sharing knowledge of the extensive diversity of fungi in ecosystems and the valuable roles that they play in the environment. He participated in and prepared the final report for a 5-year inventory of fungi in Manning Park (640 species — http://www.vanmyco.com/Documents/ManningFungiTaxonomic.htm) and has for several years been working on a comprehensive list of the several thousand fungi reported to occur in the province of BC (http://brothers.ca/Kent/BiotaLists/BCFungi.htm).
Dawn Copeman
Dawn is an avid forest explorer, community historian, artist, photographer and ‘naturalist in residence’ for the Cumberland Community Forest Society with a passion for the wild side of the forest including the incredible worlds of slime molds and lichens.
Corvee Foragers
Vanessa Sharkey and Cory Cliff have created a powerhouse of a venture that both revives indigenous traditional medicines and allows others to accompany them and learn how to harvest, process and create these medicines in sustainable and respectful ways. They share their knowledge everywhere we go.
Erik Hrabovsky
Erik Hrabovsky deeply bowed to the wisdom of the mycological queendom back in 2016 when his Free the Fungi Mushroom Co concept was conceived. Forming such a partnership with mycelium seemed only natural after witnessing them restore habitats, combat drought, clean water, cycle nutrients, build soil, remove pollutants, and introduce symbiotic relations for other life.
Philippa Joly
Philippa has been a nature educator and a clinical/ community herbalist for the past 15 years, combining her love of nature and medicinal plants to offer adults and children meaningful and healing connections to the wild world. She has run Salix School, an outdoor school for children for the past 5 years and Bright Moon Botanicals, her herbal consultation and medicine making business for the past 12 years. She offers ongoing workshops in local medicinal and edible plants, sensory awareness, animals and bird song, nature connection, herbal medicine making and more. Bringing an anti-colonial and community awareness to her work and life, Philippa’s workshops and classes are engaged, playful and hands-on. She has recently published the best selling book “A Kid’s Guide to Plants of the Pacific Northwest”
Jenn Laing
Jenn is a middle school and art teacher and amateur mycologist raising two kids with sensitivity and curiosity in the world of fungus and nature. Her family lives in Cumberland and regularly walks the forest in search of weird and wonderful biodiversity it is home to.
Natasha (Tasha) Lavdovsky
Natasha (Tasha) Lavdovsky (she/they) is an artist/amateur lichenologist with a passion for integrating ecological activism into their artistic practice. For 13 years Natasha has been experimenting with integrating environmental stewardship and anti-colonial perspectives into her video, performance, photography, installation, sound, and sculpture works. Natasha has spent most of her life on “Vancouver Island” and is grateful for her ongoing connections to the Territories of the W’SANEC, Lekwungen, Scia’new, T’Sou-ke, and Pacheedaht First Nations. Natasha holds a BA in Studio Art from Princeton University (studying earth sciences and visual arts), and she holds an MFA in Intermedia Studio Art from Concordia University, Montreal
Andy MacKinnon
Ecologist, author, activist and politician, Andy is renowned for his talents as an educator and is one of the modern architects of the widely-used biogeoclimatic forest classification system in British Columbia. His graduate research was in mycology and he is the co-author of six guidebooks to BC plants, and of the Royal BC Museum Handbook Mushrooms of British Columbia. His passion for the natural world persisted into a 30-year career as a forest ecologist. Andy is a retired registered professional forester and registered professional biologist. He still leads various field schools and guest lectures at post-secondary institutions and at Fungus Fests throughout the Pacific Northwest. Andy has an intimate understanding of BC’s coastal forests, how they have changed over time, and what is needed to safeguard them into the future.
Adrian Oberg
Adrian is a community consultant and counselor. He helped to found the Victoria Association for Psychedelic Studies in 2014 and has acted as Director since 2015. Through harm reduction work in the city core and at arts and music festivals, as well as in-depth personal experience, he developed a familiarity with altered states that led to a practice holding space with medicine in 2016. He completed the Chiron Academy training in 2020 and trained in Psilocybin Therapy with TheraPsil in 2021. Adrian holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Victoria and is currently completing an MA degree in Child and Youth Care.
Serena Olivera
As a professional wisdom keeper, Serena bridges the universal and transformational experiences of life cycle changes. In her career as a mentor she weaves ethnographic research with her own unique creative path after experiencing two open heart surgeries as a young child and many years of living off grid while raising children. Her dad came from India with strong guidance on living freely and with resiliency. This accompanied his stories of the impacts of attending a British boarding school, which sparked Serena’s research career to study how colonialism has affected childbirth and parenting practices around the world. She loves to explore human resiliency and innovative tools for community building and leadership.
Serena teaches various workshops and classes through the Town of Comox and her own business Honey Womb which she co-founded in 2024. She is a human birth ethnologist – an interpreter of the ethereal, writer, mentor and speaker. She has been a practicing doula and family wellness practitioner and researcher for over 20 years. Her goal is to provide healing and create spaces to to center in on and nurture our “Collective Womb Muscle” based on our ancestral connections and primal intuitive power as mammals.
Erik Piikkila
Erik is a Forest and Watershed Ecologist, Forest Technician, Silviculture Technician with an International Bachelor of Forestry in Finland and the University of Washington in Seattle. He is involved with an early October 2024 Vancouver Island Tour of the documentary Silvicola which is focused on our relationships with BC Forests and Forestry. He is currently developing a 2025 Fire Ecology course for UVic Continuing Studies that will have an ecosystem focus and provide an understanding of the “double edge” sword that is Fire Management and Forest Management.
Of interest to the Cumberland Community Forest, is Erik’s knowledge about Logging History and how that history has shaped Comox Valley Forests, and the legacies that are still being felt 100 years later. Erik has developed a concept he calls “Ecosystem Decoding” where reading the clues on the land is important to try and understand what has happened or changed in a forest over the decades and centuries.
Robert Pritchard
I continually question, if we are so interconnected with the surrounding non-human ecosystems, why should our death and biological decay be separated from those systems? Let’s discuss!
Kester Reid
Kes Lwin Reid is the co-founder and director of Fianna Wilderness School (www.fianna.ca), which brings nature connection schooling to kids and youth, and cultural work to adults focused on relationship to place, heritage, and soul. He is also a local musician and storyteller performing in two cultural acts, El Combo Cumbialandia, and Siarimis.
Ross Reid / Nerdy About Nature
Born & raised amongst the coastal forests of traditional Coast Salish territories, Ross has always been an active observer of the natural world around him who continually finds himself getting lost in the often glanced-over beauty of the ecosystems we play in – the resilient twists and turns of a tree, the formation of silt deposits and erosion, the persistence of moss on a decaying log…the little things. Over time, these observations shifted to see the trails compact and erode, waters waver and drift, and lands become modified and developed, jobs gained and lost, and local economies boom and bust. An acute awareness of our anthropocentric approach to the natural world and our blind dependence on it developed, and with that a desire to do better and inspire others to do the same. This love for the outdoors sparked a career in outdoor filmmaking, the desire to see our engagement in the world change for the better led him to pursue an MBA with emphasis on branding, and an appreciation for nature’s resilience led to decades of passion driven exploration, observation and research that have resulted in him becoming a bit of an ecological naturalist. Today, through blending this knack for nature nerdiness with his background in filmmaking and business, Ross works in science communications to effectively educate, constructively engage and inspire action today for a better, healthier world of tomorrow. Follow and learn from Ross on Instagram via @nerdyaboutnature.
RootZ - Wild Child RootZ
RootZ approaches life with the heart of a wild child. She carries 20+ years of listening lessons shared with beings of all ages and abilities. Through creative programs and wild open spaces across Canada, she influences the creation of kinaesthetic connection, alive with curiosity and rooted in relationship.
With a fearlessness to collaborate with a plethora of life-changing communities, she creates responsive programs, poems, camps and retreats devoted to deepening kinship with our expressive and connective self.
RootZ is currently creating earth-inspiring connections through farm and forest partnership and adult playshops in the Comox Valley. Find out about her fungus foraging and #JoySaturdays playshops @ facebook.com/wildchildrootz
Andi Grace Rose
Andi Grace Rose is an herbalist, forager doula and support worker. She makes herbal remedies, consults with clients one-on-one and teaches online and in-person. Her practice focuses on mental health, the motherhood continuum and local plant medicine. You can find her offerings at www.smokeandforage.ca
Heather Scott
My name is Heather Scott, and I have spent the last 10 years living somewhat nomadically, foraging and wild harvesting throughout British Columbia, and in my travels. I have been teaching about mushroom and native plant identification, sustainable harvesting and wild food preservation since 2018. Much of what I teach focuses on forging a relationship with, and an understanding of, our wild places and the deep connections ongoing within it. Honouring the importance of observing the natural cycles of plants, mushrooms and animals throughout the seasons to gain a better appreciation for all that surrounds us. *Heather is founder of Halcyon Wild Foods
Heather Soo
Heather Soo is a Professional Forester and fungus enthusiast. She is an active volunteer with the Canadian Institute of Forestry promoting forestry education through local initiatives on Vancouver Island including guiding walks in Campbell River in the Beaver Lodge Forest Lands. Heather is one of the founding members of the newly minted Mid Island Mycological Society (chapter of the South Vancouver Island Mycological Society)
Heather Thomson
Heather was born on Pentlatch- K’omoks First Nation territory, she is of Norwegian, Irish, English and Scottish descent. As the Cumberland Community Forest Society’s program coordinator she runs stewardship activities, education programs, volunteer management, and fundraising events. Find her on her bicycle zipping around Cumberland, playfully spreading radical ideas like building community through the arts, eating from dumpsters, and embracing transitions as a time to imagine and act towards collective liberation for human and non-human life!
Rhianna Walz & Richard
Rhianna: By surprise Rhianna fell completely in love and wonder with death, dying and grief work back in 2007 when she started her Hospice volunteer training. She feels blessed to sit with others and bear witness to their processes…. especially over tea and cake!
Richard has been a gardener since he was 5yrs. old and is still in awe of the circle of life. His connections with nature continue to be a source of joy and inspiration as he explores what it means to be human. He believes that the contemplation of what is called death is a path to greater fulfillment in life.