Faculty

Kendall Dunnigan M.A.

Kendall Dunnigan, a native of the San Francisco North Bay area, has a deep love of and commitment to the beauty and health of the natural world she grew up in. This finds expression in her work as an artist, educator, designer, agro-ecologist and community organizer. She empowers her students with ecologically-based insights and examples of solutions, while providing them a critical analysis of the power dynamics in society as it relates to her areas of focus: permaculture design and sustainable land management, the intersection between ecological sustainability and social justice, sustainability education theory and pedagogy, school and community gardening, community food security, popular education, and community power and democratic engagement. Her students not only receive knowledge of potential solutions, they become infused with her infectious inspiration to get out and become change agents.

She is the director of and core faculty in the Sustainable Communities BA major in the Pathways Degree Completion Program at Dominican University of California in San Rafael, CA and faculty at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) in their Permaculture Design Certificate program. Kendall is a co-founder of Permacopia, a permaculture consulting firm (http://permacopiadesign.com).

Formerly, Kendall was the executive director of the Berkeley Community Gardening Collaborative and the director and lead instructor for University of California Cooperative Extension Service Master Gardeners Program in Alameda County. She has worked as a youth outdoor environmental educator for many years, including at Walker Creek Ranch, Ocean Song Farm and Wilderness Center. She was the lead research librarian and permaculture instructor at an international NGO called Altertec in Guatemala. Kendall co-authored Growing Communities: How to Build Communities Through Community Gardening, which outlines how community gardening is a community building process and public health strategy (with both the theoretical understanding and application of how to do it included).

She not only teaches about community, but lives it as a co-creator in a rural intentional community at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in the western part of Sonoma County. When she and her family are not gardening, they are frolicking in the wildlands of North America, urban and rural.

Carol Venolia M.Arch. 

Carol Venolia is an eco-architect with a passion for restoring the connections between humans and the rest of life through harmonious environmental design. Her latest book, Natural Remodeling for the Not-So-Green House (with Kelly Lerner), is a beautiful, practical guide to bringing existing homes into harmony with nature. Named a Green Design Trailblazer by Natural Home Magazine, she has designed numerous context-responsive homes of straw, earth, and “good wood” and consulted on greening schools, healing centers, camps, and eco-villages. She also pens the “Design for Life” column for Natural Home Magazine and is the author of Healing Environments: Your Guide to Indoor Well-Being. In addition to teaching EcoDwelling in the Sustainable Communities major at Dominican, she teaches at the Golden Gate School of Feng Shui and the EcoGreen Realtor training and lectures nationwide.

Miriam Volat M.S.

Miriam is committed to participating in the creation of sustainable communities. Her primary areas of work are in agroecology, ethnoecology, community building, the regeneration of sustainable culture, facilitation, intergenerational, interdisciplinary education and projects in healthy food system creation. She has worked on researching methods for reducing groundwater pollution, biological agriculture education, self-sustaining local agriculture, cultural preservation, permaculture, community/organizational development and facilitation with in the food system. Her M.S. is in Vegetable Crops with an emphasis on soil biology and nutrient cycling in organic systems from UC Davis. She serves on the board of One Heart Many Rythums, a cultural preservation organization, and enjoys working internationally in such places as Thailand, Peru, Mexico and Cuba.

Adjunt Faculty

Richard Heinberg

Richard Heinberg is the author of nine award-winning books including The Party’s Over: Oil War and the Fate of Industrial Societies; Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World; The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse; Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines; and Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last Energy Crisis. He is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators. He is a recipient of the M. King Hubbert Award for excellence in energy education, and since 2002 has given over 300 lectures on fossil fuel depletion to audiences around the world. Richard is the founder of the Sustainable Communities BA major and teaches the Cultural Ecology courses for first-year Sustainable Community students at Dominican University of California.

Dave Henson

Dave Henson is a founder and the Executive Director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC), an education and training institute set on 80 acres of organic gardens, orchards and wildlands in western Sonoma County, in Northern California. Dave’s responsibilities include coordinating OAEC’s 30 staff; program development and fundraising; and directing OAEC’s Ecological Agriculture and Sustainable Food Systems Program.

He is also a co-founder of several state and national projects including the Wild Farm Alliance – a national project bringing together farmers and environmentalists to enhance biological diversity on farm landscapes; Genetic Engineering Policy Alliance – a statewide coalition of farming, food safety and public health organizations; and the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy.

Dave also serves as adjunct faculty in both the B.A. major in Sustainable Communities at Dominican University of California, where he teaches courses on Globalization, Governance, Organizational and Strategic Planning, Facilitation and Public Speaking, Intentional Communities, and Social Movement History.

Previous to co-founding OAEC in 1994, Dave worked as a project director for several national and international organizations, including the Highlander Research and Education Center in rural Tennessee, the National Toxics Campaign in Boston, Greenpeace in Latin America, the Central Europe Community Organizer Exchange throughout Central Europe, and the Environmental Project on Central America and Earth Island Institute, both in San Francisco.

Over the past 25 years Dave has led over 400 community organizing and organizational development training programs for environmental, social justice and other groups, and has spoken to hundreds of community, government and university audiences in more than 40 U.S. states and 20 countries. He is also the author of numerous articles and reports.

Dave studied sociology and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and law at New College of California, School of Law.

OAEC’s programs include the Horticultural Biodiversity Program, for which we curate a living seed collection of some 3000 varieties of food and medicinal crops; the School Garden Program, which has helped establish over 100 school gardens and accompanying curriculum in Northern California public schools; the Water Institute, which has helped establish 30 watershed restoration groups throughout Northern California; and the Permaculture program, which has trained and certified over 500 permaculture students.

Guest Instructors

Brock Dolman

Brock Dolman is a co-founder of the Sowing Circle LLC intentional community and the Director of OAEC's WATER Institute and Permaculture Program. He is a wildlife biologist and permaculture, watershed and habitat restoration educator and consultant. Since 1995 under Brock’s direction, the OAEC Permaculture Program has become nationally recognized as a leading permaculture education and innovative demonstration center. He has co-taught over 32 permaculture certificate trainings and recently returned from teaching in Brazil for the 8th International Permaculture Course/Conference & Convergence. He has been actively involved in coastal Californian watershed community organizing and education activities for over 10 years. He has facilitated OAEC’s Basins of Relations four-day residential training since 2000, which has resulted in the formation of 27 community-based watershed groups in Northern and Central California.
 
He has been appointed to the Board of the Sonoma County Fish & Wildlife Commission and also serves on the Santa Rosa Junior College’s Natural Resources Management Department’s advisory board. Brock frequently provides public workshops and works directly with numerous community based watershed literacy education programs and regional watershed groups. Brock has spoken at numerous conferences such as Bioneers, EcoFarm, HOPES, Village Building Convergence, GreenPrints and SolFest. He has been on national radio programs, published nationally distributed articles on permaculture and watersheds, and widely lectures at local universities, colleges, environmental forums, civic clubs, and public political meetings. 
 
As a professional wildlife biologist, Brock has specialized in endangered species, specifically amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. In 1992 he completed his BA, graduating with honors from the University of California Santa Cruz. He specialized in wildlife, native vegetation communities and natural history with the Biology Department, and in agroecology and conservation biology with the Environmental Studies Department. From 1984 to 1987 he studied organic horticulture and landscape design at Cabrillo College in Aptos, CA. As the sole proprietor of ChemFree Landscaping, he specialized in the design and installation of organic edible and native plant landscapes.

Chas Moore

Chas Moore spent a lifetime cultivating his understanding of food from the haute kitchens of France to the organic gardens of California as a chef, restaurateur, gardener, designer, teacher, lecturer, writer and consultant. He currently heads Seeds to Sauce, www.seedstosauce.com, a garden based culinary arts school integrating ecological, healthy, local food systems with a heart-centered spiritual philosophy.  Love, gardens, chaos (even chaos theory), restaurants and ecology all sprout up in his talks, classes and demonstrations which he’s given in environments from the Telluride Wine Festival to the Ecological Farming Conference to New College of California. Chas's deep relationship with OAEC is multifaceted in addition to having taught in several classes he spent almost every Wednesday for seven years helping in the gardens and orchards.