Staff & Board of Directors

Interlace Commons Staff

Meghan Giroux, MSc.

Founding Executive Director

Meghan is an agroforestry practitioner, service provider, and researcher with two decades of experience growing perennial crops in agricultural and nursery settings. Through her company, Interlace Agroforestry Farm LLC, and funding support from the USDA and the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, Meghan is developing a sixty-acre demonstration site that exemplifies ancient and modern forms of agroforestry, including the five USDA-defined practices. Meghan is the co-author of two forthcoming manuals on agroforestry. She has been a visiting lecturer at Yale School of the Environment. She is committed to using her natural resource management background to help land stewards protect and improve ecosystem function, increase biodiversity, and identify ways to improve land-based livelihood strategies.

Rand Hagenstein

Associate Director

Rand Hagenstein is an ecologist who has worked in non-profit leadership, conservation, and natural resource research and analysis in northern ecosystems for over 30 years. He comes to Interlace Commons from Regeneration North, Inc., where he served as co-owner and Chief Strategist, working on projects to promote natural climate solutions, food security, and ecological and community resilience. His previous posts include more than two decades at the helm of The Nature Conservancy, Alaska, where he served as Director of Conservation and then State Director. He is also currently the co-owner of Ebb Tide Ocean Farm, a start-up kelp farm in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay.

Research Fellow - Unfilled Position

Eli Roberts, MF.

Technical Service Provider

Eli has a background in forestry and farming, focusing on ecological forest management and agroforestry systems. He is particularly interested in silvopasture and conservation biocontrol. He has helped forest landowners upgrade their management plans to enroll in NRCS programs and developed watershed-scale forest conservation strategies with NGOs. Eli has written a guide to managing forests in a changing climate and a book chapter on agroforestry for the Northeast. He attended Villanova and Yale for his degrees in Psychology and Forestry. He has been a teacher, social worker, gardener, project manager, and part-time chestnut orchardist. He loves watching sheep eat leaves from a row of coppiced mulberries.

Jess Reid, B.S.

Farm and Administrative Coordinator

Jess Reid has been a farmer, Peace Corps Volunteer, and Program Director for an urban gardening organization. She graduated from Saint Michael's College after studying anthropology, focusing on farming and food systems. After her academic experience, Jess pursued meaningful work on understanding how people cultivate and grow food, fuel, and fiber. As an Agriculture Extension Agent in Madagascar, she worked with farmers to facilitate regional tree plantings focused on erosion mitigation while providing educational opportunities for local schools. She loves engaging in community-focused solutions that support the land and the people and communities stewarding it.

Rafter Ferguson, Ph.D.

JEDI Consultant

Rafter is a researcher and educator focusing on diversified farms, grassroots farmer networks, and justice and equity issues in agriculture. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois and postdoctoral work at the University of Lisbon and Haverford College, he spent three years in the Food and Environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. There he worked on projects addressing racial equity in agriculture, helped steward relationships with grassroots partners and tribal organizations, authored blogs including Why We Can’t Separate Justice and Sustainability in the Food System, and led reports on the impacts of farmland consolidation on Black farmers and new farmers, and on the impacts of climate change on farmworkers.

Ruth Tyson

JEDI Consultant

A plant-lover and naturalist, Ruth has invested in understanding her curiosity and passion for sustainable food as a bridge between the natural and social worlds. After studying Sociology and Environmental Studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, she committed to building a sovereign, sustainable, transparent, and just local food economy for Black and Brown communities like the food apartheid that impacted her childhood neighborhood. She believes in the power of research, storytelling, art, personal transformation, and organizing as necessary healing modalities for individuals, communities, and ecosystems. ruth brings a Black queer ecofeminist framework to the gardening/farming, education, advocacy, nutrition, food service, food retail, and foraging worlds of the DMV and nationally. Ruth is creating digital content, hosting plant walks, and consulting for local and regional food and farm organizations to pollinate transformative ideas and relationships to heal land and people.

Interlace Commons Board of Directors

Carrie Baker Stahler

Carrie Stahler is currently the Government & Public Affairs Officer at the Vermont Foodbank, where she makes connections between food access, community, and local food. Previously, she has worked in agriculture, the outdoor industry, and the nonprofit human services sector in marketing and communications roles. She has volunteered for a number of nonprofit organizations focused on making Vermont a better place to live, work, and play for everyone. She lives with her husband, children, dog, and an ever-changing number of chickens on an organic farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom.

Jennie Blair, MD, M.S., Natural Resources Candidate

Jenny Blair, MD, is a journalist, writer, editor, and current candidate for the agroforestry masters at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her writing has appeared in many venues, including Medscape, New Scientist, Discover, and the Hartford Courant. Educated at the Yale School of Medicine, she trained in emergency medicine at the University of Chicago and earned teaching and humanitarian awards. As an emergency physician, she cared for patients in Chicago, the Northeast, and Haiti; she also led medical-student workshops in Vermont and taught physicians in Indonesia. She runs workshops in narrative medicine at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences Center.

Deeply interested in sustainable and regenerative food systems and healthy ecosystems, Jenny earned her permaculture design certificate in 2016. She completed Vermont's Master Composter course and has dabbled in conventional, organic, and hydroponic farming; thermal- and vermicomposting; blacksmithing; green woodworking; rocket stoves; fermentation; scything; dry stone walling; tree pruning; foraging; thatching; and other permaculture-related and -adjacent techniques. She also completed Dr. Elaine Ingham's Soil Foodweb online training. She loves spending time on farms and hopes to become an agroforestry professional upon completing her master's degree.

Jonathon McRay, M.A.

Jonathan is a farmer, facilitator, and writer in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He grew up in Central Appalachia and worked in Israel/Palestine and Mozambique before returning home to take responsibility for his life and history. Jonathan has worked on farms with action research initiatives and grassroots coalitions and was a founding member of Vine and Fig, a sustainable living center for education, supportive housing, and community organizing. He is co-founder and caretaker of Silver Run Forest Farm, a riparian nursery and folk school rooted in love and living soil, committed to remediating the toxins that pollute our souls, society, and soil, from chemical leaching to white supremacy. Jonathan teaches workshops and classes on cultural ecology and restorative justice. He facilitates and consults with groups and organizations to transform conflict, understand power and oppression, and shape liberating visions and decisions through the Cambium Collective. Jonathan has a master’s degree in Conflict Transformation and Restorative Justice. He is a member of Soul Fire Farm's Speakers Collective, where he