FACULTY PROFILES
Lisa Trocchia, PhD
2023-24 Courses
ENV57900 Food Systems
COR57550 Capstone
ENV57901 Critical Ethnography: Place, Identity, and Food
ENV57904 Sustainable Diets and Biodiversity
ENV57955 Values Chains
COR57550 Capstone
I use he/her/they pronouns. I coordinate the Master of Science degree program in Sustainable Food Systems at Prescott College and I teach in the MSFS program as well as the PhD in Sustainability Education program. I serve as an academic advisor, Capstone advisor, and on PhD Dissertation committees.
I've been developing curricula and teaching about sustainability and food systems in higher education for a decade. Before that, I spent 15 years ground-truthing the food movement from various perspectives that include growing chemical-free vegetables for the local farmers market, ethically harvesting wild foods, beekeeping, and creating herbal medicinals. I trained as a pastry chef and became a worker-owner in an organic bakery. I started several other successful local food-based micro-entreprises, served as co-director of the regional food policy council, and held leadership roles in non-profit organizations focused on food access, growing local food networks, and sustainable community development. Aside from a few years spent in the international corporate business world very early on, I began my career as an educator in public and private schools, K-12.
As an academic, I am a sensory ethnographer combining my background in the arts with research interests that include the performance of food, cultural foodways, and the modulation of affect embodied in food spaces. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I bring expertise in critical and political theory, communication studies, sociology, and the study of social networks and complex adaptive systems to my food systems perspectives. My Ph.D. is in the Social Ecology of Food from Ohio University and my Master's degree is in Sustainable Food Systems from Green Mountain College.
Active internationally in food systems networks and food justice initiatives, I also enjoy occasional opportunities to work as a consultant offering support for visual storytelling, sustainable tourism, social systems network design, communication, and education, and group facilitation to develop social structures that activate equity, collaboration, and self-organizing.
Melvina M. Brown EdD, MBA
2023 Course
ENV58500 Impact Measurement & Project Design
I go by Melvina (long I) and use she/her pronouns. I live in the US State of Pike Creek Delaware, which is part of the homelands of the Lenape who live in the US and Canada with historical territories of northeastern Delaware, all of New Jersey, the eastern Pennsylvania regions of the Lehigh Valley, New York Bay and Western Long Island and Hudson Valley. I grew up in the town of Historic New Castle and of both African American and Cherokee Indian descent. My great great grandmother was a medicine woman originating from the Carolinas the territories of the Cherokee. Through displacement in conjunction with the slave trade many of the Cherokee tribe were displaced into the Northeastern regions.
My journey has been both diverse as well as integrated; spending about 25 years in the corporate and consulting environments with a primary focus on Supply Chain Management, Technology and Finance; along with 15 years of combined experience in Academia, Food, Social, Environmental Justice and Holistic Healing. My education started in my home state of Delaware where I studied Accounting and Computer Science at Goldey Beacom College, receiving my B.S. in 1984. I then received my MBA and EdD from Wilmington University. Presently both an instructor in the Masters in Science in Food and Sustainability Program as well as a student in the PhD in Sustainability Education Program at Prescott; my research focuses on the intersection of Eco-Spirituality and Pedagogy in which I am due to complete May of 2024. In addition, I serve as the Co-chair of the Steering and Governance Committees for the Delaware Urban Food and Farm Coalition. I also act as a food and safety educator through the Chesapeake Innovation Center. As an urban permaculture homesteader and herbalist. medicine maker and beekeeper, I have a profound interest in wildcrafting and growing sustainable food and medicine, utilizing regenerative and indigenous practices.
My work experience has involved executive leadership roles in various organizations; community and social advocacy and holistic healing. In addition to my present teaching roles at Prescott and Goldey Beacom College; I serve as the Executive Director and Founder of InnerSource Wellness Center and Urban Regenerative Sustainability (www.innersourcewellnesscenter.com)
The center serves as both an education and healing center offering Permaculture Design Certification Programs; Holistic Healing and Esoteric Practice and Programs. Within our center we have both created and maintained a food forest on slightly over an acre of grounds where we grow our own food; make and teach about medicine and host a small nursery, apothecary and apiary; which is surrounded by 300 acres of protected park land.
My specific teaching experience has been in both the online, hybrid and face to face environments; teaching from undergraduate through doctoral level students. My life has become fully integrated in that my present activities and engagements are all my favorite things to do. I most enjoy communing with nature; healing work as a practicing shaman and sound healer; teaching and sharing and showing up in this world to contribute to positive change wherever I can. I work closely with the urban underserved communities relative to urban farming and community gardening and provide opportunities through education and provision of resources. Our small farm is certified by both the County and State of Delaware to produce and sell produce, medicinal plants, fruit, nuts and berries and we also do a considerable amount of propagation. Our focus surrounds regenerative, sustainable indigenous practices and permaculture methodology. The center has been open for eight years and we are in the process of adding a flock of chickens to our homestead. to complement our ten existing beehives in our apiary.
I am joyful over the opportunity to share my experiences through our learning environment as well as learn from each of you I look forward to getting a chance to get to know each of you during our journey. I believe knowledge is a powerful transformative force in combination with the heart. When it is both used respectfully as well as felt it can make the world a better place. Education can liberate your mind and open doors to yourself and out picture into our greater environments. Compassion is key and allows us to experience through the lens of others and be both open and accepting of all views. Science can be both a grounding force and support the evolution of ideas and achievement of praxis. A lens of ecology leads to an understanding of interconnection and the importance of sustainable design. In essence our ability to drive towards the most sustainable and valuable design occurs when we are observing the opportunities presented through an infinite and multidimensional cycle of engagement within our food systems’
Badger Johnson, MS
2023-24 Courses
ENV58910 Ecosystem Services
ENV57950 Agroecology: Theory & Analysis
Badger is my given name. It is an old family name from my ancestors, most of whom came to this continent from the British Isles. I use he/him pronouns. I live in the US State of Ohio, which is part of the homelands of the Shawnee people. The Shawnee people speak an Algonquian language and are descendants of the mound-building culture that erected more earthen mounds in southern Ohio than currently exist anywhere else in the world. If you visit, I recommend you pay a visit to see Serpent Mound.
I have been studying sustainable agriculture and agroforestry since 2007 and teaching about it for 12 years. My education started in my home states of Kentucky and Ohio, where I studied plant biology and forest soils at Ohio University and received my B.S. in 2011. I focused my M.S. on forest farming at University of Missouri, because in 2014 I was offered a research assistantship with the director of the Center for Agroforestry. It was a dream come true, because I was interested in how logging and prescribed fire impacted wild and cultivated medicinal herbs in the forest.s. Later, I went back to school and finished a forest management associates degree at Hocking College in 2023.
I am the Agroforestry Manager at Rural Action, a sustainable community development non-profit working in southeastern Ohio and serve as an adjunct professor at Hocking College in Ohio and Prescott College, I have always enjoyed teaching and have organized many workshops for other instructors, mentored younger folks, and increasingly leaned into my enjoyment of the praxis. As an activist commitment, every year I teach a new cohort of people how to conduct prescribed fires, grow ginseng, plant and harvest chestnuts, inoculate waste wood from timber stand improvement with edible mushrooms. I also teach peer counseling. Besides teaching and organizing, over the years I have worked in laboratories, vineyards, orchards, ranches, the National Park Service, the Forest Service. Sometimes I go on wildland firefighting details out West through the Ohio Division of Forestry.
Currently I mostly farm chestnuts and garlic, and work at a non-profit teaching landowners about agroforestry, doing site assessments and writing woodland management plans. This summer I am supervising six AmeriCorps service members who are getting into the ecological stewardship professions and I could not be prouder of them. As I write this they are in an orchard working to organically contain an oak wilt outbreak that was caused by the 17 year periodic cicadas that hit several years ago.
In my spare time I go botanizing, and try to locate and study additional populations of economic importance that are rare in the territory I call home. These include river cane (Arundinarea gigantea), false unicorn root (Chamaelirium luteum), shortleaf pine (Pinus echinata) and silver plumegrass (Saccharum alopecuroides). The disregulation of the climate by fossil fuel consumption provides an impetus to help species of interest that are at the northern edge of their range to move north, which is my interest in the pine, cane and grass, false unicorn root is currently more valuable than ginseng on the open market, yet it is so poorly understood in Ohio that it has gone overlooked for some time.
Besides farming and botanizing, I enjoy hang gliding. It is hard to overstate how exhilarating and yet serene non-motorized flight can be, and I am working on my third level of certification and hope to be at the point soon where I can float like a seagull, up and down the coastal dunes of Lake Michigan.
I believe knowledge is a powerful transformative force. When it is used respectfully it can make the world a better place. Education can liberate your mind and open doors to yourself and your career. Compassion can help you understand yourself and others points of view. Science can ground ideas and achieve praxis. The lens of ecology can teach us how to design systems that are and will be durably sustainable. Design is fundamental to solving problems in our food system. I humbly give credit and draw inspiration from people who came before us in this place. While honoring the wisdom of our traditions, I believe it is our duty to fight for the freedom and well-being of all beings when it is threatened, including now, and to evolve, grow and overcome the terrific obstacles we face as a planetary society to our long-term survival.
Kimberley Greeson, PhD
2023 Course
ENV57902 Food Justice Seminar
My name is Dr. Kimberley Greeson (she/they) and am core faculty in the Sustainability Education doctoral program. As an interdisciplinary scholar-educator, I also teach and advise in the M.S. Sustainable Food Systems and M.A. Interdisciplinary Studies programs. My research looks at the biopolitics of food and conservation; more-than-human entanglements, and decolonizing pedagogy. I am a cisgender, biracial Asian American settler on Hawai'i Island (occupied Kanaka 'oiwi land) where I live in a small town on the slopes of the volcano Hualālai.
My pedagogical philosophy is one that seeks to (re)humanize education and examine power structures. I acknowledge that this is hugely complex in academia, a system built on white supremacy and colonialism.
In Hawai’i, I am a curriculum specialist for Uluha’o o Hualālai, a nonprofit that works for the cultural and ecological preservation and regeneration of Mt. Hualālai. The high elevation areas of Hualālai are important for our watershed (including native forests and native birds) as well as culturally for Native Hawaiians.
Kristen Sbrogna, PhD
2024 Course
ENV57960 Food and Agriculture Policy
Kristen Sbrogna joined the Sustainable Food Systems program in 2022 and also teaches with the Outdoor Education Leadership program. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Environmental and Marine Sciences program at the University of New England. Formerly, she taught interdisciplinary courses in social justice and sustainability for over a decade at Saint Mary's College of California. Sbrogna’s teaching is informed by her practice as a community leader in the non-profit field, including serving as executive director of La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley. In 2015, she founded Leaderful Strategies, a consulting firm that supports non-profit social justice organizations through structural transition and reorganization. Sbrogna holds an MFA in Creative Writing and earned a PhD in Sustainability Education at Prescott College. In her dissertation, Sbrogna developed a biocultural framework for crop transition in Northern California, reflecting her interests in sustainable diets and global food transition, biocultural diversity, environmental and climate justice, traditional ecological knowledge, and place-based methodologies. Sbrogna lives in Southern Maine with her partner, three children, and hundreds of other species.
Henry Anton Peller, PhD
2024 Course
ENV57920 The Living Soil
Henry has a PhD in Soil Science from Ohio State University and is a full time farmer, soil science researcher, and soil carbon consultant. His research interests include agroecological systems in places such as Cuba, Haiti, Belize, and Central America, in addition to his 125-acre family farm adjacent to the village of Roseville in southeast Ohio. His farm includes crop fields, orchards, forests, wetlands, and prairie. The primary farm product is willow, grown on about 8 acres of lowland soils. Henry also grows produce on 4 acres, where he mobilizes an armada of soil health practices in zero-herbicide, minimum tillage production systems. Specifically, he sows cereal and legume cover crops each fall, terminates them using a homemade roller crimper and occultation tarps the following spring, and direct seeds or transplants fresh market and staple food crops using no-till planting tools.
"My motivation to farm comes in many forms: respect for soil organisms, concern for the impacts of agriculture on water and climate, encouragement from friends and community, and the imperative to produce efficiently and generate sales."