PHOTO BY DEB D’ANDREA[/caption]

Victory Gardens is excited to announce our new team! We welcome Sonya Zielinski and Deb D’Andrea to the Board of Directors, joining Executive Director Jim McVey, Founder and friend of Lyn Hanna’s, Michael Massa, and Arturs Bergs and Karen Hansen Lichtfuss as essential volunteers.

Many of you know Mike and Jim, as they have been key players since the inception of Victory Gardens. Mike has graciously offered his time as our treasurer, and participated in Victory Garden events. You’ve seen Jim on the property building new beds, planting, watering, and harvesting, along with doing community outreach, getting our produce to the Farmers Market, the Nederland Food Pantry, the Ned Coop, and the Holistic Homestead among others.

We welcome Sonya Zielinski, new to the team: a lifetime nature lover, social activist, and community organizer with a background in environmental biology. After becoming aware of the climate crisis at age 15, her passion for fostering healthy, sustainable, and joyful communities has steadily increased. She is currently in the process of obtaining a graduate degree in social work with a focus on ecological justice.

Sonya will be offering a free Lacto-Fermentation Workshop on October 27, 2022 at the Victory Garden House. This free workshop will include a conversation about the health benefits of using lacto-fermentation to process vegetables, a tasting of delicious fermented foods, and an opportunity to create your own batch of lacto-fermented pickles. Please email Sonya for more information on the Lacto-Fermentation Workshop to sign up: szielinski@womenswilderness.org.

Originally an Outside Advisor to Victory Gardens and friend of Lyn’s, Deb joined the organization in June to help lead Victory Gardens into its next chapter of innovation, execution, operational excellence, and growth in order to fulfill Lyn Hanna’s and Victory Gardens’ vision. She has over 20 years’ experience leading successful teams in a variety of industries, and has lived in Nederland for several years.

Deb is best known for her involvement in NedFest and other music festivals, and for her “4TheLuvOfDogz” articles. Deb looks forward to bringing together a great team of volunteers, expanding the Victory Gardens network, and putting smiles on the faces of those who knew and loved Lyn.

We also welcome Arturs Bergs, who is new to the team. The idea of sustainable food has his passion for as long as he can remember. Growing up in Latvia on a farm where they farmed/hunted/traded/ foraged the vast majority of their food, his goal is to keep the farming aspect going at home, with the added benefit of knowing mechatronics.

Arturs is hands-on in the garden, offering concepts to increase productivity and build new growing spaces, along with heading up Victory Gardens’ webpage/ social media outreach. While he has focused on research and development for years, developing industrial 3D printing technologies in the aerospace and space sector – his favorite being 3D printing prosthetics – currently Arturs is enthusiastically developing quantum matter machines that allow for novel new algorithms to be developed. He hopes these hyperfast calculators can be used to improve food distribution and reduce food waste on a global scale.

Also new to Victory Gardens but not to Nederland, Karen Hansen Lichtfuss grew up in Northwestern Ontario, where all the vegetables her family ate as she was growing up came from their garden. Her mother was a Master Gardener, and they had their own greenhouse, starting everything from seed.

Karen has lived in Nederland for the last 15 years, and uses many of the methods she learned from her mother after adapting them for high altitude. Karen has a passion for goats; she also volunteers on a goat farm, and makes her own goat cheese from their milk. Delicious!

Victory Gardens, a 501(c)(3), is dedicated to making the town of Nederland a more resilient and sustainable community through local food production and renewable energy. Our primary goal is to promote and build local food systems by working with citizens, organizations, schools, businesses, and government. We are guided by the principles of food security, energy independence, emergency preparedness, education, informationsharing, and a strong local economy.

If you are interested in joining our team, please contact Deb at debdandrea@gmail.com.