Josh is a joker born and raised just outside the hear of Rock-n-Roll (Cleveland, OH). After attending art school, he hit the road for the west coast and beyond. He has spent years dreamin' and doodlin' and has come to Yestermorrow to start doin'. He enjoys makin' music and long walks to the compost pile.

Josh is a recent graduate of Yestermorrow's Natural Building Intensive program and is our Kitchen/Garden Intern for 2008.

Adam was born and raised in Georgia where he received his degree in Math from UGA. Motivated by some spurts of adventure through school, he decided to do some exploring after graduating. In 3 years, he managed to work/volunteer in 12 different states doing a variety of work, mostly with AmeriCorps. He then settled in Seattle for 2 years and worked for YouthBuild teaching carpentry to disadvantaged youth. At Yestermorrow, he hopes to learn some design, beef up his skills, and figure out his next step.

Ted Kilcommons has worked in the world of dovetails, frog’s hairs, biscuits and dados for the past year and a half as a builder and owner of Ted K Design/Build (www.tedkdesignbuild.com). A graduate from The University of Texas at Austin, Ted spent 5 years molding young minds as a teacher in Harlem, USA before following his love of building and design. While renovating lofts and brownstones in New York City during the day and designing furniture at night, Ted finds time to play guitar, practice Karate and play hockey with his team, The Unicorns.

Bo (a.k.a. Boraffe, Bovine, Bocephus, Botree, Bodacious, etc.) hails from the state of Utah, but is currently pursuing a Master's of Environmental Management at Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He comes to Yestermorrow in hope of balancing his policy oriented Master's studies with ground knowledge/skills related to sustainable development. After his time at Yestermorrow, Bo will be conducting research in Papua New Guinea where he plans to apply what he has learned at the school.

After graduating from UCLA in 2005 with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, Tony decided to take a break from the big city in Southern California. Rejecting the idea of working in an office and staring at a computer all day, he spent the next year living in the woods doing conservation work for AmeriCorps and then did a season of wild land firefighting with the Forest Service. Following rock climbing adventures in the Sierra Nevadas and trekking through the Himalayas, Tony decided to learn everything he could about sustainable building and ways of preserving the natural world he loves so much. He found himself at Yestermorrow looking for hands-on experience performing environmentally conscious construction and design. One day he hopes to return to graduate school and use the skills he's learned to build his own home.

Originally from rural Wisconsin, Peter has been wanderlusting for the last ten years passively looking for a place/s to call home. Frustrated with the pretentious study of architecture at CU-Boulder, he got re-excited through a wider view of the field during an ecological design program at the Ecosa Institute in Arizona. The lure of bamboo drew him to Asia in early 2003 where he learned, volunteered, worked and traveled throughout the continent pursuing various interests and random tangents until late 2006. Currently he is pursuing an additional piece of paper that says MA in Sustainable Development at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont. He will graduate this May and his next step/s will likely be correlated with his hunt for enjoyable and fulfilling employment and its success, or lack thereof. Peter first pondered interning at Yestermorrow in 2002 and took advantage of his ephemeral residence in Vermont to reacquaint himself with building in the Western context, glean new skills, and have fun.

Hannah grew up on a farm on an island off the coast of Maine which inspired her to pursue a B.A. in Visual Arts from Loyola University New Orleans which she only obtained after much dilly-dallying, a year abroad in Italy and Hurricane Katrina. After spending time in an intentional community in Scotland and on various other globe-trotting experiences her views towards sustainability were solidified. After picking up odd construction jobs she hopes to go on to receive a Masters in natural and sustainable home design and (of course) continue enjoying different world cultures and outlooks.

Dave Kaplan joined the Yestermorrow crew via the great Pacific Northwest, where he studied architecture at the University of Washington before migrating northward to Bellingham. He came to us after spending two years timberframing, boat building, and playing on glaciated peaks. He also likes cooking/eating and playing music. He hopes to apply his newfound knowledge in addressing the issue of food supply, and in building communities through, well, building communities.

After several years of vagabonding the globe as a self styled environmental do-gooder and fish dork, Zack landed in Burlington, Vermont where he is pursuing a independent B.A in Sustainability Studies. Zack has previously spent his time blowing glass, deciphering the Sri Lankan head bobble, avoiding federales, monitoring coral reefs, raising salmon, protecting sea turtles, teaching environmental education, and doubling his verbosity learning a second language. Always known as one to play in the mud he has a strong interest in Natural Building and has settled back in Tennessee where he is preparing to build his house using natural building techniques.

Alice came to Yestermorrow ready to work and build and learn, after a year at a drafting job in her hometown of Portland, Maine.  Before that she spent four years at McGill University in Montreal studying architecture and struggling with French, ten months in the Netherlands and one crazy semester at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City.  Although she briefly considered becoming a teacher and feels fairly certain that at some point in her life she will live on a farm with lots of animals, for now she has her sights set on becoming an architect. 

Sanne Durzy studied sculpture at Mount Holyoke College.  She graduated in 1999 and went on to pursue her art and travel the country and abroad working odd jobs to support herself.  Her most recent work has been in clay and stone.  Her lifelong dream of designing and sculpting a house, along with her appreciation of nature, has led her to study building.  She recently returned to New England after seven years and hopes to find work and continue her education here in Vermont.

Travis originated in Iowa- a farming community in the southeastern sector of Iowa- his education started with roaming throgh cornfields and building houses in the summer time. His higher education kicked off in Kansas where he recieved a two year general education from Hesston College. Tired of books and uncertain of a desired career path, he volunteered as a PE teacher in San Francisco, where he played copious amounts of four square and kickball, as well as fine tuned his conflict mediation skills. After a nice long trek back to the midwest he enrolled at Goshen College. After two and a half more years of schooling, which included a semester of studying history and culture in Ethiopia, social and environmental issues in the Arizona desert, and lots of ceramics.
Travis graduated with a degree in Interdisiplinary Studies. After all this higher education he decided that all he wanted to do was design and build houses, but in a socially/environmentally conscious way, which is what brought him to Yestermorrow.

After leaving Yestermorrow, Jessa Turner flew to Arizona to spend time plastering for Bill & Athena Steen, among other things. Deciding it had been too long since her last cross-country hitchhiking adventure, she ditched her flight back across the country and hitched from Tucson to San Diego to Sacramento to Eugene to Seattle to Glacier to Yellowstone to Devil's Tower to Mt. Rushmore to the Badlands to her doorstep in Berea, Ky. She has finally graduated with a degree in Sustainability & Environmental Studies and continues to pursue her dream of opening HomeGrown HideAways.

Garth has spent much of his life either in the mountains or on the coast, both in the U.S. and also abroad, searching for that perfect vista. Originally from Lookout Mtn, GA, Garth received his BA in English with a concentration in studio art at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA. Upon graduating, he spent a year as an Outreach student at Auburn Rural Studio, where he worked with the second-year studio building a home for Music Man (Jimmie Lee Mathews), and started a drama class with local school children while executing improvements to the Bodark Amphitheatre in Newbern, AL. Garth then spent two years as an English teacher and Youth Director in Mobile, AL, and most recently, he spent time in Charleston, SC helping his brother start up a deck building business in the Low Country. Unable to leave the Yestermorrow bubble, Garth is currently working with Sellers and Company Architects in Warren, VT and hoping to learn about the sport of curling.

Jason came to Yestermorrow with a Southern-Fried State of Mind. Growin' up swingin' a hammer for his ol' man's construction company, he learned a little bit about building houses and a lot about puddle jumping, frog gigging, and fort building. He now spends his time twirlin' a pencil in architecture school at Auburn University and hopes to graduate one day, but not tomorrow. Since then, he has had the honor of attending the Rural Studio in luxurious West Alabama and working on a house in Mason's Bend. Jason has worked part-time in a cabinet shop and waited on a few tables when school duddint get in the way, but truly misses his time as a Jeep tour guide in the San Juan Mountains nestled away in the Colorado Rockies. Jason enjoys fried okra, grits, fishin', pottery and playin' a tune on the guit-fiddle.

Elvire trekked through kilometers of potholed, border-patrol-infested roads to make the journey South from her native Montreal to the Mad River Valley. With little more than a hand-drawn map and a weak-willed compass to guide her, she finally stumbled upon the Yestermorrow campus one rainy Sunday afternoon. The air was thick with sawdust and a faint scent of powertools tickled her nostrils; she took to the place immediately. Before joining the ranks of Yestermorrow interns, she spent four years ruminating on philosophy books and languages before realizing she would much rather be riding her bicycle Rodrigo Raleigh and searching for the perfect pine nut ice cream in Mexico. Mysterious forces compelled her to migrate back home in the dead of the Canadian winter. She spent a good part of the last year learning judicious use of words such as "dynamic", "gesture", and "axiality" at the McGill School of Architecture, where she is now a second year architecture student.

Anne-Marie-Flusche (floo-she), a Cancer-Leo cusp and the fifth/final child of professional dumpster divers, was raised and eventually released from Muenster, Texas, population 1500. In order to catch up with what was going on outside the <cheese bubble> Anne Marie bolted around the world for awhile - spending time in Italy studying Mr. Bill Shakespeare, in Barcelona with tapas, in California dusting off solar panels while stomping on cob at the Solar Living Center, and with Opus Vitae Design and VectorWorks in Texas. Her fondness of design-build practices persuaded her to spend a quarter of her life completing degrees in both Construction Science and Environmental Design at Texas A&M University. Currently Anne Marie has no concrete plans (pun intended) except to not have concrete plans. She's way into sustainable design/construction materials and methods, kale, and adopting a goat. Unable to break out of the Yestermorrow bubble, Anne Marie is currently working with Sellers and Company Architects in Warren.

Born and raised as the son of goat-herding log-home builders in the Penokee mountains of Northern Wisconsin, Amorin Orion Mello IV grew tall with the spirituous nymphs and pans of the north woods and drifting snowbanks in which he heard his calling to create an environment out of itself. Taking advantage of his dual-citizenship, he leapt across the Great Lakes striving to struggle with Environmental Civil Engineering within the Canadian halls of McMaster University. As a result of breathing smog for many years whilst living in the urban cesspool he lost a piece of his soul, so Amorin ran off again to work for a year at various educational communes. Sacrificing wages for food, he has deafly led the blind in environmental education at Wisconsin Lion Camp, wrestled together a solar powered mud-hut at the Solar Living Institute, fought corporate wastes of energy through their own devices at EarthCraft House, and finally arrived at Yestermorrow to play with architects and their goats. Amorin's current interests are his long hair, learning how to draw, finishing his education before the turn of the decade and fire-dancing in various biomes.

Kristin was first spied one morning on the eve of the Watts riots, and it got thoroughly into her blood. She's a riot and a half. Mysteriously she has some piratey ways, including a love of adventure and a practical sense with money (bury it or spend it). The truth about Kristin, really, though, is that she is a mermaid. She is mysterious, well-groomed, and she likes "adventure," a lot of it, as mermaids are wont. She faced north once, looked left, and found herself gallivanting across the bumpy geography of Central/South Asia.  A few times she has looked south however, turned left, and ended up along her most treasured Eastern Seaboard.  Building what?  Where? It is all just a geopolitical question anyway.  And for Kristin, the process of getting there is paramount.  Fast and hard.  Once, and many times afterwards, she has found herself in Long Beach, CA, her home, home. 

The Yestermorrow Experience taught Aaron to think and do, visualize and create, design and build.    It also taught him the value of continuous daily belly laughter, warm raw milk with maple syrup, and just plain chugging maple syrup from a bottle.  With newly found competency and a sweeter-than-ever tooth, Aaron left Yestermorrow having discovered two critical realizations: 1) deeply satisfying fun is just as important as saving the world, and 2) nobody will ever save the world unless they are having deeply satisfying fun.  Operating under this new paradigm, Aaron headed home to the great northwest to build a 100% site-milled woodshop with his crafty father... from WA to the mountains of southern California to remodel a ski home... from CA to the wonderland of Rancho Mastatal in rural Costa Rica to design and build a flowing foyer to the ranch's bamboo classroom.  After Costa Rica, Aaron arrived at his personal Shangri La, the fabled Rocky Mountain Institute.  Working with Amory Lovins, genius extraodinaire, is currently providing all of the inspiration, excitement and challenge that a young lad could find just about anywhere.  The 9-5 finds Aaron redesigning and rebuilding the tropical greenhouse of RMI's headquarters, while the 5-9 finds him clambering up 14,000' peaks, zipping through aspen-dense singletrack, brewing beer, and waiting for deep dry powder.

Berkley Leach sprang forth from her mother's womb in the small hamlet of Old Forge, NY. Her formative years were the things dreams are made of: Practicing archery, riflery, paddling in big ole canoes, three-legged racing, and generally making merry at Adirondack Woodcraft Camps, a family endeavor. Carousing around with fellow youngsters spawned in our Berkley a passion for life and living that has been burning brightly ever since. This feisty, fireball of a gal exclaims that studying architectural history at Middlebury College gave her a "key card to the world." After interning with architect and famed Dimetredon creator Jim Sanford, and gaining hands-on building experience in a local cabinet shop, Berkley was well on her way to becoming a designer/builder of note. But should she study architecture to a master's level? Berkley came to Yestermorrow in a quandary and has been in one ever since. Among Berkley 's hobbies are sober dancing, skiing, hiking, strolling, knitting, and generally encouraging a party atmosphere.

A graduate of Berea College, Kelly studied Sustainability and Environmental Studies with a focus in Ecological Design as well as German. She spent a year abroad as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow skipping about the world squatting in on various communities to study their traditional building methods and their application in modern ecological design. While traveling and while at Berea she learned many eco friendly skills such as cob building and earthen plasters. Since leaving Yestermorrow, Kelly has been back to co-teach a Yestermorrow class in her specialty, natural paints and plasters.