Hailing originally from northern Vancouver Island (Kwakwaka’wakw Territory), Erin is a radical educator, Permaculture activist, and cultural changemaker. Her background in anti-capitalist and environmental justice struggles informs her practise of Permaculture as a radical realignment of human social processes with the living earth that we are a part of. From natural building to urban farming to nonhierarchical organizing and direct democracy, Erin’s work centers around skillbuilding and empowerment within communities to create justice, beauty, and abundance; to meet our own needs through mutual aid and collectivity, in harmony with our ecologies and outside of the destructive machinery of capitalism and the colonial state.

Erin is a Certified Permaculture Designer and a recognized Permaculture Teacher with the Urban Permaculture Guild. She has been deeply involved in grassroots food justice work, through the international Food Not Bombs movement and as a volunteer and worker on many organic farms and community-based farming and farming education projects.

 

​​In 2008 Erin started the Farmhouse Farm, Vancouver’s first bike-powered backyard CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) project, as an offshoot of the garden at The Farmhouse, one of the city’s longest-running collective houses. Starting with the radical ideas that people should get to make their living in a way that benefits their community and that growing food is a human right, no matter where you live, she turned the lawn of this rented home into a farm that provided produce to the Farmhouse’s five residents as well as to five other families across the city, delivered once a week by bicycle.

 

After two highly successful years, Erin handed off the Farmhouse garden to a new set of Farmhouse Animals and now works and teaches in and around the Powell River region.  She continues to organize and teach with many diverse groups, and writes on food justice, farming, and sustainability issues for publications around BC and across the country.