Introducing our Birth Team!

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I am grateful for the opportunity to help birth Threshold into a world that deeply needs new, bold laboratories and models.   We need to learn how to live together in ways that do not perpetuate harm on each other or the planet.  For many years I have helped start and lead community organizations with food and health at their core.  And I'm excited to do it again and have fun while co-creating this new village.  In 1996, I founded High Mowing Organic Seeds and have played a big role in several community food non-profits, notably the Center for an Agricultural Economy and the Food Venture Center in Hardwick, Vermont.  I really like starting new, complex organizations that challenge the way things "work". My background in farming makes me especially excited to grow lots of organic food on our Threshold farm.  I have led a privileged life and being a white man in America, I have had doors open for me that are closed to many others.  I am continually humbled by the opportunity I have been given and it inspires me to be of service to this beautiful world.  I'm also a dancer, a trickster and I love ceremony and nature-based spirituality and being silly while we stretch and heal from the trauma of modernity. 

I am originally from France; my lineage is an interesting blend of anchored farmers and nomadic travelers. I met Tom while teaching his daughters at a local Waldorf school years ago, and when he invited me to join the Threshold project in March 2024, I offered him my counsel to get it off the ground.

 I am a neurodiversity consultant and advocate, and one of my services is to support pioneers who think out of the box to trust themselves and turn their wild ideas into life -and community-sustaining projects through deep inner and outer work. Threshold Village is such a project for me: it combines land stewardship with self and community care in a radical way.

​As a birth team member of this budding urban farm and intentional community, I am very excited about exploring how we can inhabit the Threshold land by caring for and protecting a mix of cultivated, wilderness, and transient habitats to blend our ancestral and modern ways of being part of nature. I am also excited about the human aspect of it: creating an intentional community whose light in the world will be to move, work and play at unsettling our colonial, patriarchal, capitalist, disconnected, and destructive ways of relating to our bodies and each other.

​We are exploring right now the various ways in which the Threshold community wants to govern itself and pay its bills. The option of having a financial model where no one would be turned away for lack of funds, while keeping the house and project growing healthily, is an engaging puzzle and a real nut to crack. We want to dive into this adventure with eyes wide open, strong shoulders, and unbridled hearts.

As a queer freak, I feel most alive when surrounded by other beings who value their authentic expression and embodiment. When I feel inspired by those stepping into their power with radical care for their community, I feel an abundance of capacity and resource emerge within myself. This is the kind of gift of relating that I want to be a part of growing in our communities.  Being a part of birthing Threshold Village  has already begun to inspire, open and awaken these parts of me through reimagining my relating to nature, money, relationship, play, and self. It takes community investment and support to create the kind of radical home we want to exist in and this project offers a tangible opportunity to engage in that.  I look forward to continuing to be a part of growing this community, with a deep alignment in its core value for experimenting and play. 

M is an herbalist and writer. They’ve lived in several communities throughout the last 20 years they’ve been in VT. Of Threshold’s Core Values, radical care is one that feels particularly resonant. They’ve dedicated their life to helping humans and more-than-humans resist and heal from the harms of capitalist-colonialism. They work towards building a transformed world of abundance and belonging beyond hierarchy, xenophobia, capitalist scarcity, and the destructive delusions of modern Eurocentric societies. 

I’m drawn to helping bring Threshold Village into being in Montpelier because its model is rooted in something I deeply believe in: meaningful relationships, shared purpose, and creating spaces where people can truly belong. Through my work in housing and community development, I see a rare opportunity to shape an intentional community that supports connection, care, and everyday resilience. Being part of this effort reflects both my professional focus and my personal commitment to building environments where people can live more supported, interdependent, and fulfilled lives. 

Having traveled extensively and spent time in some radical experiments of community living around the world, I’ve dreamt about an intentional community in my beloved Vermont. And now there’s one forming in Montpelier! I’m drawn to come down out of the hills I love, from my beautiful yet isolated hermitage, to support and help envision a better way to live on our Earth than each person or family on their own. Having met Tom years ago at the Green Mountain Waldorf School, I know the seeds of this community have been germinating for quite awhile, and it’s exciting to see them now burst forth into life. The core values of radical care and abundance, belonging, creativity, mindfulness, and interbeing with the human and more-than-human world resonate with my deeply held beliefs of an equitable place for all to call home.