Danielle is a farmer, outdoors person and food justice advocate who has a penchant for living where people vacation. She grew up hiking and skiing in Big Bear Lake, a small mountain town in Southern California. Danielle studied journalism, anthropology, and Spanish for her undergraduate degrees at California State University, Long Beach during which she spent summers learning and writing in Central and South America. After a brief stint at a Southern California Newspaper, she learned that her love for writing did not meet its ends in journalism alone, and she felt called to pursue self-education in agriculture and food systems. While living in Ecuador and working on a few community-based farming projects she realized her passion for foodsheds and using food as a medium through which to connect with people.
Danielle always engaged with food through gardening and urban farming until she found herself teaching horticulture and ecology at 15 different school gardens while working for nonprofit Green Our Planet in Las Vegas, NV. There, she developed an unexpected appreciation for the desert landscape and realized the power of place-based food system development through gardening and nutrition. Her experience with cultivating food security through public schools across the desert city drove her to pursue a Master’s degree in Sustainable Food Systems at Prescott College.
Throughout her graduate education she focused on rural economic development, agroecology and food system development through non-market mechanisms. More recently she has delved into using Geographic Information Systems to tell spatial stories about food access and agriculture. Danielle unexpectedly landed on the Olympic Peninsula mid-pandemic when looking for fulfilling work. While working two seasons as the crew manager at River Run Farm and operating a small sauerkraut company, she focused on learning the land and getting involved with local food system development and food access. Danielle is driven by her passion for bioregionalism, small farm sustainability and improving access to high quality food, and she couldn’t be happier to be working with the Extension and SNAP-Ed!