About Us

Collaborators

Ashley Nielsen, Ph.D. - Partner and Founder of Living Education

Ashley is an educational development consultant. She works with universities, schools, non-profits, and businesses to create sustainable, green, regenerative, place-based, holistic, and living educational processes and structures. Coming from a living systems perspective, one of Ashley's focuses is to create a harmonious connection between the community, the land, and the learning experiences. She also is very familiar with alternative educational systems such as Montessori, Waldorf, Reggio Emilia, and Democratic/Free schools.

Ashley also serves as an adjunct faculty member at Santa Fe Community College where she teaches various courses for the Psychology department, including Ecopsychology, Personal Development, Social Psychology and Cognitive Psychology.

Nicholas Mang, Ph.D. - Partner

Nicholas works closely in collaboration with Ashley to bring Regenerative Education to the world. He is a community educator and organizer focused in urban sustainability and regeneration work. Central to his work is the question, “How do we enable our community learning systems to become regenerators of cultural and ecological place?” Work includes developing leveraged intervention processes for reigniting community involvement and stakehold in the stewardship of place. Many times this work begins with educational systems, by reorienting them toward place-based regeneration initiatives.

Ted Fish, Ed.D., M.B.A.

Ted is an educator based in Santa Fe, NM, who specializes in teacher training, program development, and strategic design. He works with individual schools and school districts, as well as non-profits and businesses, throughout the United States. Ted has a unique capacity to inspire and integrate a love of learning, grounded in principles drawn from fields as diverse as education, psychology, anthropology, and organizational systems; with a simple pragmatism that helps clients improve their performance the next day.

In addition to his consulting work, Ted directs the Gardner Carney Leadership Institute, a think tank devoted to the practice of developing leadership among students in schools; he sits on the strategic planning committee that is guiding the revitalization of the Santa Fe public school system; and as a board member of the non-profit, Link Hands for Humanity, he helps to oversee philanthropic educational and medical projects in Asia.

Loretta McGrath, M.A. - Sustainable Universities and Colleges Consultant

Loretta McGrath is a collaborative project, program and research designer who consults with educational organizations and the public/private sectors to create processes which foster healthy human communities and living systems. She works with Living Education, LLC, to enable higher education institutions to enliven sustainability in all facets of their learning communities.

With over fifteen years of experience in higher education as an educator and academic administrator, she has designed and taught innovative place-based curriculum for sustainability, bioregional awareness, intercultural relations and community service. Loretta also serves as an adjunct faculty member at Santa Fe Community College where she teaches a course on Environmental Ethics and Sustainability.

Shannon Murphy - Sustainable/Green Curriculum Specialist

Shannon Murphy specializes in the design and creation of educational programs and materials that bring to life the systems and processes that shape the natural world. Shannon combines a vigorous love of the natural sciences with a life-long passion for writing to produce stories, presentations, and curriculums that teach and inspire. Her recent projects include designing and writing life-science units about threatened ecosystems for middle-school classrooms with the Santa Fe nonprofit Earth's Birthday Project, and working collaboratively to write about the Story of Place for different communities and ecosystems with the regenerative land-use firm Regenesis Group.

Erin O’Neill - School Gardens Consultant

Erin has been working in sustainable agriculture and education for almost ten years now. She currently is the Edible Schoolyard garden coordinator at Monte Del Sol Charter School. She also consults with schools to help them start and integrate gardening into the curriculum. Her main focus has been the empowerment of people through self sufficiency and has enacted this goal by teaching in various forms about gardening, health, environmental stewardship and sustainable development.

Erin has a BA in Cultural Ecology from Friends World College and a certificate in Ecological Horticulture from the University of Santa Cruz, CA. She has been deeply engrossed in the study and practice of organic agriculture for over ten years in various different forms. She has lived and worked on farms in New England, North Carolina, California, Nicaragua and India learning and teaching about working with the land in a sustainable and regenerative way. She also has been the garden manager at the Santa Fe Children's Museum, garden teacher for Urban Sprouts, and Summer Sustainability Institute for Santa Fe Youth.

Regenesis Group - Story of Place Experts

- Partnering people with place

Carol Sanford - CEO of InterOctave

Carol works to co-create Regenerative Businesses

and Communities through Regenerative Systems

Design and Practices. Examples from: DuPont Corp. Us & Canada, Colgate Palmolive Europe and South Africa. Townships of Soweto and Alexandria, South Africa. Coral has worked with Fortune 500 companies such as Intel and Agilent as well as New Generation Businesses such as Seventh Generation, Ecological, and Back to Nature.

Elizabeth Noblitt - Vocational Training Consultant

President of Seine Productions, Elizbeth is consultant that develops educational systems and programs that align with a company’s vision and values. Prior to that she opened and ran the Gary Manuel Aveda Institute in Seattle, a vocational training school. Transforming education and training into a process for human development is her passion.

Becky Davis - Nutritional Consultant

Becky helps design and integrate nutritional programs that focus on sustainable agricultural and processing practices and foster a physiological environment in the students to optimize mental acuity and learning capabilities. The food we eat is an important area to create healthy, green, regenerative practices that can have a major impact on the vitality of the planet as well as ourselves. Becky received a BS in biology with an emphasis in human physiology and nutrition at Colorado State University and is currently pursuing a graduate degree in Food Science and Technology at UC Davis.

Living EducationTM,, LLC 546 Alarid Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 505-920-1641

Living EducationTM, LLC is a collaborative of people who became deeply concerned about the fragmentation and mechanization of the educational process and its disconnect from the current world situation. We found that many times educational organizations are insular form their community and have a philosophy that is not congruent throughout the structures and processes of the organization. Therefore Living Education was founded as a way to raise awareness about Regenerative Education and to enable educational organizations to be in harmony with themselves and to add value to their community.