We are a team of educators, farmers and ranchers, facilitators, ecologists, investors, designers, and storytellers who are passionate about bringing together people to connect with the land and eachother. We look forward to learning with you.
Meet the Team
SALLIE CALHOUN
Founder
Sallie leads with an endless optimism that is paired with practicality and grounding. While she’s a visionary and dreamer; Sallie is also calmly rooted in the soil. Her leadership style is one of curiosity and courageous energy. She will always show up exactly as she is. She’s a storyteller and weaver of narratives that makes our work at the PRLC so cohesive. Sallie has taught us to work in ways that bring us joy; to know when the work is not ours to do, bringing clarity on what our work actually is, all the while allowing individuals to explore their own paths. Working with her is deeply profound in its experience of her confident humility, willingness to learn, and to not contend with any ego. With her focus on purposeful long-term and large-scale impacts, she inspires people so that they feel empowered to actually do something about the complex challenges of our time.
ELAINE PATARINI
Director
Elaine is known and loved for her radical hospitality that invites people to have a radically different kind of experience, whether it’s digging in the soil and finding a pair of #soilmyundies or gathering around her kitchen table. As our key convener of the PRLC, Elaine lives and breathes entanglement-- the interconnection of people, plants, animals, microbes, and community. She seeks out the human-centered element in each opportunity and gives compassion, curiosity and creativity in every convening she designs. Her tagline and special sauce reads: Let’s Gather... On the Land… Around Food … To Celebrate!
KARLA URATA
Secretary & Treasurer
Karla has a brain that Cannot Stop Working on a problem, even if it's circling around in the background, until it is solved. Karla will find the ANSWER and move us all onward and upward! She works on enormous complex issues daily and to state that she has a knack for Overcoming Obstacles would be the understatement of the century. If you're lucky enough to engage with Karla in conversation, you’ll know how warm, fun and present she is to work with.
MEGAN MENDENHALL
Communications Director
Megan’s beautiful design aesthetic is like a breath of fresh air in its unexpected gentle ‘shouting in your ear’ communication style. Megan is a curator of context and concepts, weaving the threads of our multi-layered work into a sublime visual format that connects our community to a sense of place and mission. Megan brings joy and delight to our collective work that sets the tone for having #NoRegrets.
Our Leading Educators
AVERY C. ANDERSON-SPONHOLTZ
Globetrotter Foundation | #NoRegrets Initiative
When you meet Avery, it’s clear that she has the ability to reach things in high places. Once you get to know her, you’ll find an insatiable curiosity at the core of her superpowers. Working with Avery is an engaging pleasure that draws you into genuine conversation, and the way that she asks questions and frames context will have you thinking about things differently than before.
ESTHER PARK
Cienega Capital | #NoRegrets Initiative
We envision Esther in her superpower glory with a golden lasso on one hip and a velvet hammer on the other. When the conversation starts to devolve into distractive rabbit holes and tangents, Esther has the spectacular ability to lasso us all back to the essence of the conversation that we should be having. It’s a velvet ‘reset, align, and reflect’ hammer pounding the nail of clarifying questions into the conversation. We rely on Esther to catch all of the important parts and to point out the dancing elephant in the room that will not be ignored. She’s effective and diligent in her work and equally persuasive at play being one of the most fun people to gather with.
GREG RICHARDSON
Research & Monitoring | Paicines Ranch
Underneath a calm, unflappable demeanor lies a mischievous collaborator who can convince most anyone to join him in curious, exploratory adventures of the best sort. Greg’s huge and earnest smile quickly draws you into his pursuit of community engagement, whether the community be of the human or the microbial species. As our director of research and monitoring, Greg delivers the data that informs our work and does so with thoughtful clarity and an illustrative story. His “can’t not do” is the way in which he applies intention and care to his work along with a sharing and open communication style.
KELLY MULVILLE
Vineyard | Paicines Ranch
As the North Star on our team, Kelly is perennially thinking outside of the box of agriculture for ways that nature can truly be restored. It seems impossible for Kelly to NOT do something right, and he embodies the motto, ‘how you do anything is how you do everything’ - how the efforts that you make on a small scale is mirrored in how you do things on a vast scale.
Kelly has an investigative spirit where everything should be considered. He’ll always tell you if you’re asking the wrong questions, and encourage you to find the right questions to ask. He never quits and he’s never done, and is onto the next thing in a wonderfully relentless way.
P.S. - It’s fairly easy to get delightfully drawn into Kelly’s ‘dry and wry’ humor, always done with a straight face, and one look at his photo will easily tell you what a snappy dresser he is (or rather was - at least once)
*We love Kelly’s shirt in the photo above that was acquired through Fibershed / Fibershed Marketplace and made with wool from sheep raised by Lani Estill of Lani's Lana Wool, woven by Ryan & Kat Huston at Huston Textile, and designed by Daniel DiSanto.*