Sundog Ecovillage Members as of January
2009. We also have a few folks on the membership track.
Rick Sherman,
I am a third
generation Montanan. I spent the summers riding the trails of the Bob
Marshall Wilderness with my father. It was the time immersed in the
clear waters and steep mountains of the wilderness that gave me an
understanding of the impact humans have on the land.
This led me to tree
planting with a labor coop called Hoedads in Eugene, Oregon. It was
here I learned to work as a unit with others. I also learned how a
small group of organized people can make profound changes in the
politics of community. Hoedads started a movement of worker owned
businesses all up and down the West Coast.
When I returned to
Montana I found myself working a resort in Seeley Lake as a wrangler.
For six years I operated a trail ride and sleigh ride operation. It
was here that Feather and I met.
Eight years ago our
horse job was bull dozed by a golf course and our kids were in need
of a better educational facility. We moved to the Missoula area with
a couple of basic goals. Get the kids to good schools, and build
careers based on art and teaching.
I was the art director
at the Shirt Shop for six of the eight years I worked there. I am
currently enrolled at the University of Montana pursuing a degree in
Media Arts and a freelance graphic designer. Feather completed her
masters degree in Integrated Arts and Education and is teaching art
at the Missoula International School.
We have accomplished
our initial goals. Now we are initiating a new set of goals. Sundog
Ecovillage gives us the opportunity to use our talents, experience,
and education to create the model of community living and land use
that we have envisioned all of our lives.
Feather Sherman
Feather
is an artist and art educator currently teaching at the Missoula
International School, Missoula Art Museum, Flagship (after school art
program) and Zootown Arts Collective. She received her master’s
degree in integrated arts and education, the Creative Pulse, from the
University of Montana in 2003. Feather was honored at the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. for her innovative methods of
working with learning disabled students in 2005. She was chosen from
hundreds of art educators to participate in the Power of Art Workshop
supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and held at the
renowned Lab School of Washington, founded by Sally Smith.
As
well as being passionate about teaching art, Feather has lived in
alternative communities such as Wheeler’s Ranch, Sonoma County,
California and has been very active in Rainbow Family Gatherings for
World Peace since 1972. She has worked for years as a peer counselor
and advocate for women and teenage girls, developing the Peer
Education Drama Project to teach high school students about healthy
and unhealthy relationships. She has volunteered for eight years at
the Deer Lodge State Prison’s Boot Camp on the Victim Impact Panel,
speaking directly to inmates about the impact of their crimes on
their victims and families. One of her greatest accomplishments is
being a mother to her five fantastic children and she has been
blissfully married to Rick Sherman for fifteen years.
Jason Gutzmer
is a father, a husband, a traveler, but is best known as
an educator, visual artist and builder.
From a broad range of cinematography for both fiction
and nonfiction, to painting constructions, performance art, public art
installations to digital art and design. Jason’s enthusiasm for
creating culture, art, ecology and teaching have led him from the
Rockies to
the Amazon, where he has taught classes and led workshops in diverse
realms
of art, sustainable design, and extreme green building . Jason grew up
in Montana and after receiving a degree in Wilderness Studies, and a
BFA in Fine Arts and working in everything
from dance to photography, but better known as a painter he left to
work as an educator and performance artist in Latin America were he co-founded the Mobile Ecovillage (La Caravana Arcoiris por la Paz) a living and learning center working for the last 13 years in Central and South America. There he met his wife Penelope while traveling with artists and educators from over thirty countries. There he also began working in documentary
films which after seven years led him back to academia to pursue a
Masters of Fine Arts in Media Arts. In addition to working on many
films and producing much of his own work
including a feature length nonfiction movie shot in 2006 in Brazil he
also enjoys teaching courses in Media Arts and
Documentary at the University of Montana. Jason’s credo… “get out of
the box!” (La Rana Mobile Art and Ecology Project) based in Montana is an offshoot of the La Caravana Arcoiris:
combining visual art, theatre, giant puppets, masks,
stilts, and folkloric festivities with ecology.
His passion is promoting and learning to
live a more sustainable lifestyle ecologically and culturally in
community, using art and image and putting in practice systems of
Permaculture. www.gutzmerart.com
Penelope Baquero
is originally from Colombia,
South America. She left her home at a very young age, eager to
discover the world outside of her home environment. In her travels
she has been working as a facilitator of community building
processes, using art, consensus decision making tools, multicultural
event productions, networking, traveling, teaching, and other
artistic and educational endeavors. She has been involved with
several grassroots organizations in Colombia and other Latin American
countries, particularly with the Rainbow Peace Caravan, a traveling
ecovillage working for the past 13 years all over the Americas.
Penelope came to visit Montana in 2000 and decided that it would be a
good place to make a nest to fly and come back to with her husband
Jason. She has a Bachelors in Finance and International Relations and
a Master of Arts in Integrated Arts and Education. Music and dance,
especially of African origin are her passion which she combines well
with being a mom, painting, and founding ecovillages in the Rocky
Mountains.
Jean Duncan has
a Master's Degree in Business Administration from the University of
Montana and a Bachelor's of Science from University of Kentucky. She
is the Director of Finance & Admin for Women’s Voices of
the Earth (WVE) in Missoula. She has worked for the Jeannette Rankin
Peace Center, the Montana Hunger Coalition, the Good Food Store, and
the Organic Certification Association of Montana (OCAM.) She has
extensive experience with natural foods stores and cooperatives. She
just finished a rewarding 8-year stint on the board of the
Montana-based Alternative Energy Resources Organization (AERO).
She
is a working to establish an ecovillage in the Missoula area with
others who want to live in community with a small ecological
footprint. The pursuits that keep her ticking are the great out of
doors, fresh local organic food consumption and meeting the physical
and spiritual challenges of building an ecovillage by committee.