Team of Advisors
Patryk Battle
Director of Living Web Farm
Patryk Battle is the Director of Living Web Farms, a network of educational and research farms dedicated to the widespread transition to renewable energy, regenerative farming practices and the elimination of food insecurity. A major focus of his life’s work s the production, processing and delivery of food to his community. Although the locus of his efforts has changed over the decades his dedication to making these endeavors more socially just and environmentally regenerative has not. He sees Mutual Aid as a natural pathway to social and economic justice and environmental regeneration.
Chloe Moore
Food & Empowerment Activist
Chloe fell in love with the Blue Ridge Mountains in 2013, when she moved from Massachusetts to Warren Wilson College to study Sustainable Agriculture and Biology. Now, after graduating in 2017, she lives on a community farm in Candler, NC, and works in Asheville as a native perennial gardener. Her passions include cultivating a resilient and just food system in the face of a changing climate. As a young person of color, Chloe feels a calling to work towards the empowerment of brown and black farmers/farm workers. Like many, her black ancestors were stolen from their homeland for slavery, and her free ancestors were pushed into northern cities, where they forgot how to be stewards of the land. Chloe finds empowerment and delight in working southern soils, growing healthy foods and medicines, and having the freedom to love the land and its people.
Dave Meesters
Herbalist & Rural Mutual Aid Cultivator
Dave Meesters is an herbalist, gardener, and land steward living in Madison County. He is the co-director of Medicine County Herbs, a medicinal herb apothecary and nursery, and the Terra Sylva School, which provides herbal education within a context of radical ecological and social consciousness and immersion in the wild woods of Appalachia.