Mike Garling

President and Treasurer

Mike Garling was born and raised in Detroit and is a graduate of Michigan State University Business School. He moved here from Chicago, where he and his wife, Laura, met while working at CBOT Futures Exchange. They have a four-year-old daughter in Sunfield's Kindergarten, and an eight-year-old daughter who is in the second grade at Sunfield.

Michael has been actively involved in Sunfield for over six years, serving on the finance and site committees, and most recently, on the board of directors. Michael has recently been involved in managing a small local company which manufactures aluminum boats, and currently makes bagels at Metro Bagel. He enjoys playing music, hiking, biking, and kayaking. Laura has also been very active in the Sunfield community in many aspects.

Beth Ann O’Dell

Board member; Third/fourth-grade teacher

Beth Ann O’Dell was born and raised in Seattle. She is a trained Waldorf teacher and attended college at Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota. She has been working with children and families in Waldorf schools, public schools, Indian schools, and the Head Start program for more than twenty years.

She is the mother of four children, three of whom are now grown, and the grandmother of one. Beth Ann has lived on the tiny island of Palau in Micronesia and on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Her travels have helped her develop a deep respect and honoring of people from very diverse cultural, religious, and economic backgrounds. She has a passion for youth, fiber arts, animals, and living on the land in close contact with nature.

Jude Rubin

Board member

Born and raised in New York, Jude fled to the West Coast after graduating from Brown University with just a duffel bag, a backpack, and her degree in Environmental Studies. She worked with Seattle Tilth to develop organic gardening education programs; with King County Surface Water Management to catalogue salmon habitat conditions of the Cedar River Watershed; and then independently traveled from Washington to the Southern tip of Chile to work on various reforestation efforts.

In 1993, she returned to school for an M.S. from the University of Vermont in restoration ecology and was honored with both an R.K. Mellon Fellowship and a Switzer Environmental Fellowship. While working on her thesis project – a natural history/restoration plan for the Chimacum Creek Watershed – she met her husband, salmon biologist Peter Bahls. She has since worked for Northwest Natural Resources Group (formerly "Olympic Peninsula Foundation") and River Network. Jude currently serves as director of stewardship for Northwest Watershed Institute, a 501(c)3 she co-founded with Peter in 2001.

At Sunfield, Jude was head of the landscaping committee in 2008–10, and worked as staff grant writer in 2009–10. In 2011 her family was delighted to host a farm intern.

As a mom, Jude is grateful for the guidance and support her family receives through Waldorf education for maintaining simplicity, rhythm, vitality, and balance while parenting in an often-chaotic world. Hannah, ten, is in the fifth grade at Sunfield, and Cecilia, fourteen, studies dance at Interlochen Arts Academy.

To shake off that wonky, "too much computer feeling," Jude helps the farmers bring in the CSA harvest and weeds the new permaculture garden at Sunfield’s farmhouse. She enjoys dancing, yoga, hiking, biking, and working to transform the last vestiges of her inner New Yorker through the study of nonviolent communication.