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.

Jude Rubin

Secretary

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, eleven, is in the sixth/seventh grade class at Sunfield, and Cecilia, fifteen, 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.

Beth Ann O’Dell

Board member; 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.

Laura Lewis

Board member

Laura Lewis grew up between Seattle and Bellingham, spending most of her time on the water with her family. In high school she began working on a farm and realized that she wanted to study agriculture and continue interacting with land and people.

In 1996 she graduated with a B.S. in Agriculture from Washington State University. While at Washington State University, she spent three years working for the USDA ARS on their research farm in Central Ferry and at the Pullman campus, evaluating cold season legumes and other crops.

After WSU, she joined the Peace Corps and served as an African Food Systems Initiative volunteer in Niger, West Africa. She returned from Niger in 1998 and resumed working for the USDA ARS at their Yakima Area Research Laboratory working with cherry, apple and pear producers to understand pest pressure from codling moth and other pests.

Eventually she made her way down to Davis, California to continue work with the USDA ARS National Clonal Germplasm Repository, managing the persimmon and mulberry collections while also evaluating other fruit and nut species from Mediterranean regions. While in Davis, she pursued her Ph.D. in Geography, focusing on centers of agricultural origin and diversity. She did her dissertation work on pearl millet, an African cereal species that is extremely drought tolerant. She completed her Ph.D. in 2006 and moved with her family to Maryland to begin work as an Assistant Professor of Biogeography at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Once firmly planted on the east coast, it became apparent to her that home was in the Pacific Northwest. With two young sons and the need to be back in familiar terrain, Lewis accepted a position in 2011 with Washington State University Extension as the Director of the Jefferson County office. She is primarily responsible for agricultural development programs that assist local farmers and food producers in the region. Her two sons attend Sunfield Farm and Waldorf School and she is happy to serve on the Board of Directors to assist the organization in creating a supportive, transparent community for the School and Farm to prosper and grow.

Tom Brotherton

Board member

photo coming soon

Tom Brotherton moved to Quilcene in 2005, from Kent, Washington. He and his wife, Cass, have 2 adult sons, a foster daughter and two grandchildren, one at Sunfield and the other in Oregon.

Currently Tom divides his time between appellate work for the Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney and improving the Quilcene Village Store, a family enterprise.

Tom retired from the Boeing Company where he was an engineering manager, and spent most of his time there in avionics engineering. He earned his law degree and passed the bar just before retiring. Tom earned a bachelor's degree in Physics from the University of California, a master's degree in System Engineering from the University of Washington, and an M.B.A. and J.D. from Seattle University. Currently he is the President of the Jefferson County Bar Association and serves on the Jefferson County Planning Commission. He previously served on the Kent City Council and the Kent Planning Commission.

Tom is a private pilot and keeps a Cessna 172 at the Port Townsend airport. He also has a small, hilly, wooded piece of land and a small tractor and enjoys rearranging the land to increase its usability and interest.