Our Board and Staff

Mindy Fitch (she/her), our Chair, grew up in the Puget Sound area, Salish territory, Washington State. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Western Washington University in Bellingham and studied filmmaking at Vancouver Film School in British Columbia. Shortly after moving to Portland in 1997, she began editing plant, gardening, and natural history books and field guides at Timber Press, where she remained on staff until becoming a mom in 2006. She now edits books on a freelance basis, homeschools with her two daughters, and works on various nature connection advocacy projects.

Sheila Henson (she/they) is an ADHD coach and educator who brings her knowledge, experience, and passion for neurodiversity, accessibility, and transformative justice to her position on the Rewild Portland board of directors. She grew up in Thousand Oaks, California, close to forest, desert, and the beach, and now lives in North Portland. She holds undergrad degrees in History and Psychology, a Masters in Education, and has worked in education and behavior for nearly twenty years, including teaching in a self-contained behavior classroom at Serendipity Center, a therapeutic school in SE Portland. Sheila has mad skills in crisis prevention, de-escalation, collaborative problem solving, and mediation work. She heads our Transformative Justice committee and receives formal training in this area (most recently in Equity-Informed Mediation and Restorative Justice for Organizations), which she brings to the rest of the board.

Erica Savadow-Pope (she/they) grew up on the East Coast, roaming the sparse woods around her suburban development in Maryland. She moved to New York City for a few years, feeling pretty aimless and disconnected, then moved to Portland in 2008. She’s always had an appreciation for nature and cared not a lick for the trappings of “normal” youthful suburbanhood. It wasn’t until Erica settled into the Pacific Northwest that she finally understood what had been missing in her life. Her feelers had been out, but with no ideas on what they were grasping for. Here, she grew roots and didn’t feel so alien for her lack of attraction to the world of materialism and glamor. To pay the bills, she does bookkeeping and administrative work. To live, she has learned to spin her own cordage and wield a knife, start a fire with ferro and friction, weave baskets, build a relationship with local plants, and feel inspired by the brilliant ingenuity of others embracing a relationship with the wild. She feels beautiful when she wakes up under the sky, washes her face in a cold creek, and spends her days with dirt-y hands.

Paulé Wood (they/them), our Treasurer, has a background in Human Centered Design and has been professionally designing complex systems for two decades. Storytelling is a powerful and ancient practice; they have coached and facilitated workshops to help people break out of fixed and outdated thinking using storytelling, from environmental economics to queer/trans community. 

A practitioner of de-armouring and Northern European magic, they use the Wheel of the Year as a framework to navigate at many scales and have led closing rituals at events and festivals using the “Wheel of the Event” framework to help people orient to leaving sacred communal space and return to the mundane. 

A maker and repairer of clothing, tools, and community and a lifelong learner, they enjoy reading, listening, and discussing topics about resistance, mutual aid, alternative governance structures, cultural anthropology, sociology, and the way things work. Paulé gave a talk, Rewilding Loneliness, at the 7th Annual North American Rewilding Conference. They are the co-initiator of the community organization Rewild Salish Sea, part of the Rewild Alliance.

Peter Michael Bauer (he/him) is our Executive Director and an instructor for various programs. A fourth-generation Portlander, his first merit badge in the Boy Scouts was basketry. From there he went on to receive his Eagle Scout rank. He has followed a path of non-traditional education. From the age of 16 he has traveled the country attending programs such as Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School, Wilderness Awareness School in Washington State, Rabbitstick Rendezvous, Echoes in Time, Wintercount, Lynx Vilden’s Stone Age immersion program, and the Columbia Basin Basketry Guild (where he currently sits on the Board of Directors). He has been an environmental educator for many organizations in Portland, including Cascadia Wild, Friends of Tryon Creek, and the Audubon Society. Prior to becoming the full time executive director of Rewild Portland, he worked in the film industry as a production coordinator for several years. In his spare time he weaves baskets, practices the banjo, and translates Chinookan Myths into Chinuk Wawa at the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Portland office. He is the founder of rewild.com and author of Rewild or Die (under the moniker Urban Scout).

Sparkle Bennett (she/they) is a human who has recently returned to Portland after a short stint in Des Moines, Iowa and Springfield, Missouri. After two decades as an executive assistant in various sectors, they’ve hit a big hairy existential wall with corporate work and couldn’t be more excited to serve the Rewild Portland mission and community. They are formally educated in fine art, archaeology, and spiritual psychology; and have received additional training in scrum, sales operations, event production, project management, mushroom cultivation, organic urban farming, non-violent communication, and facilitation of authentic relating gatherings. They love to spend time exploring the natural world, abandoned buildings, and the highly stimulating streets of the fine city of Portland. They are the proud steward of two loving cats.

Ivy Stovall (she/her) delights in the abundance, patterns, and chaos of the natural world and of humanity. So it makes sense that three years into a Biology degree, she flipped majors and earned a BA in Interdisciplinary Humanities at the University of West Florida. Her broad education prepared her perfectly for her work in outdoor education, which she began as a 4H camp naturalist, teaching outdoor skills and elementary and middle school science curriculum in the field. Since then she has taught high and low ropes challenge courses, ESL at all grade levels, and developed a North Portland homeschool co-op and independent art, adventure, and theater camps for kids in her community. These days she lives and works at The MudHut Kulturhaus, her St. Johns urban permaculture homestead, where she shares her enthusiasm for outdoor living and hosts camps, workshops, skillshares, music and theater, women’s groups, and community celebrations and ritual. She likes to always be harvesting and keeps her hands busy making herbal medicines, homebrews and fermentations, botanical inks, dyes and pigments, wild foods, basketry, and natural building. Always a student and always a teacher, Ivy enjoys contributing to and learning from the passionate people of the Rewild Portland community. Many Rewild kids have learned fire and knife skills around The MudHut fire pit and know Ivy as the Echoes in Time kids’ camp coordinator. Ivy loves the creativity, curiosity, and wildness of young people and is dedicated to the work of building healthy intergenerational communities connected to and through the natural world.

Juniper Birch is a believer in magick and the elemental magick that comes naturally from the Earth. She has been a teacher in a variety of formats for over eight years now. She has a Masters degree in Curriculum and Design which has led her to break out of the public education box and begin writing her own curriculum based on the natural rhythm of the Earth. She currently leads a
naturalist program called, Wild Cascara Naturalist School, out on Clackamas
land and has been serving the community in that position for the past five
years now. She is a strong believer in creating rites of passages and holding
safe space for them for folx of all ages, backgrounds and expressions. She
loves creating containers for creative spaces that support playful imaginative
construction of understandings. The Earth is her greatest teacher and values
being a learner in all things. She is a single mother of two incredible young
men, loves living off the land and her greatest ally is the native white Oak
trees.