Rachel Schneider

co-director, co-founder

Rachel Schneider is co-founder and co-director of the Institute for Mindful Agriculture, along with her husband, Steffen. As part of the Hawthorne Valley Farm, where she worked for more than 25 years, Rachel held the positions of market gardener and Director of the Hawthorne Valley Place Based Learning Center. She directed farm-based learning experiences for children, taught business training courses for beginning farmers and developing and offered workshops for people interested in Biodynamic agriculture.

Rachel now serves as Director of the Rolling Grocer, a non-profit grocery store and food access project. The Rolling Grocer mission is to increase the health and collective well-being of Columbia County residents by making wholesome, local, natural and organic food available to everyone, regardless of income. This is achieved through a unique, three-tiered pricing system.(https://www.rollinggrocer19.org/about-rg19 )

Steffen Schneider

co-director, co-founder

Steffen is a co-founder and co-director of IMA, along with his wife, Rachel. He finished his agricultural university studies in Giessen, Germany in 1982. Director Emeritus of Farm Operations Hawthorne Valley Farm, he has been a Biodynamic practitioner since 1983, first in Wisconsin, and from 1989 until 2020 at Hawthorne Valley. He loves working with the livestock, especially the dairy cows and his passion for Biodynamics continues to grow. He is convinced that a spiritually grounded agriculture is a major lever for societal transformation. He has given workshops and lectured at numerous national and international conferences.

Through the Institute for Mindful Agriculture, he is currently engaged in food justice projects in the Hudson Valley of New York and supports food systems change in collaboration with several agricultural ventures, locally and nationally. Currently he serves on the Board of the Biodynamic Demeter Alliance as treasurer. He lives with his partner Rachel in Columbia County, NY and is grateful to be able to spend more time with his two sons and three granddaughters.

Ursula Versteegen

co-founder

Dr. Ursula Versteegen is a co-founder of the Institute of Mindful Agriculture, Presencing Institute and the Society for Organizational Learning. She is a team member and trainer of the Eurasia Learning Institute, facilitating social change toward new development paradigms such as Gross National Happiness.

She is an action researcher and social activist with an aspiration to bringing forth profound societal change that allows all of us to re-connect to ourselves, each other and planet earth. Her particular interest is in exploring the riddle of social fields: how can awareness based practices help shift the patterns of relationships amongst multiple well-intended individual stakeholders from co-creating results that no-one wants, towards communities of trust generating collective capacity for action addressing the big challenges of our times?

Ursula has been working with the social technologies of presencing in business, education, health care and the agro-food-value chain for the past 20 yrs. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from University of Freiburg in Germany and a Masters of Public Health from Harvard School of Public Health.

Jill Jakimetz

Regular contributor

At IMA, Jill is a regular contributor of research, writing and designing embodied learning experiences in dialogue with place.

She holds a BA and MA in environmental studies from Bates College and the University of Oregon and continues to explore the feedback loop between cultural imagination and the environment. A Fulbright Fellowship to the European Union gave Jill insight into the beginnings of public policy support for agricultural co-benefits: "high-nature value farming" in Ireland and other forms of "multifunctional agriculture" in the Netherlands and across the EU, along with the cultural and organizational challenges that come alongside. Jill trained and has worked on many organic and biodynamic farms and brings her food world experience as a farmer, baker, administrator, and educator together with her academic experience in ecocriticism, art, ecology, landscape architecture, environmental policy, and geography. Jill adapts forest bathing methods of connection to help open ways for people to experience farms, soil, self, and nature in a new way. Her work asks- how can we listen to one another and to the more-than-human world? What can art, science, and Earth-based livelihoods teach us about processes of inquiry, experimentation and production even in the face of unpredictable change?