Prior to MamaSezz, Lisa spent over 20 years as the pioneer owner and CEO of the Vermont Bread Company, supplying all-natural and certified organic breads, rolls and English muffins to supermarkets and natural product stores in the Northeast, including private label for Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. She sold a majority stake in the company to a large private equity firm and worked with them to create the first national certified organic bread company. Lisa went back to school to get her MBA and on one day in April 2014, her final paper was due at 9:00 am and at 9:01 it hit the WSJ that the business was sold to a public company.

Lisa is the co-author with Margot Fraser, founder of Birkenstock USA, of the book Dealing With the Tough Stuff: Practical Wisdom for Running a Values-Driven Business. She has served on numerous boards including Vermont Community Foundation, Vermont Smoke & Cure, Chittenden Bank, The White House Project, VBSR and the Women’s Freedom Center. She has an MBA from the UVA Darden School of Business and is a graduate of the Harvard Business School Owner-President Management Program. Lisa lives with her three generations of her family in Brattleboro, VT.

Prior to coming to NPR, Smith worked for Marketplace, where she was a correspondent and fill-in host. While there, Smith was part of a collaboration with The New York Times, where she explored the relationship between money and marriage. She was also part of Marketplace's live shows, where she produced a series of pieces on getting her data mined.

Smith is a native of Idaho and grew up working on her parents' cattle ranch. She is a graduate of Princeton University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in comparative literature and creative writing. She also holds a master's in broadcast journalism from Columbia University.

Udi Mandel Butler grew up in Rio de Janeiro and the United Kingdom, and is now a resident of Putney, Vermont. He is Chair of the Sustainable Development program at the School of International Training where he is co-developing a new MA program in Sustainable Development and Regenerative Practices. Udi’s work focuses on regenerative practices for ecologies and communities and the role and possibility of higher education to offer hopeful futures. This later work has included a critique of current higher education systems and a collaboration with alternatives that are emerging from social and ecological movements and indigenous communities across the globe offering innovative practices around sustainable development and regeneration. To this end Udi has co-founded with Kelly Teamey and others the Enlivened Learning project and the Ecoversities Alliance – an international alliance of places of learning and higher education committed to social and ecological justice and regeneration. Across these strands of work he has combined social research, historically contextualized and critically ethnographic, with more co-creative and collaborative methods of inquiry. At the same time, he has experimented with creative forms of communication, which, in addition to published articles and books, has involved such formats as documentary filmmaking, collaborative publications, and collaborative exhibitions. Udi received a PhD in Social Anthropology from Goldsmiths College (University of London), an MS in International Development from the University of Bristol, and an MFA from the University of Edinburgh and has held faculty appointments at EARTH University (Costa Rica), the University of Bristol (UK), and the University of Oxford.

Within Hungry Harvest, Stacy Carroll created “HarvestRX,” a farm to patient food access platform that supplies preventative health programs with affordable access to fresh fruits and vegetables, delivered. To date, Hungry Harvest has recovered and delivered 9 million pounds of surplus and cosmetically imperfect produce while donating 700 thousand pounds to our hunger relief partners.

Carroll holds a masters degree from Wagner College and has spent the majority of her career consulting for the hospitality and consumer food industries.

Jamila Gaskins is a social, economic, environmental and racial justice activist. She grew up in Kent, OH exploring the woods and climbing trees and running after her older brother hoping to get into a football game. In 2018 she graduated from Antioch University, Los Angeles with an MA in Urban Sustainability. While at Antioch Jamila worked in cooperative development learning firsthand the challenges faced by people in under-served communities, with English as a second language and those who are possibly undocumented who are trying to bring healthy food to their community. Throughout her program, she investigated how worker-owned cooperatives and community land trusts could be tools for improving community health and wealth. She eventually expanded to explore the relationship to the land; resilience, the ability of people to survive and adapt and to understand the ways in which past policies, beliefs, and practices impact the present. Her thesis, entitled “How Did Forced Migration and Forced Displacement Change Igbo Women's and Their African American Environmental Identity,” won the 2018 Library Research Award, best graduate paper, social science.

Martina Anderson is a nomad coming all the way from Austria that finally settled with her two children in Vermont. She has a background in Special Education and is all about Inclusivity and building community through relationships.

Liz Knapp lives in Adamant with her two kids and a dog and a cat. She has been intimately involved with the local food movement in Vermont in a variety of ways for over 15 years, including (but not limited to) running her own farm, advocating for policies that would strengthen family farms, and building relationships between local farmers and small businesses.

Mari Stuart (PhD) is an ecological designer, teacher, and writer. She is the founder of Project Grounded, which helps people to connect with the regenerative agriculture movement through their daily choices.

Originally from Finland, Mari now lives in Asheville, NC on a small urban homestead. She holds a PhD from Harvard University, and taught Asian religions and environmental ethics at Reed College and the University of South Carolina before transitioning to ecological design. Mari brings this interdisciplinary background to her work with Project Grounded: teaching and empowering people about ecological and social solutions to climate change, connecting the dots between grounded people and grounded carbon, and designing landscapes that support life in all its forms.