Members and Volunteers

We are a group of seed savers from coast to coast who protect Canada's seed biodiversity by growing it ourselves and sharing it with others. Every year, we multiply the most vulnerable seed varieties that we can, exchange seeds with each other, and keep those varieties alive and in cultivation for future gardeners to enjoy.

We are a membership organization with over 1000 members across Canada that make Seeds of Diversity a vibrant and visible part of the gardening and food security scene. Our funding primarily comes from charitable donations made by both members and non-members. [Become a member]

Besides multiplying rare seeds, we volunteer at over 150 Seedy Saturday and Seedy Sunday events across Canada, write articles for our popular magazine and monthly email bulletin, package seeds for community seed libraries, and help beginner seed savers learn the easy techniques for growing good seeds.

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Board of Directors

Our Board of Directors is made up of volunteers, elected by our membership, who guide Seeds of Diversity's vision and oversee the work of our staff. We value contributions from members in all regions of Canada, from diverse backgrounds, who offer experience in non-profit governance and community leadership.

Do you love what Seeds of Diversity does and want to help make it even better? We're looking for people with skills and experience who can help strategize our work for the future. Meetings are monthly and virtual, typically no more than an hour. We're especially looking for people who have connections with the wider seed-saving community, experience in administration or governance of non-profit organizations, and availability for a one-hour virtual meeting each month.

If that sounds like you, send us an email expressing your interest and let us know 

  • Why you want to join Seeds of Diversity's board of directors.
  • What knowledge, experiences, values, or skills you can offer as a board member of a non-profit like Seeds of Diversity, and where you learned or acquired them.
  • Any questions that you might have about our Board, meeting style, or other roles within the organization.

Steph Warr, Chair

Steph has been a member of the board since 2016, and represents the Maritimes.

 

Matthew Kemshaw, Treasurer

Matthew has been a member of the board since 2017, and represents British Columbia.

Teprine Baldo, Secretary

 

Teprine is a seed farmer and agroecologist who loves working with all the elements within a permacultural framework and being outside on her family farm in Frelighsburg Quebec. It was the coming into this world of her two wonderful children that inspired her to move back to the land and take her family's food sovereignty into her own two strong hands. Sharing the love of nature and seeds with her children is a nourishing task that she takes on with joy and patience. Living her passion and being a good role model and entrepreneur, she hopes to encourage her community to take similar actions, to take time to plant seeds, watch them grow, and share them with others.

Dariya Quenneville, Director

Dariya is on a lifetime journey of building a deeper connection to the earth and ourselves. She lives on Manitoulin Island and facilitates wilderness immersion programs through a non-profit called Finding Polaris Wilderness Community. FPWC also has a wild food forest project that she is actively engaged in that focuses on wild fruit/nut trees, medicinal plants, and native tubers/roots. She has been humbled by the teaching of abundance, observation, patience, and resilience that come with saving seeds. From that place she will be forever a student and in service to the study and sharing of seeds.

Zoe Arnold, Director

Zoe lives on Treaty Six Territory in Saskatoon, SK. She is a qualified teacher and outdoor education specialist. She holds an honours degree in Biology, a B.Ed., and a certificate in Forest School Education from the UK. She helped launch the Saskatoon Seed Exchange in 2020 through the Saskatoon Public Library and has helped organize three of Saskatoon's Seedy Saturday events. Zoe has worked with organizations specializing in conservation, urban agriculture, outdoor education, and environmental initiatives. She has been involved in urban agriculture and developing greenspaces as gardens in Saskatoon. She currently spends the majority of her time teaching children and youth outdoors on a variety of topics.  She can usually be found outdoors in all seasons enjoying gardening, hiking, and cross country skiing.
Zoe joined the board in 2018, and represents the prairies from her home province of Saskatchewan.

Valerie Gabriel, Director

 

Valerie Karonhiatakwen Gabriel is a Kanien’kehá:ka of Kanehsatake, and the owner of Nations Garlic Farm and Tall Tree Learning Center, a small-scale garlic permaculture farm and environmental and agricultural education center for Kanien’kehá:ka youth.

She is an environmental and agricultural consultant currently working with TerraHumana Solutions as well as the Kanehsatake Ratihontsanonhstats Environment Center. Valerie participated in the UN COP13 and has been part of the Indigenous Women's Biodiversity Network since 2017. She serves on the advisory committee for the Food, Environment, Health and Nutrition of First Nations Children and Youth (FEHNCY) in Kanehsatake. She has a degree as an environmental technologist from Vanier College and is now conducting a bachelor’s degree at Concordia University in Human Environment.

Valerie joined our board in 2020.

Staff

Bob Wildfong, Executive Director

Bob has been saving seeds and teaching about garden biodiversity for over 30 years. He mixes science and storytelling to reveal the secret lives of seeds, plants, and pollinators. Bob has been a member of Seeds of Diversity since 1988, and became our first Executive Director in 2002, after a career in software engineering. He teaches garden and food history at the Waterloo Region Museum, and as a board member of the Pollinator Partnership Canada helps build the movement to preserve pollinators. He is a past president of the Culinary Historians of Canada, and delights in explaining how we can learn about future food sustainability by remembering past lessons.

Angie Koch, Seed Library Coordinator

Angie is a local, organic vegetable farmer and educator. When she is not out in the fields at her farm near Waterloo, ON, Angie manages the collection of seeds stored on site and works, coordinates our volunteer grow-outs, and works with other seed libraries to establish protocols and provide training materials for the storage and record keeping of seeds in their collections. Angie is also proud to be the first Canadian farmer to certify herself under the Bee-Friendly Farmer program in 2012!

Christine Sloboda, Office Administrator

Christine volunteered in our office for many years, and joined our staff in 2019.  When you email our office to inquire about membership, donations, Seedy Saturdays, or a hundred other things, Christine will be there to help you.

Allison Eady, School Food Gardens Co-Coordinator

Allison joined us in 2019 to help grow our School Food Gardens program, but her vision for the project dates back to her original research that started it.

Rayna Almas, Youth in Food Systems Program Manager, Media Coordinator 

Rayna joined our team in 2019 to help grow our School Food Gardens program. She has since taken on the additional role of Media and Promotions Coordinator. She is currently studying Food Security and Urban Agriculture at Ryerson University, and hopes to continue exploring solutions to the issue of industrialized food systems in Canada and on a local and national scale