People. Seeds. People.

Director + Education and Campaign

Kia Ruiz

Kia began her relationship with The Local Seeds Coalition as an Advisory Group member representing IFOAM NA and working with the Governance Committee. Kia also currently chairs the NonGMO Project (transitioning to Food Integrity Project) Board of Directors and serves on the Board of Directors for a public charter school in Colorado. All are very different projects but require the same muscles in leading organizations. With LSC she loves the world-walking of this project that combines the rigor of standards creation with the dignity of diverse cultural conversations. The tensions of these worlds are something Kia plans to bring more into our public-facing programs outside of the first year growing season.

Kia is a trained scientist with a background in statistics, pedagogy and interpretation beyond her ecology work. In working with organizations and community-building since her teens she has been trained and works in governance, organizational leadership, facilitation, and engagement.

You can often find Kia outdoors with her two teenagers and spouse on trails, growing food, and often saying “we live here” while watching the Colorado landscape.

Development

Julia Dakin

Julia is the big reason why this project exists with her passion for the work and connecting key relationships with others who support LSC in philosophy, experience, and funding. Over the years she has spoken with many under-resourced, and often under-valued seed people doing incredibly important work in their communities. She realized we could all benefit from an organization supporting the public facing side of our work, so that we’re not all creating separate resources, and continuing to struggle to reach our local communities.

Julia brings passion, work ethic, and listening. She has a love of grant writing because it runs from the big-picture vision down to the details. She is learning to communicate with visionary funders who have not traditionally funded agricultural work by showing how we are connected in our desire for a better world for humans and the environment. Her vision is a food system that values regional and cultural crops. She wants to help raise enough money so that the people making better food more accessible can be compensated, and the project can expand to wherever in the world it provides a benefit.

Julia enjoys growing in a community seed garden, and making bean jewelry. She would love to travel to Kenya to visit some new friends working with farmers in the future.

Standards

David Gould

David Gould is part of the Local Seeds Coalition’s Governance Working Group, and leads its Standards Working Group. He has over 30 years’ experience in organic and sustainable food systems, and holds a degree in Life Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he focused on food science, biochemistry, and microbiology. David has long played an influential role in the development of standards, practices, policy, and assurance systems that strive for social and environmental justice. He currently also serves as the General Secretary of the IFOAM Seeds Platform. He has been instrumental in worldwide efforts to control genetic engineering and advocate for farmers’ rights, and has worked with thousands of farms and companies in over 50 countries on 6 continents, in the role of consultant, trainer, third-party inspector, or certification agent. David began his career with a decade of experience in alternative education models, which he uses along with his technical background to support his work of bringing different forces together in order to catalyze broader change across the planet. David lives in Portland, Oregon, USA, where he saves seeds in his garden and embodies a slow-food approach to the table. He has a deep spiritual orientation and is an active astrologer for individuals, couples, and organizations.