Common Threads Farm Board of Directors

Laura Plaut - Founder and Director

John Rawlins - Treasurer 

Nancy Burnett - Secretary

Carolyn Feffer - Member at large

Laura Plaut - Founder and Director of Common Threads Farm

Laura is a passionate life-long learner. She believes that learning is most effective when it is organized around real-world needs and projects, and when it is FUN!

Common Threads Farm grew out of Laura's 20+ years as an experiential educator and her conviction that nothing is more fundamental and worthy of our attention than how we choose to interact with food and energy. She believes that important issues such as the future of food and energy will be solved, slowly but surely, by helping people experience and fall in love with patterns of consumption that are healthy for themselves, their communities, and our planet. 

Laura holds a master's degree in Nonprofit Administration from the University of San Francisco and a bachelor's degree in Chinese Language and Culture from Amherst College. Prior to founding Common Threads Farm, she chaired the Education Program at Prescott College, served as an Instructor and Course Director for the North Carolina Outward Bound School, directed the Fort Miley Ropes Course in San Francisco, served as the Education and Service Learning Coordinator for the East Bay Conservation Corps; and led international service-learning programs for teens in China, Thailand, and Costa Rica.

John Rawlins - Treasurer

John's career choices resulted in several lives, each with its own parallel life of hobbies.  John received his Ph. D. from U. Texas in 1965.  After graduation, he did pure nuclear physics research at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada - and in parallel went on uncountable fishing trips in the northern Saskatchewan Canadian shield area.  He then moved back to the states to an undergraduate teaching/administrative job in southwestern Pennsylvania at California State College - and went crazy over white water kayaking in the river wonderland of that corner of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. 

In 1976 the call of the big rivers out west brought him, wife Mary, and new-born son Mark to eastern Washington where John worked as a reactor startup physicist on a Department of Energy project tied to the breeder reactor program - and for most of his time there he and Mary (and occasionally Mark) made frequent day trips and week-long forays on rivers in Idaho and one big trip down the Grand Canyon of the Colorado river.  He became an avid, serious bicycle commuter throughout the two-decade Hanford career. 

Twins Michael and Laura appeared on the scene in 1985 and complicated/enriched life considerably for Mary and John.  John also started a continuing hobby of playing early music on recorders, which he still does today in a small performing group in Bellingham.  John retired early from Westinghouse Hanford in 1995, moved to Bellingham, and ended up teaching astronomy and physics full-time at Whatcom Community College until 2008. 

The parallel Bellingham area hobby that evolved into a full-time retirement interest is working with wife Mary outdoors on a 10 acre Everson-area parcel, trying to learn how to produce food sustainably - using a combination of intensive vegetable gardening and perennial permaculture plantings.  Son Mark, his wife Larissa, and their daughter Madeleine live and work in Portland, OR.  Younger daughter Laura lives in Bellingham, and her twin brother Michael lives in the bay area of California.

Nancy Burnett - Secretary 

Nancy is a biologist by training and a naturalist at heart. She has had lots of experience gardening and teaching kids science including starting the school garden at Beach School on Lummi Island. She is also a photographer and has been involved in producing a PBS science television series about the animal kingdom.   

Carolyn Feffer - Member at large

Carolyn Feffer is a certified Permaculture Designer. She received her certification from the Bullock Brothers Permaculture Homestead on Orcas Island.  Carolyn holds a bachelor's degree in Landscape Design and Sustainable Development from Fairhaven College.  

Carolyn first came to Common Threads Farm as an intern in the spring of 2008 and has continued to volunteer at the farm ever since. She has worked at other small-scale organic farms in Whatcom and San Juan Counties, and teaches Permaculture Education courses at Inspiration Farm in Bellingham, Washington. 

Carolyn enjoys making medicinal herbal products, gardening, cooking, whitewater river sports and playing in the woods.