Born and bred in South Africa, with a diploma in Fine Arts.

With the economic downturn that began in 2008, I realized there was a need for our communities to go back to basics in order to build their local resilience. That, couple with the variety of other intensifying issues such as climate change and ecosystem collapse, pollution, water scarcity, peak oil and the decline of other natural resources, led to my doing research into the idea of sustainable/self-reliant communities. Through that research, I came across the Transition Town movement which I began promoting in Port Elizabeth together with a few other like-minded folk in 2010. One of our main concerns at the moment in this process of building local resilience and reducing fossil fuel dependency is food security. So we are trying to equip people with the skills to produce their own food according to the principles of permaculture, and also inspire a shift in practice of local farmers.