Vanessa Tavernetti

Vanessa is a credentialed teacher and has worked with school gardens for the past 10 years in San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago. She was instrumental in developing the sustaining garden program at Valley Vista School, Petaluma and is a founding member of the School Garden Network of Sonoma County.  She is currently the Petaluma City Schools District Community and School Garden Coordinator and has a consulting business which helps school gardens with developing curriculum, sustaining programs, and implementing farm to school programs while helping link schools with their surrounding communities.  She supports schools to be academically strong, nutritionally wise, and environmentally aware. Vanessa and her husband also run a small organic CSA in Petaluma, Flicker Farms, which has vegetables, native plants, and fruit trees, as well as, chickens, rabbits, ducks, goats, sheep, and bees.  She is passionate and dedicated to shifting food production from conventional agribusiness to small community food systems.  She believes strongly people will heal themselves, others, and the earth by having connection to the earth through their food.