Rhonda Baird
Rhonda Baird is a seventh generation Hoosier. Her family roots come from Western Europe and Cherokee families (both those from North Carolina and those that were forcibly removed from the southeast). She was a first-generation college graduate, gradutating with honors from Indiana State University in 1997. She married Corbin Baird that same year and began her community, labor and forest organizing work that same year. In 1998 she returned to Indiana State University as a Eugene V. Debs Fellow in the Labor and Social Reform Movements Program. She also began her time with Middle Way House (a domestic violence program) that year as an Americorps volunteer. She worked there full-time until her return to graduate school in 2003. She studied South Asian relgious traditions at Indiana University until the summer of 2005 when she took her Permaculture Design Course.
Since then she has been teaching, developing her own home system, and exploring fiber arts as a way to balance consumer and producer roles in an interdependent community economy.