Syndallas Baughman grew up on the water and in the forests of Michigan and Florida and earned a B.S. in Biology at University of Michigan and M.S. Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine. Along the way she’s camped and studied plants and pollinators in the Siskiyous in S.W. Oregon, swamps, forests and fields of Michigan, Kauai, coastal and desert California, and the California Sierra Nevada.  She taught at El Cerrito Preschool Cooperative, learning from wise and loving mentors to step back and follow and support kids’ ideas. At Wildcat Community Free School she followed kids through creeks and forests, set up experiments, supervised the use of power tools, knives and fire, facilitated democratic decision making and mediated a lot of arguments about Pokemon Card trades. She’s planted native gardens with preschoolers to high school students, and has homeschooled and camped all over the U.S.A. with her two teenage sons.

Syndallas spent much of the past decade at an automotive manufacturing plant where her responsibilities included developing accountable health and safety systems with teams of union leaders, production operators and supervision.  She recently served on a Michigan State working group developing guidance for community centers and public events around COVID safety.  She participates in consensus decision making with her neighbors at home at Great Oak Cohousing Community. The beautiful wild world is the place Syndallas wants to be! She loves sharing nature connection with people and other living things and you!