Name
Current role(s)
What they do at CCR
Relevant background
Short sentence on values or approach
We use a structure with Directors, Council Members, Program Leads, and Advisors because it matches how the nonprofit actually operates.
The board still holds overall legal, fiduciary, and organizational responsibility, and helps identify opportunities for collaboration across the whole organization. It is responsible for the health of the nonprofit, major governance decisions, and keeping the work aligned with the mission, obligations, and donors. But not every project or decision needs to go through the full board.
Councils help guide specific areas of work by involving the people most connected to them. They help shape direction, priorities, standards, and larger decisions within that area.
Program Leads handle day-to-day responsibility for moving that work forward, including planning, coordination, communication, and implementation.
Advisors offer knowledge, perspective, and support where needed, without necessarily being involved in day-to-day operations or formal governance.
This structure keeps decision-making close to the work, includes the right people at the right stages, and gives those carrying major responsibility the flexibility to act quickly. Some people may hold more than one role, depending on the needs of the organization.
Directors
Grey Tyson
Makerspace, Village, Health, and Cultural Council
Grey Tyson is a community builder, systems thinker, and practical designer working to create regenerative spaces that are affordable, adaptable, and grounded in real life. With experience in cooperative housing, hands-on innovation, trauma-informed organizing, and cross-disciplinary project development, they build models for shared living, creative infrastructure, and community stewardship that respond to both social and environmental realities.
Their work is shaped by lived experience with chronic illness, neurodivergence, and environmental health challenges, giving them a direct understanding of how badly many existing systems fail the people they are supposed to serve. Rather than treating those conditions as separate issues, Grey approaches them as connected systems that must be designed in tadnem to support health, dignity, and long-term resilience.
Grey’s work is driven by a belief that better systems should be tangible, beautiful, and usable, and that communities need tools they can actually carry forward themselves.
Taja Luna Wicks
Agriculture and Village Council
Taja is a seed keeper, educator, grower, garden coach, permaculture consultant, fermenter, amateur plant breeder and biologist, connoisseur of food and its preservation, and aspiring ethnobotanist, with a passion for nutrition and microbiology. She is grateful to those who organize and build new worlds, like her collaborators at the Center for Creative Repair.
Taja has spent the last 7 years on Orcas Island dedicated to learning how to live with the land. With a passion for reading and self-study, but not fitting into the formal education system, she focused on hands-on experience, learning from elders, those around her, and the cycles of the seasons. In 2022, after growing all the food she and her partner needed for an entire year from seed, she learned through that experience the pitfalls of the rugged individualism that drives America: just because we can, doesn't mean we should. We need community, we need laughter in the fields, we need our gardens to be our art, we need people around to tell stories, to sing songs, to ask questions we would never think to ask, to be together sitting in a circle threshing seeds.
This is what brought Taja to teaching 7-month workshop series on permaculture, observation, food preservation, growing food year-round, off-grid systems, seed saving, and breeding. She feels she will learn something new every day for the rest of her life, and believes the best way to continue her education is to share her knowledge. She loves all the diverse perspectives that come from many different people working together, and how that leads to new ways to teach and understand the world.
The village has been taken from us. The tragedy of the commons is something to learn from. People getting to be together, learn from one another, and grow with the seasons, remembering we are not separate from nature, but in deep relationship and symbiosis with the earth. This is the thing we all crave, but most have forgotten.
Taja wishes for every child, or inner child, to get to plant a seed and watch it grow through the season, to produce hundreds of seeds. This simple act reminds us we do not live in scarcity, we live in abundance. We must remember that this abundance must be shared.
Pedro LopezDeVictoria
Cultural Council
Pedro is a musician, educator, and farmer living on Orcas Island. He is currently the lead roadie for local band Star Guts, a ten-year veteran of cinema projection and management, a children’s entertainer, a novelist, a playwright, and a believer in all islanders. He moved to Orcas to slow down and benefitted greatly from a transition away from city life towards the sustainable rhythms of rural life. He has created many educational programs around media literacy and songcraft, and is responsible for designing the Richie Moore Songshop at the Funhouse Commons. He hasn’t caught any fish this year, but with determination, he believes he can accomplish most things.
Council Members and Program Leads
Asifa Welch-Pasin
Makerspace Lead, and Cultural Council
Asifa has been a board member with Orcas Recycling Services and The Exchange since 2019 and has been organizing the Trashion Fashion Shows on Orcas Island since 2012. For more than a decade, she has been creating and hosting hands-on creative workshops, including sewing classes using reclaimed materials, and making pet clothing, beeswax wraps, costumes, reusable shopping bags, and upcycled jewelry from old, unusual, and discarded materials of all kinds.
Since 2020, she has offered sewing and creative reuse classes focused on sustainability and accessibility, while also mentoring young artists and aspiring fashion designers. She believes deeply in the power of creativity to build confidence, connection, and community. She believes there is an artist in every person, even if they don’t know it yet.
She is also a performer, singer, and dancer, and has been appearing in productions at the Orcas Center for the past 11 years. Over that time, she has designed, created, and assembled hundreds of costumes for Orcas Center productions, blending storytelling, imagination, and creative reuse.
In addition to her creative work, she serves as the Volunteer Program Manager at the local Food Bank and works as a journalist and office manager for the Islands Sounder. She has also been a volunteer community member with the Coalition for Orcas Youth since 2019.
Asifa loves teaching, collaborating, and working with people of all ages and backgrounds.
Creating welcoming, safe spaces where people feel comfortable being themselves is at the heart of everything she does. She believes that having a dedicated place like the Center for Creative Repair, where creativity can grow, skills can be shared, and community can thrive, is essential to the health and spirit of the island.
Merlin Munzing
Makerspace, Village, and Cultural Council
As a partner artist and collaborator at the Center for Creative Repair, Merlin uses their eclectic background in education, visual arts, and anthropology to co-develop workshops and classes that support emotional resilience, community care, and self-expression. Their work is informed by a belief that art is not a luxury, but a vital language. By encouraging a practice of mindful curiosity and tactile engagement, they offer spaces where people can reconnect with themselves and cultivate creative skills.
Merlin is passionate about consent-based learning models and creative collaboration, especially for younger students. Their teaching approach is student-driven but mentor-facilitated. Instead of just teaching students how to use a paintbrush and simply make a painting, Merlin aims to teach art in a way that combines the student’s interests, ideas, and innate approach while imparting creative skills and knowledge of the medium, all the while asking, “How can we make art and learn together?”
Kyle McNeal
Village Council
Kyle McNeil is an experienced mechanic and machinist with AAS certifications from Bellingham Technical College, experience in the industry, and six years of service in the U.S. Navy. Kyle’s interests include restoring old machines through traditional techniques and new technologies such as CAD, 3D printing, and CNC machining. He also enjoys the medium of podcasting and making informative educational videos.
Bailey Quishenberry
Village, Cultural, Health, and Agricultural Council
Bailey is a Shawnee queer artist, farmer, language teacher, and educator living on unceded Coast Salish territory. They are also a steward of Long Duck Farms. They believe in art not as a luxury, but as a practical necessity.
Their ethos is that there is no choice but to create art, because art is how we convey meaning, but also how we live. To live is to change the world around you and to tell a story, and you can do that intentionally or not.
They want to teach people how to take the stories inside of them and put them out into the world, however they feel called to do so.
Art is, for Bailey, the process of living.
Their praxis is practical art that serves a purpose, with roots in folk art, illustration, cultural storytelling, protest posters, mythos, and portraits that hold the subject in a clear and kind light. It is a praxis that sits in conversations over dinner and in community art projects.
Their paintings are meant to be on walls and in pockets, pressed between the pages of favorite books, printed on stained work shirts, or snuck under a fresh loaf of bread left on a doorstep.
Bailey is currently looking for more varieties of beans for their dried bean collection. Someday, they plan to make the world’s most comprehensive Every Bean Soup.
Ashley Elaine
Health and Village Council
Simon
Gallery Manager.
Simon is an African Grey parrot with 31 years of expeince being a small guy and uplifting the vibe. His favorite activity is violence, but he excels in sculpting, song wrting, comedy, sound effects, and more.