Grey Tyson
Grey is a community builder and systems thinker working to create practical, regenerative spaces. With experience in cooperative housing, hands-on innovation, and trauma-informed organizing, they develop housing models, workshops, and collaborative spaces shaped by lived experience with chronic illness, neurodivergence, and environmental health challenges. Their approach centers on adaptability, low-cost solutions, and inclusive design.
Taja Luna Wicks
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 growing all the food her and her partner needed for an entire year from seed, she learned through that experience the pitfalls of 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 be together sitting in a circle threshing seeds. This is what brought Taja to teaching 7 month workshops series on permaculture, observation, food preservation, growing food year round, off grid systems, seed saving and breeding. She feels she will learn something new everyday 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 prospectives 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, we are in deep relationship and symbiosis with 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.
Merlin Munzing
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, he offers 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; his 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?'
