Meet The Green Team

Written by Arianne (To Think Is To Create)

A Midwest transplant from Los Angeles, Arianne is a former Paralegal turned freelance writer and mom of all boys. She loves to challenge people to think and to educate themselves, all the while throwing in a little snark for good fun. An advocate for natural health and green living, she fully embraces the “eco-mom” title. All three of her sons have autism, and their view on life challenges and inspires her every day.

She can also be found writing at her personal blog To Think Is To Create, her NWI Parent Magazine blog, Stop Looking At Me, munching away as a channel editor for Blog Nosh Magazine, and as a contributer for Chicago Moms Blog and Mama Speaks. Also, come check in with her on Twitter at ToThink.

Regular Contributors

Beth is a 35 year old native Idahoan, wife to Roger and mother to Roger, Jr., Rebecca and Susanne. She began her journey into "green" living in 2006. Her current life journey is Urban Homesteading, where she and her husband are turning their 3/4 acre lot into a sustainable urban "farm". She enjoys food preservation, learning new ways to simplify life, gardening, sewing, reading, homeschooling, baking her own bread, recycling, renovating vintage Volkswagens and generally staying busy. A love for nature and all things organic drives this Mom to think of new ways to do things that cause little to no impact on the planet and just generally beautify her life! Beth blogs at her personal blog Coming Up For Air.

Jennifer never imagined life as a Christian, wife, and mother of three children, but here she is and loving every interesting minute of it. She holds a B.A. in English and has finally found her calling as a writer and stay-at-home, homeschooling mommy. “I never thought I would be a part of the blogging world, and now I can’t get enough of it. There is so much I want to share and I have learned so much from others.” Before marriage and family, she was a Web designer and taught the same. Her entrepreneurial spirit continued and lead her, along with her husband, in the creation of an online business, Life as Organic. They promote safe, non-toxic, and natural living through community events and as Shaklee independent distributors. In the free time she hopes to find, “if she can ever get it together,” Jennifer enjoys reading, writing, running, lots of time on the computer (her sewing machine misses her), and taking lots and lots of pictures (just ask her children). She also writes about and shares the adventures of her homeschool journey at Homeschool Roster as well as green, natural, and vegetarian “city girl,” now country living at Little Green Secrets.

After leaving the corporate world, Jen Khatchatrian started her own company, Function & Space to provide “closet therapy” for her clients and recycle those impulse purchases. Recently she founded Chicago Smart Green Families – a group designed to connect families in the city that are starting or maintaining a green lifestyle. She resides in Old Town, a historic neighborhood in Chicago, with her husband and 2 young sons. Jen contributes to the Chicago Moms Blog and as The EcoChic Organizer.

Jennifer Taggart runs The Smart Mama, offering advice and resources for going green and non toxic at home, with a focus on kids and babies. She is a mom of 2, former environmental engineer and currently a partner in a Los Angeles firm. She is an environmental attorney specializing in consumer product labeling law and Proposition 65. She is the author of the forthcoming The Smart Mama's Green Guide: Simple Steps for Non Toxic Babies from Hachette Book Group, USA, Center Street. She has an eco-consulting business to help individuals and business go green and non toxic, from greening the cleaning to testing toys using an XRF analyzer. She lectures throughout California on going green and non toxic. Jennifer served as a Commissioner with the Los Angeles City Environmental Affairs Commission for 9 years.

Green Mamma, also Jessica Monte, is a New Englander living outside of Washington, D.C. where politics, protests, and activism are a way of life. Always an idealist, Jessica is committed to raising environmental awareness as well as a green family. Since the arrival of her daughter Annabelle, who is 18 months, Jessica has been educating herself about family health and its interdependence on the community and the environment. A writer at heart, Jessica loves people as much as she loves planet Earth; learning about ways to protect and care for the environment have presented numerous opportunities to meet creative green people. When Jessica is away from her laptop and researching the latest on green living and natural parenting, you can find her climbing on the jungle gym or playing on the swings in her neighborhood. Check out Jessica at Green Mamma, green living tips for all folks, especially kids and parents. Jessica is also a monthly contributor to API Speaks.

An avid t-shirt slogan aficionado and Pacific Northwest native, Kerri Anne is a former English Literature major turned web geek/writer/non-profit savant. By day she works for a green company wherein she is thrilled to be doing her part to save the planet daily. By night she spends copious amounts of time day-dreaming about world travel and hiking with her fantastic web-designing husband and their one-year-old pug puppy named after Iggy Pop. When she's not enjoying all that the good green earth has to offer, Kerri Anne is most likely writing at her personal site, Kerrianne.org, or at CinematicEcstatic.com, wherein she nurses her undying obsession with movies of all lengths and genres. She can also be found on Twitter daily, and recently started a project and a site devoted solely to her newfound love of felt mustaches, and yours, too, at Sisterhood of the Traveling 'Stache. Kerri Anne can be reached at kerri@kerrianne[dot]org.

Sommer Poquette is GreenandCleanMom.org and she’s a WAHM with two little greenies! Sommer is a mom who’s trying her very best to be some shade of green every single day. She juggles many things each day, just like most moms. She’s an educator, green entrepreneur, humanitarian, Zonta club member, enthusiastic social media fanatic, Shaklee Business leader, Oprah fan, and bossy but loving wife. Sommer admits to not being a doctor, lawyer,scientist or environmentalist. Sommer knows how confusing and scary raising a child can be, but also how tough it is to be eco-savvy and run a home based business. It’s her hope that she can inspire other moms to try a little harder, be a catalyst for change and to offer some fun green tips on how to go green. As a mom she knows how much it means to be a good role model, but also how important it is to support and help one another verses judging.

Tiffany is a freelance writer and newspaper journalist from Ohio and a “green” mom to three wonderful kids, eight and under. One of her foremost concerns is the state of the environment and making sure that her family lives with a light ecological footprint. They try to maintain a sustainable home with green products that have minimal impact on the Earth. Tiffany enjoys all things related to natural living…organic and raw foods, natural health, travel, yoga, water aerobics, hiking, and meeting like minded friends. In a previous life she was a marketing and advertising executive working in a major metropolitan city and the owner and president of a cloth diaper manufacturing and distribution company until her love all things green brought her to a small Midwestern city and a more natural family life. On a more personal note Tiffany was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer in 2006 at the age of 28. She is cancer free right now but the experience has taught her that there is nothing more important than living naturally and healthfully and it will always be her goal to help other moms and dads who are not aware of the toxins that can be found in the average home and diet and why we MUST change that…for ourselves and for our precious children. Tiffany writes for a variety of different web sites and companies, and has contributed to a few books as well. Her main blog for natural and green moms is at Nature Moms.

Monthly Guest Posters

Amy Gates, aka the Crunchy Domestic Goddess, lives in Colorado with her husband Jody and two children, Ava and Julian. A stay-at-home-mom, she is passionate about natural childbirth, home birth, breastfeeding, attachment parenting, gentle discipline, recycling, green living, organic foods, and informed health care decisions. In addition to taking care of her children and home, she runs two online CafePress stores - Attached At The Hip and Cute As A Bug, and enjoys blogging, photography, reading and hiking.

Deanna Duke is a mother of two and manager of an urban homestead in the heart of Seattle. In addition to working full-time as a software developer, Deanna is the Director of the program, Goods 4 Girls which provides reusable menstrual supplies for girls in Africa so that they can stay in school. On her blog, Crunchy Chicken, Deanna hosts an eco book club, interviews, giveaways, polls and lots of (sometimes crazy) environmental challenges. Her goal is to push people beyond their comfort level, forcing them to think about the choices they make that affect the environment. In other words, she puts the mental in environmental.

mod*mom is a full-time mom + wife with a degree in environmental science + interests in mod, modern, futuristic + space-age design, technology, music, books, blogs + adventures. she resides in a sixties vintage prefab in silicon valley between yahoo + google.

Jenn Savedge is a full-time mom, environmentalist, and author who researches and writes about the two topics that are closest to her heart: children and the environment. As a former park ranger for the National Park Service, Jenn traveled the U.S., learning about the environment in some this country's most breath-taking wild places. Her first book, The Green Parent: A Kid-Friendly Guide to Earth-Friendly Living (Kedzie Press, 2008) gives parents the info they need to go green while raising kids and the tools they need to pass this info on to the next generation. Find out more about Jenn at her green parenting website, The Green Parent.

Jess Trevelyan drove across the country to DC shortly after college graduation in SoCal. She was lured by the palpable passion of the wonkety minds in our nation's capitol and is still hooked. Despite ping-ponging back and forth to California for brief stints (hiking a chunk of the Pacific Crest Trail, graduate school at Berkeley, crawling from the bathroom to the sofa and back during the Silicon Valley months of her son's pregnancy), she remains a steadfast Washingtonian. An East Coaster at heart, she grew up in the Boston area but knows that the people she holds near and dear cannot ever again live in a place so frejeezing cold that their nostrils clamp shut in protest. An eclectic career as a health-food store produce prepper, nutrition newsletter and nonprofit grant writer, English teacher, researcher, and mother all came together when she began to blog in 2007. Currently, Jess balances life with two kids under five, a counter-surfing Lab with a delicate stomach, freelance grant writing and research gigs, and a near-addictive consumption of health, food, nutrition, environmental, parenting and kids' blogs. She loves the fellowship of writers found in the blogosphere and the divergent ideas that co-exist in the blogging community. In the physical world, Jess loves living in a corner of the city that's nestled in between the green space of Rock Creek Park and a walkable retail strip, a small-timey urban pocket with a public school for her kids down the block, playgrounds galore, and so many children that the sidewalks are stroller-locked. Jess also blogs as MamaBird over at SurelyYouNest.

Monica is a mom, wife and blogger in British Columbia, Canada. She has spent most of her life independently researching health and healing and is particularily interested in bringing awareness to various environmental health issues that effect families today. Monica and her husband are working towards their dream of building a self sufficient eco home and being as "off the grid" as possible, but not to be confused with living in the boonies! When she is not scrubbing blueberry stains off the walls she tries to find time as much as possible for yoga, walking, gardening, hiking, and sitting down to a riveting non fiction book. She recently started blogging as a way to reach out and meet other moms and she hasn't looked back since. You can find her blogging about living a healthy & inspired life on her blog Healthy Green Moms.

Stefani Newman is a daughter, wife, mom, sister, freelance writer, art teacher, and green educator (for anyone who will listen!) A native New Yorker, Stefani started teensygreen in July of 2007 while living in the beautiful country of Panama, where she lived by the Pacific Ocean for the first time. She now resides in South Florida with her wonderful husband and two beautiful, talented, curious, life-loving daughters, who help her with obsessive shell collecting, messy cooking, and library adventures. With teensygreen, Stefani hopes to help like-minded parents make economical, educational, and safe eco-choices for their families!