Meet Our Teachers
Forest Friends Teachers
Forest Friends teachers will guide your children as they grow strong and true within a nature-connected community. We engage young children in ways that will quicken and protect the sense of wonder that they naturally have for the world. We help guide children into deep understandings of natural science while also cultivating their imagination and intuition. We are committed to helping them develop strength of will through engaging them in a variety of purposeful and meaningful work activities. We are kindness keepers and we facilitate the development of reverence for life and empathy for others. We help children develop the life skills and capacities that are most optimally developed in early childhood, creating a strong foundation for a lifetime of learning and holistic, harmonious engagement with the world.
Kelly McMenimen
Director & Lead Teacher—All Programs, All Ages
Kelly McMenimen is a naturalist and a poet, a singer and an activist, but most of all she is a gifted educator and facilitator of connection and development. Her love of both nature and human culture has led her on a beautiful and circuitous journey through life. She is deeply tuned in to the natural world, having spent much of her childhood roaming the mountains and climbing trees in the San Juan national forest of Colorado, with her brother, her trusty dog and sometimes even her most adventurous cat! In her college years she was a camp counselor and a raft guide in the summers. She has always been called into wild places—renewing herself regularly by going into the woods, the mountains, the ocean, or a river. At the same time, she has ascended to the peaks of human culture and seen beautiful views from there as well: She has performed in acclaimed theatre productions, written and edited for an award-winning regional magazine, and performed as a professional jazz singer with highly-talented musicians in Brazil and the Bay area. Her lifelong interest in human consciousness and cultural healing led her on a journey that included a year at Esalen Institute and several years in graduate school at CIIS, where she earned a master’s degree in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness.
All along the way, she has worked and developed as a teacher. First she guided and taught children at summer camps. Then she spent years teaching English to adults from around the world. Then while she was in graduate school she taught in Marin public schools. After having a child, she dedicated herself soley to mothering for a number of years. She views her role as a mother as her most important job, and she is incredibly proud of her amazing son, who is now 15 years old. But as he grew older, she was also able to expand and share her gifts with the larger world again. Her natural teaching talent was recognized when she was helping in her son’s preschool and there she was mentored as a Waldorf early childhood teacher by masterful teacher Lesley Grant. Kelly was then left in charge of the preschool while Ms. Grant took a sabbatical. This experience expanded her teaching skills, as well as her understanding of child development and the role of the teacher in early childhood. She subsequently spent several years assisting in Waldorf classrooms at various grade levels, and studying Waldorf education, child development, and other forms of education. She continues to study how to facilitate human development at all stages in a truly balanced and balancing way.
Meanwhile, she saw the two threads of her love for life--nature and culture--meeting in a beautiful way in the world of permaculture. So she embarked on a study of permaculture design at Regenerative Design Institute and eventually started teaching permaculture to adults in the summers. Since then, she integrates permaculture principles and awareness into her life and teaching. She also had the opportunity to spend a year immersed in Jon Young’s Regenerative Design and Nature Awareness program, where she fully realized the cultural value of her personal connection to the natural world. She came to understand that she has a real gift for creating experiences that help others come home to their natural connection to and love for Mother Earth. So she started offering her own nature connection programs for children in 2011.
Looking to expand her community of like-minded colleagues, she happily went to work for Vilda nature connection programs in 2014, where she became the lead teacher and director of the early childhood programs. It was wonderful to find herself teaching and learning within a whole community of nature-connection mentors, and being valued for her early childhood expertise. She lived for many years with the inspiration for a full-fledged outdoor alternative school where children are enriched by culture and nature at the same time. She was overjoyed to midwife Forest Friends into being, with the support of Vilda as a sister organization. Every year of Forest Friends has been an incredible adventure and she is constantly blown away by the power and magic of teaching in collaboration with the natural world. She and her colleagues have been astounded to see just how deep and rich the inner and outer connections become, and how fully children thrive, in this very special program. She has come to believe that there is no better classroom for early childhood than an enchanting forest eco-system where a wide diversity of species participate and collaborate in every aspect of the educational experience.
Kelly continues to teach permaculture and to organize and advocate for regenerative practices and community resilience in her local watershed. She is committed to ongoing development as a teacher and derives inspiration and guidance from regular attendance at trainings, classes, and conferences. Kelly is grateful for all the amazing teachers she has been mentored by in her life, including Lesley Grant, Joanna Macy, Brian Swimme, Charlene Spretnak, Jean Houston, Penny Livingston, Jon Young and more. She is especially grateful for the opportunities she has had to learn from several indigenous elders, including Paul Rafael and Arkan, and she considers these deeply-rooted wisdom keepers to be some of her most important teachers, along with the forest itself.
ANDREA CORTEZ-JUARBE
Teacher
Andrea is a teaching artist originally from New York City and has been working with children for over 20 years. She is passionate about play and the outdoors; and loves to inspire confidence, joy, and creativity in her students. She has worked in preschools, after school programs and recreation centers teaching dance/movement, mindfulness practices, and expressive arts to a variety of age groups from 2 years old to adults, including young adults on the spectrum. She got her B.A. in psychology at Wesleyan University, where she also studied filmmaking and dance films, which later inspired her to teach dance film production to children at SF Recreation and Parks. In 2021, she decided to make the outdoors her classroom and began working for Gaia Passages teaching leadership, outdoor skills and earth-based practices to young girls. Andrea fell in love with holding creative, nurturing spaces for youth out in nature, and this led Andrea to work for the forest preschool A Wilder Harmony. Earlier in her career she was a doula at SF General and recently she studied Energy Kinesiology as part of her growing fascination with the body's innate intelligence to both communicate and heal itself. She has lived in both Chile and Argentina, where she studied tango and taught children dance, but has found the landscapes of California to feel most like home.
ANNE MARIE FALGE
Teacher
Anne Marie is an improvisational movement and visual artist with over two decades of experience teaching young children indoors and outdoors. Anne Marie is deeply connected to the forests of Northern California where she grew up among the Redwood trees, playing in the creeks of the Oak Woodlands and camping with her family in the Sierras every summer. Through high school backpacking trips and a job with the Marin Conservation Corps, she began to understand that when one spends time in a place, one begins to love that place. This understanding awakened her deep care for open spaces and the stewarding of wild environments through education and habitat restoration. Through experiences of living at the edges of wilderness in retreat centers in Nova Scotia and Colorado, helping farmers on various farms, gardening, nature journaling, studying herbalmedicine and botanical drawing she continues to love, steward and feel great curiosity and awe of the natural wonders of the earth. One of her greatest loves is to be with children outdoors exploring and playing while listening and looking closely at the expression and intelligence of life around us. A preschool teacher and a teaching artist, she has been offering art exploration classes and outdoor Art and Ecology classes to families and young children in parks and on the shores of the San Francisco Estuary. With her she brings a joyful sense of play, an appreciation of the uniqueness of each child, a love of dance, improvisation, chi gong, song and music and the intention to create a nurturing and loving learning environment, fostering respect, sensitivity and open curiosity.