John lives with his wife, Alyssa, and three teenage kids in the Stanton Heights neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the founding director of Garfield Community Farm, the largest permaculture site in Pittsburgh, where he has worked for nearly fifteen years. The farm is a non-profit working to bring food justice and ecological restoration to three acres of once-abandoned city land. John is also a founding pastor of The Open Door Church in Pittsburgh. John and his wife Alyssa also perform musically as This Side of Eve. For a decade, John has been creating ecological designs for food production for schools, home owners and churches. He is a team teacher for Pittsburgh’s Permaculture Design Course. Wild Indigo Guild is John’s new endeavor to help congregations and people of faith connect with God through nature and develop the tools to bring effective food justice, environmental justice and ecological restoration into faith practice.

In 2019 John and his family went on a pilgrimage to visit the oldest, tallest and largest trees in North America. Their quest took them to the Sequoias and Redwoods of California, the Bristlecone pines of the Great Basin, the “pando” Aspen forest of Utah and, in 2022, the newly discovered ancient bald cypress forest of North Carolina. Much of what Wild Indigo has to offer came through these experiences in the natural world.

John is available for Permaculture Design consulting through his design business and co-teaches a permaculture design course along with Darrell Frey and Elizabeth Lynch of Three Sister’s Permaculture. This course is an ongoing modular course held at Garfield Community Farm.