It’s All About Food

Kathy Stevens, Founder and Director of Catskill Animal Sanctuary, spent her childhood on a Virginia horse farm. It was in many ways an idyllic youth, one that instilled in her a deep love of and respect for all animals. Kathy left the south for graduate school in Boston, MA, where she spent eleven years as a high school English teacher. In 2000, she was asked to head a charter school in Boston. Instead, one year later, she opened Catskill Animal Sanctuary, one of the country's leading havens for farm animals and a center for raising public awareness of their sentience and their suffering. Kathy lives behind the barn with her dog Hannah, CAS's Director of Canine Pursuits, and her cats Fat Boy and Mouse. She's an avid reader, loves to hike, swim, and bike, and spends rare quiet time with her partner David and her close friends. 

Founders Jenny Brown and Doug Abel moved to Woodstock as full-time residents in May 2004. Doug is a film editor and Jenny previously worked as a producer, director and post-production supervisor. They met while working for the filmmaker Errol Morris in Boston, while Doug played a key role in editing the Academy Award award-winning documentary The Fog of War. Jenny’s credits include work on the PBS series Frontline and Nova, ABC’s 9/11 special Report From Ground Zero, and most recently she produced and directed a show for Discovery Channel’s Extreme Engineering series, A Trans-Atlantic Tunnel. Since the early 90’s, Jenny would occasionally volunteer her time working undercover as a videographer for PETA and Farm Sanctuary. After her last week-long trip undercover visiting stockyards in Texas, she decided to give up her TV career and dedicate her life to helping these animals that society seems to have forgotten. Jenny moved to Watkins Glen, NY, to live and work at Farm Sanctuary and learn all she could about shelter operations. It was that essential experience that gave the couple the confidence to open up a sanctuary of their own. 

Debbie Merrill is making a name for herself as the Rolling Raw Vegan Guru. As host of her own popular TV show along with her diet program called” Raw Foods On The Roll: Getting America Healthy” she is teaching people how to “eat less and live more” everyday and for the rest of their lives. Having been a vegetarian for 25 years and now what Debbie likes to call a “raw fooder” for 10 years she is finally teaching people her secrets to looking and feeling amazing. Debbie’s Raw Foods On The Roll program is designed around the consumption of food while in its natural state and as she is teaching the world that there are amazing raw food substitutes for all food, even meat! She is educating people on how the nutritional content of food changes once you cook it and how after food reaches a certain temperature a lot of the nutritional value is lost. Raw Foods On The Roll is about eating to look and feel great, the program not only aids in weight loss and improves ones energy but can also help lower blood pressure and cholesterol.

Leading American foraging expert "Wildman" Steve Brill has been guiding foraging tours in and around New York City since 1982, both for the city and independently, but he's best known for having been arrested and handcuffed by undercover park rangers for eating dandelion in Central Park. He also lectures for schools and youth programs, museums, libraries and environmental groups. He is the author of Identifying and Hrvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild)Places, The Wild Vegan Cookbook and Shoots and Greens of Early Spring in Northeastern North America. He has created a wild food Web site, www.wildmanstevebrill.com, produced a video series, Foraging with the "Wildman" and has been profiled numerous times on television shows and in newspapers and magazines.