Featured Speakers

All members of our team are dynamic and experienced public speakers and workshop facilitators. Depending on the size and nature of the event, most presentations involve one or two of the following speakers.

____________ PAXUS CALTA ____________

PAXUS was abandoned by his wolf parents and raised by liberals in the suburbs of Boston. He has hitchhiked on sailboats across the Pacific, danced top Russian tanks before Yeltsin made it fashionable, smuggled Tibetan monks across the Himalayas, navigated submarines on the ocean floor in Hawaii, worked on the oil rigs on the North Slope of Alaska and fought nuclear power plants in eastern Europe. He facilitates a class in "designing revolution" at an alternative high school in Charlottesville VA. At Twin Oaks he manages recruiting for the community and marketing for the businesses, does teen advocacy work, makes tofu and tries to spark revolution when ever possible. He is a prolific propagandist and has been published in numerous mainstream and radical periodicals. He suffers from terminal immodesty and an inflamed funny bone. He is a co-parent of a brilliant 2 year old child, Willow.

_____________ EZRA FREEMAN _____________

EZRA’s story began in 1973 when his parents, part of a wave of 20th century pioneers, moved to the woods of central Maine to live “the good life.” He was born into a closely-knit community, and spent much of his childhood on a run-down rural farm. Growing up poor, surrounded by artists, musicians, thespians, and assorted crazies, Ezra failed to absorb most of the values of mainstream American culture. He attended New College in Sarasota, Florida, a small nontraditional school dedicated to student-initiated learning, and graduated with a degree in political science and history. After college Ezra traveled extensively, and wound up in California's Bay Area, where he worked as a musician, gardener, cartographer, SAT teacher, and artichoke salesman before "dropping out" and spending seven months living out of a backpack in the wilderness. Never entirely at home amidst the materialism, specialization, and unsustainability of contemporary American life, Ezra finds Twin Oaks to be an exciting and viable way to live in greater concord with his beliefs. His passions include playing the mandolin and bass, traveling, performing, and endlessly learning.

_____________ SKY BLUE STAR _____________

SKY was raised in progressive college towns in California by parents who met at Twin Oaks Community. After an exploration of community living as an adult, the sociology curriculum at UC Santa Cruz successfully (though inadvertently) convinced him that the best way to address the ills of society was to join experiments in creating a sustainable culture. He has spent the last 3 years living at Twin Oaks co-managing a soy foods business, facilitating community process, organizing conferences and parties, and promoting the Communities Movement. He is a delegate to the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, an organization focused on shared outreach and mutual support between member communities, starting more communities, and creating an egalitarian world. He is the Intentional Communities Caucus liaison to the North American Students for Cooperation. He is one of three co-parents to his 2 year old son, all of whom are part of the Star Family, an experiment in affinity-based family, focused on co-empowerment, radical intimacy and consensus, and personal to planetary transformation.

_____________________ SIR APPLE PANTS ONEIDA, THE FIRST ______________________

APPLE is 33, and has been living at TO for 3 years. She discovered the community through her sister, who lived there before her. She grew up in a (lower?) middle-class household with typical mainstream values. She graduated from college and then had a variety of different jobs unrelated to her degree (environmental fundraising, restaurant work, housepainting…) Just prior to moving to Twin Oaks, she was working as a wilderness instructor and guide, leading groups on outdoor adventures for fun and personal growth. She is still passionate about the outdoors, and spends most of her working time outside: planting and weeding in the garden, mending the dairy fences, retrieving firewood with the rest of the forestry crew. She calls herself a farmer, and loves experiencing at TO the direct relationship between work and personal consumption (her friend Emily milked the cow, Rae made the milk into cheese, apple harvested the potatoes, and Bucket made it all into cheesy fries).

Interested? Email for more information:

Ask any questions (logistical, hypothetical, philosophical)… she loves it all.

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