A few years post the World Trade Center attacks, she packed her bags, headed west and never looked back. She attended Bauman College of Holistic Nutrition & Culinary Arts, located in Berkeley, CA, in 2005 and 2007 where she earned her certifications as Nutrition Educator & Nutrition Consultant.

In no time at all– the place, the people, and the plants grew on her. As a part-time, nutrition-based cooking instructor for the Berkeley Unified School District, her love for plants- as both food and medicine- has been her driving force in raising awareness around healthy food and lifestyle choices as well as finding ways to incorporate herbs into the diet both preventatively and medicinally. It became clear that delving into the way of the plants was the next leg of her journey.

While Tanya’s interests in nutrition are focused around digestive wellness, food allergies and seasonal cleansing— she is gravitating towards women’s reproductive health in herbal studies.

Tanya can often be found dancing, reading an inspirational book, hiking, doing hot yoga or creating herbal medicine in her spare time.

Tina’s cell #:  510-406-1078

Cole Lea grew up in a large working class family with her bare feet both on the rolling green hills of Pittsburgh and the Appalachian trail in south central Pennsylvania. She comes from a long line of troublemakers and storytellers! She fell in love with water, words, weeds, mountains, mud, and music at a very young age. She has worked in the environmental movement since 2001 training countless agitators and community organizers fighting for environmental justice and the human right to water.

Cole started seriously studying plants in 2003. She has helped hundreds of women learn about and use plant medicine at festivals across the country. In 2008 during her Saturn return she moved thousands of miles to the Bay Area and began studying at the Ohlone Center in 2009.

She is excited about helping people take their health and wellness into their own hands and hearts. She is passionate about working with what she feels are herbally underserved populations of lesbians, queer women and lgbt youth as well as people living with experiences typically diagnosed or labeled as psychiatric conditions.

In her spare time you will find her camping, visiting with friendly plants or people, writing poems, listening to live music, hiking, or staring at the moon.

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Kathryn McCabe is a Western Clinical Herbalist living and practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She started out heading towards a Physical Therapy degree, wanting to heal people through exercise, massage and movement. After graduating with a Degree in Kinesiology, the study of human movement, she worked in the Physical Therapy field with people with sports and orthopedic injuries and then with children with disabilities. Over the years she felt that just treating the muscles and joints often fell short of helping the whole person. In working with herself she fell back on her old friends and allies, herbs. Herbs helped treat her mind, body and spirit. With some inner soul searching she realized that her passion truly was with herbal medicine. She enrolled at Ohlone Herbal Center in 2009 and has completed the Foundations of Herbalism, the Therapeutic Herbalism Program and is now in the Clinical Internship working as a Clinical Herbalist at Ohlone Herbal Clinic.

She aspires to help people to find their way toward health and balance with herbal blends, herbal honeys and candies, tinctures and capsules, nutritional advice and positive supportive energy. Her belief is that herbs are a gift on earth to help us all to have stronger immune systems, optimal digestive and endocrine systems and peaceful spirits. She also can assist you with exercises for physical injuries as well.

Kerry Hughes, M.Sc., is an Herbalist and Ethnobotanist who has long-worked in deepening the relationship between plants and people. She believes plants hold specific medicinal, nutritional and spiritual properties that we crave in order to create a life for ourselves that is worth living. It is from this philosophy she builds an herbal practice.

Kerry has spent the past couple decades studying the multiple uses of plants, and in this time has authored several books: The Incense Bible, The Health Professionals Guide to Dietary Supplements,  Botanical Medicines: The Desk Reference for Major Herbal Supplements. Through her consulting company, Ethnopharm, she has worked with multiple agencies—such as The United Nations, US-AID, The World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), and PromPeru—in order to promote benefit share, and market access as a way to value traditional knowledge, promote biodiversity, and help enrich lives and provide income  to rural people. She continues  to focus on the interface between the private and public sectors in the market development of botanicals worldwide, and has a focus on fair trade through her Direction of the IMO-US office. Kerry brings the depth of her experience in ethnobotany to her herbal clients who wish to increase their own health and vibrancy through the integration of herbs in their lives.

Katie grew up in a small coastal town of 2,200 in Maine and spent the first 18 years of her life falling in love with the rocky coast and marveling at the transformations of the four seasons. She obtained her B.S. in Plant Sciences at the University of Connecticut after becoming discouraged by her pharmacy studies; she wanted to help people, not aid in the market of blind pill-pushing. After graduating, a spontaneous move across the country to California ensued, landing her in the Bay Area. While trying to figure out future plans, herbal medicine emerged as the answer to her desire to help people truly find health and happiness in this hectic world while allowing her to maintain the connection with nature that had always held so much importance. It took a long time to put all the pieces together, but she feels she has finally started settling into what she is meant to do.

She has completed the Herbal Intensive Apprenticeship course at Ohlone and is now gaining clinical experience in the school’s student-run clinic. She has always loved working with people and is excited to begin working with clients independently in the future. She is currently dabbling with creating homemade herbal products that may be easily integrated into modern lifestyles. Katie’s goal is to bridge the gap between the average person and herbal medicine. Herbal medicine is able to offer simple solutions to help support people as they move through the modern world and all it has to present. Learn more about her motivations at her website: http://www.retrofitbotanicals.com/