Our Board

Abby is the founder and president of Maverick & Boutique
, a consulting firm that helps people in organizations work well together in a world increasingly characterized by complexity, diversity, and rapid change. She works across sectors as a facilitator, teacher, and coach in leadership, strategic planning, and organizational culture. Abby is also a co-founder of Mozaik, a Quantum Intelligence Platform that enables groups from 2 to 2000 to rapidly address complex opportunities and challenges while building capacity as teams. Abby is an avid gardener, musician, and yoga practitioner. She lives on VCLT land in Ashfield with her orchardist husband, Alan Surprenant, their goldendoodle LC (short for Love Child), and 100 fruit trees.

Sara is a cofounder of Valley Housing Cooperative which leases 25 acres from Valley CLT in Greenfield. Sara helped lead a successful capital campaign to acquire this land, and is now working on planning housing development. Sara serves as a Greenfield city councilor at-large and is the chair of the Unhoused Community Ad Hoc Committee. Sara enjoys mutual aid community spaces and reuse, and co-founded Redistro free store which operates out of a warehouse near downtown Greenfield. Sara graduated from Hampshire College with a focus on environmental justice. She is particularly excited to be working at the intersection of permanently affordable housing, climate resilience, and democratically self-governed communities.

Susanne is the treasurer for VCLT and a lessee on VCLT land. During an adventurous life, she has been a professional carpenter, a farmer, a bookkeeper, and worked with severely autistic teenagers. She was the co-director of PeaceTrees South Africa, bringing together teenagers from around the world to learn conflict resolution and plant the Manyanani Peace Park in Khayelitsha, a township outside Cape Town, a year after the end of apartheid. She was the financial manager for the Center for Public Policy and Administration (now the School of Public Policy) at UMass Amherst. She has an M.S. degree in Climate Agroforestry and is a student of Abenaki, the Indigenous language of the land where she lives. Though this land now legally “belongs” to the land trust, it was never ceded by the original inhabitants and tenders of the land: the Sokoki, Abenaki, and Wabanaki peoples, the People of the Dawnland.

Al has been a lessee on VCLT’s Shelburne Line Rd holding since 1987. There he and partner Marilyn Beal renovated a 1931 barn into a woodworking shop with  additional  studio and living space above, and then built their own super-insulated passive solar home and outbuildings. He has run a craft studio woodworking business, Fine Edge Woodworking, since graduating from Amherst College in 1982.  Al has been on the VCLT board for some 30+ years, providing an institutional knowledge and perspective on the organization's complex history for new arrivals, and a living bridge to the organization’s founders. He continues to be fascinated by the challenges of providing affordable housing and homesteading opportunities in a world where the commodification of everything threatens, quite literally, everything worthwhile.

Gabriella della Croce is an educator, community organizer, artist, and mother of two. She is happiest when elbow deep in clay or garden beds. She has done a wide variety of work, at organizations including The Farm Education Collaborative, School Sprouts, Equal Exchange, Gardening The Community,  Cooperative Development Institute and the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, which she co-directed for seven years. Currently, her main work is motherhood and running Sapling School, a small forest preschool. She also sells her ceramics through the Artisans Cooperative, and freelances as a cooperative business developer and language interpreter.
Gabriella has a BA in Environmental Science & Policy from Smith College, and an MA in Labor Studies from UMass Amherst. She and her extended family live on unceded Wabanaki/Pocumtuc land in Colrain.

Saul is a co-founder of Valley Housing Cooperative, a multi stakeholder housing cooperative in Greenfield MA. They are trained in Sociocracy decision making and helped implement that in their housing cooperative as well as a community run sauna cooperative. They were a distinguished fellow of the Jupyter open source software project as well.