Meet our team

Cristy Abbott is a Certified Permaculture Educator, Practitioner, and Consultant with over a decade of experience teaching Permaculture Ethics and Principles to children and adults. She specializes in regenerative farming, urban agriculture, soil building, and seed saving, and volunteers at Sweetwater Organic Community Farm in Tampa, FL.

Cristy has helped develop and manage community gardens and farms, including founding Faith House Community Garden in St. Petersburg in 2010, now known as the 15th St AgriHub, a Permaculture demonstration and education site. She has also led school field trips at Sweetwater and has been part of the Florida Permaculture Convergence Planning team for over a decade.

Internationally, Cristy mentors Permaculture entrepreneurs and supports projects in Uganda and Kenya. She serves on the Board of Directors for Permaculture Initiative Uganda and has taught at Permaculture gatherings in both countries, including the first Lake Victoria Permaculture Convergence in Kenya.

Cristy is passionate about biodiversity, soil health, community building, and helping people understand the connections between soil, plants, animals, and the planet. She is a featured instructor in our October 2024 Permaculture Design Course.

Paul Kroll Jr. has been designing permaculture systems since 2012.  Kroll built his first food forest in a large urban backyard in Merida, Yucatan where he first experimented with tropical fruit trees, chicken coops, restaurant waste composting and making biochar.  Kroll has a history as a licensed architect and is always willing to consult on tiny houses and sustainable homestead systems.  He offers affordable full permaculture site designs and offers comprehensive permaculture site consultations.  Kroll is a co-coordinator of Lake Permaculture and runs PKBiochar.com where he turns waste bamboo from local farms and properties to permanent soil carbon.  Check out one of his upcoming biochar demonstration burns, listed at PKBiochar.com.  Paul is a featured instructor in our Permaculture Design Course. 

Saren is a certified Permaculture Designer and landscape architect based in Florida, blending training from Hampshire College and hands-on study in Costa Rica with a deep commitment to regenerative land design. Passionate about wellness and healing through nature and human connection, she creates spaces that reweave people into the rhythms of the natural world — nourishing both people and the planet.

I’m the son of Hungarian immigrants and a lifelong Floridian. I grew up mucking around the Everglades as a kid and have loved plants and wild spaces ever since.

Much of my adult life has gone to environmental activism, including a stint as State Conservation Chair for the Florida Sierra Club. I'm also a former print journalist and still write, mostly essays about land and place.

As a Florida Master Naturalist, I lead interpretive hikes around North Central Florida. I love to geek out with people and share knowledge about our natural systems. But just as importantly, I want to help them realize their deeper connection with nature.

My home is on Blind Crow Farmstead, 20 acres of pine and hammock near Gainesville, where I grow vegetables and fruit trees, keep bees and chickens, teach yoga and permaculture, and manage the land for wildlife as much as for food.

I bring this mix of skills and interests to my work with the guild, where I hope to help more people see permaculture as a design system for sustainable living and as a way of belonging to place.