Board Members
Alison Leber - President
Alison Leber is a self proclaimed food geek. She is passionate about real food. Alison is the Program Director of the Flagship Program – a not-for-profit project of Beecher’s Handmade Cheese/Pasta & Co/Bennett’s/Pure Food Bistro in Seattle, Washington.
The Flagship Program is dedicated to educating people on benefits of pure, all-natural foods through nutrition education workshops in elementary schools through out the Puget Sound and Portland areas.
Alison is the former owner of Brie & Bordeaux – Bistro, Cheese & Wine shop in the Seattle area. The French influenced bistro utilized local, seasonal ingredients before it was in vogue and the Cheese & wine shop specialized in local and imported farmstead cheese.
Her background includes stints in Seattle-area restaurants such as Café Juanita and Gerard’s Relais de Lyon, and in the wine industry – from the making to the selling!
Bruce Dunlop - Vice President
Bruce Dunlop currently operates a small, diversified livestock farm and specialty food business on Lopez Island, WA. During the past several years he has been actively involved with starting a livestock processing farmers cooperative and led the development, construction and testing effort of the first USDA Inspected on-farm livestock-processing unit. Assisting other communities to follow in their footsteps and rebuild the small-scale meat-processing infrastructure needed by independent farmers is his major focus today.
Prior to his idyllic life as a shepard he worked in the food processing industry and on the development and manufacturing of biological pesticide products. A graduate of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario he has degrees in Biology and Chemical Engineering.
Bob Hilgenberg - Treasurer
Why does Cascade Harvest Coalition interest a retired public planner with 39 years of planning and director experience in four states? Well, let’s call it “getting hooked on” or convinced of the potential pay-off of such a “radical” yet engaging concept that conservatives, progressives and liberals can get behind. That concept and mission, “BUY LOCAL-EAT LOCAL farm products to benefit all in the region or state” is the foundation of the Cascade Harvest Coalition.
My strong interest in farming started (unknowingly) while growing up in northeastern Wisconsin. Whether it was caused by never living more than 100 feet from a farm or the 100,000 cans of peas or corn a day I canned while running the filling machine at the local cannery I still do not know. At any rate, I spent most of the next 43 years preparing for and performing county (and one city) planning and agency management in four mid-western and western states (Missouri, Iowa, Idaho and Washington). All four jobs dealt with resource land including farms and farmland and a large variety of land use and community elements. My projects during the last 13 years were with the Snohomish County Planning Department. Initially, I prepared and defended the agricultural element of our comprehensive plan. From 2000 to 2004 I worked with King County staff in final design, start-up, operation and monitoring of the Puget Sound Fresh, FarmLink and other multi–county farmer assistance programs. Upon retirement from Snohomish County in 2004, I was accepted as board member of Cascade Harvest Coalition continuing to serve at present.
Seth Caswell
Chef Seth Caswell understands the importance of farmer and chef connections. Critical to this healthy relationship is the ability to listen to the needs of both parties and develop flexibility and an appreciation of each group’s hardships. Through extensive volunteer work and his work in Seattle restaurants, he has emerged as a leader in promoting the use of local and sustainable products from the Puget Sound in local restaurants. As President of Seattle Chefs Collaborative, he strives to educate diners, chefs, and co-producers about issues of sustainability. For Seth, supporting local farms means altering menus to accommodate what is seasonal and locally available. He plans on opening Emmer Restaurant in the spring of 2009 in Seattle.
Goldie Caughlan
Goldie Caughlan was headed to law school in 1973 when she made an abrupt U-turn after reading Frances Moore Lappe's "Diet for a Small Planet." During her re-education, she learned of the depletion of soils, the dependence upon petroleum in the food system for synthetic fertilizers, dangerous pesticides and antibiotics, and their concentration in factory-farmed meats, dairy and eggs. In 1983, with a degree in health education from the University of Washington, she became nutrition education manager for PCC Natural Markets (then known as Puget Consumers Coop) and started FoodWorks! (now called PCC Cooks), a cooking school that emphasizes the use of whole, unprocessed, natural and organic foods, especially those grown regionally by family farmers.
She grew up in the 1940s on a small farm in North Idaho. "Later, I realized we had been poor, as was everyone I'd known as a child, but I'd never felt poor since we had all we needed, and always shared with many who didn't. We lacked nothing of real value!" Goldie realized that as an adult, working, attending school and raising a family, she'd mostly lost touch with the essence of community, of the importance of real food and real life values. She vowed to "unhook" her family as fully as possible from dependence on the corporatized food system. She says, "Of course, I now see that independence is itself a myth, and that it is interdependence that is most desirable and stabilizing. As for getting 'unhooked?' I believe when we live in the belly of the beast, as we do, we just need to keep alert, working at the 'unhooking' goal!"
Goldie has served three terms on the Washington State Organic Advisory Board, and in 2001 she stepped down from management of PCC's cooking school to accept a five-year appointment to the 15 member National Organic Standards Board at USDA. For several years, her column "Insights by Goldie" has been a monthly feature of PCC's Sound Consumer, a monthly newspaper. In addition to the Cascade Harvest Coalition board, she's on the board of the PCC Farmland Trust, as well as the Cornucopia Institute, a national agricultural watchdog group. Retirement plans? "Naw, I'm too busy and having too much fun!"
Jason Salvo 
Jason came to agriculture in a roundabout way. Jason started farming after graduating from law school and working as a lawyer for less than one year. Along with his wife Siri, and their business partner Dan Beyers, Jason runs Local Roots Farm - a small, diversified vegetable farm located in Carnation, WA. They sell vegetables through their CSA program, at Seattle-area farmers markets, and to local restaurants. Jason and Siri had intended on working in the so-called "real world" until they saved enough money to buy a farm of their own. But the summer that Jason studied for the bar exam, Siri interned on a small farm in the Snoqualmie Valley and met Dan Beyers, who owned a beautiful piece of farmland and was looking for partners to farm with. So Jason and Siri scrapped their original plan, threw caution to the wind, and skipped the whole "real world" thing.
Jason believes that the world needs more family farms and he is actively working on policy efforts to repopulate our region's farmland with real, live farmers. He wants you to know that small-scale agriculture is a rewarding business at which anyone can succeed. He also believes that the most subversive and revolutionary things you can do is to grow your own food.
Clayton Burrows
Andrew T. (‘drew) Corbin
The latest addition to the Snohomish County WSU Extension Faculty, Andrew (‘drew) Corbin received his PhD in crop and soil science from Michigan State University where he studied the soil quality, weed seed bank and economic dynamics of the three-year transition period from conventional systems to certified organic crops such as corn, soybean, wheat and alfalfa. He also spent the last ten years as the project manager for the Long-Term Ecological Research site in row-crop agriculture at the Kellogg Biological Station (MSU’s largest agricultural experiment station). This is the third extension system he has been involved in. Drew was an agricultural educator for MSU Extension and a regional specialist in Integrated Pest Management with Cornell University. His goals and interests are to support, maintain and expand the agricultural industry in the greater Puget Sound region, particularly Snohomish and King Counties, by transferring knowledge to current and future growers. He has been collaborating with interested producers as well as university investigators both on the farm and at the two regional research and education centers in Puyallup and Mt. Vernon. “When I was asked to interview for this position, one of the first places I turned to was the Cascade Harvest Coalition website – where I could discover the trends producers and consumers follow around the Sound. Joining the Board of Directors for me was a no-brainer – as I felt the need to give back to the organization that helped me reach my goal of living, working and playing in the Pacific Northwest.”