DIANE, Member
Although Diane has lived in Tennessee since the ‘80s, she says ‘it’s longer than most native Nashvillians’. You may still hear her Long Island roots if you listen closely. It’s no surprise she aspires to recreate the half sour pickles from New York deli-style pickles with farm cucumbers. Diane has been lucky enough to have some her family follow her to Nashville, including two young musicians who keep her up on music in town. She looks forward to sharing life with even more people.
Diane spent her career as an environmental engineer, and retirement has ignited a passion for native Tennessee plants and wildlife habitat restoration and conservation – skills she plans to share with Burns Village & Farm. Every year, Diane makes a point to hike Mt. LeConte in the Great Smoky Mountains. She is excited to live in a fun, practical and nurturing neighborhood environment reminiscent of one place she lived as a child. She looks forward to early morning strolls through the farm and yoga in the common house.
Teddy the Yorkipoo (pictured here) has very important duties as the group’s official mascot, and Diane’s furry friend.
AUNDRA, Member
Aundra has been a dancer since she was 9 years old. Her passion led her to work as a teacher and choreographer for many amazing dance companies. Dance has taken Aundra from Russia to New England, and even inspired her small soup business! She says choreographing a dance is just like choreographing a recipe. Aundra (AKA the Soup Lady) aspires to open her own food truck one day, and you can find her at the Richland Park Farmers’ Market every weekend, right where she met John and Rebecca.
With only one of her two brothers in Tennessee, Aundra joined Burns Village & Farm to keep her active and involved in the community. Her grandfather owned a farm, so the idea has always been intriguing. Whether it’s practical or not, Aundra really wants a cow – just ask her about it.
GWEN, Member
Gwen grew up in Alabama with lots of pets, including horses, cats and dogs. Naturally, she became a veterinarian in adulthood, after studying at Auburn University. Gwen has helped every kind of animal under the sun, but quickly pivoted her career when she discovered her passion for environmental protection. Highlights include working for the U.S. Senate Environment Committee and positions with environmental nonprofits, including serving as Executive Director of the Tennessee Environmental Council, 15 years with the Cumberland River Compact, and her current work for climate resilience with the Model Forest Policy Program.
Gwen is a free spirit without children or romantic attachments. Although she enjoys her family of choice, including a wonderful circle of friends, colleagues and two ex-husbands, Gwen has wanted to live in cohousing ever since she learned about it from Germantown Commons in Nashville. She also has two beautiful tortoiseshell cats named Turtle and Tessa, who cannot wait to meet their new neighbors.
Like a true Southern woman, Gwen loves watermelon and butter pecan ice cream, but you might not guess her affinity for water! With so much of earth’s waters unexplored, Gwen’s curiosity lends itself to kayaking and scuba diving.
JOHN & REBECCA, Members
John grew up on an Arkansas farm and spent seven years of his adult life at Blueberry Hill Cohousing in Vienna, Virginia. He and his partner Rebecca moved to Tennessee to be closer to family and to help his son start an organic vegetable farm. When he unpacked in the farmhouse in a rural area north of Nashville, he thought "Oh my gosh, where is everybody?” Blueberry Hill Cohousing was an agrihood before the term existed, but they couldn't find anything like it in Tennessee, so they decided to form Burns Village & Farm.
John is a retired Program Analyst for the Environmental Protection Agency, Office of the Inspector General (OIG) in Washington, D.C. After “retiring,” John served on nonprofit boards including Southern SAWG, Southern SARE and the Tennessee Organic Growers Association. Currently, John is a School Board member of Cheatham County where he successfully initiated a program to install solar panels on one high school and a USDA Farm to School Grant.
John & Rebecca currently own a small farm of blueberries, chickens and chestnut trees in Cheatham County. Although John has lived in Memphis, St. Louis and Vienna, VA, he has been a diehard St. Louis Cardinals fan ever since the 1960s.
Rebecca grew up on a dairy farm in West Virginia and treasures her years walking fields and tending vegetable and flower gardens. She and John lived in Blueberry Hill Cohousing which sits adjacent to Potomac Vegetable Farms, owned by a family whose daughters started the Blueberry Hill community. Rebecca enjoys the prospect of developing deep connections with neighbors, supporting sustainable agriculture, and preserving farmland, which she can combine in Burns Village & Farm.
Professionally, Rebecca has worked as a psychologist in public schools, community mental health centers and children’s hospitals. Currently, she’s a public health researcher at Tennessee State University and a member of the editorial board for an environmental and social justice web-based publication called the Deep Times Journal.
Rebecca dreams of preparing favorite recipes with her neighbors for community dinners, helping with landscaping the common areas (she likes to weed), and impromptu conversations and walks around the Village.
LINDSEY, Member
Lindsey currently lives in South Nashville where she enjoys all of the tacos, pupusas, curries, and kebabs Nolensville Pike has to offer. However, after two decades of city living, Lindsey is ready to follow in the footsteps of her mother and grandmothers, who always had big, beautiful gardens and a joyful abundance of fresh produce. Lindsey grew up exploring the creeks and woods of rural Alabama and is excited about living five minutes from Montgomery Bell State Park, where she can hike and kayak to her heart's content.
Lindsey adores her work as an Instructional Manager at Lead Academy High School, where she and her team help students achieve extraordinary academic and personal growth. She coaches teachers and develops systems to support the implementation of Multi-tiered Systems of Support (MTSS). She received her initial teaching certification in Social Studies 6-12 through the Teacher Preparation Program at Princeton University and her Master's in Special Education and Applied Behavioral Analysis at Vanderbilt University.
CHRISTINE & KEITH, Members
Christine was born in Nebraska but moved to coastal Georgia as a child and has been in the south ever since. She loves gardening and working with plants, and has longed to get back to her farming roots, so an agrihood is the perfect opportunity to be near a farm. Christine also enjoys writing, reading, sewing, and most crafts in general. She and Keith Wallace married in 2021 and have been looking forward to being part of a cohousing community for many years.
Christine has her BA in Philosophy from the College of Charleston and moved to Tennessee in 2005. She works as Chief Strategy Officer at Commercial Industrial Construction, Inc., in Nashville.
Keith grew up on a farm in middle Tennessee. As a child he enjoyed having his grandparents and cousins living close by. During the summers when not shelling beans or shucking corn, he loved exploring the forested hills and hollers by the Cumberland River near his home.
Keith graduated from Austin Peay State University and has spent most of his professional career working in retail management. After many years, he has carved out a way to make his love for books, comics, sports and other collectibles a full time profession. He looks forward to living on a farm again and being reintroduced to harvesting, canning fruits and vegetables as well as continuing his love of brewing beer.
KENT & CASSIE, Members
Kent has Bachelors and Masters degrees in Accounting from Brigham Young University, is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), and has a bunch of other professional designations related to insurance, fraud, and forensics. He has worked as an auditor, consultant, financial executive, and expert witness in civil litigation involving high-profile corporate fraud, famous (and infamous) Ponzi schemes, merger and acquisition disputes, and even such things as gold mines and sunken treasure, frequently with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.
Having worked from home for the past 14 years, Kent is looking forward to a life filled with neighborhood interactions and involvement plus a farm he does not have to maintain himself. In fact, he loves to mow grass and fosters a (now not so secret) desire to be involved in bushhogging the pastures at Burns Village & Farm.
Over the past 40+ years, Kent and Cassie have lived in Utah, Florida, Missouri, Tennessee, Houston, Iowa, and Ohio and have been blessed with 7 children and 13 grandchildren. Most of their older children call Middle Tennessee home as they lived in Franklin during many of their school years, where they had 15 acres with sheep, chickens, and a horse.
Cassie grew up on family farms in Kansas and Missouri. Her father raised wheat, hay, beans, milo, chickens, pigs, and cattle. They had a pony and a milk cow. When she and Kent lived in Tennessee in the 1990’s they had 15 acres, a garden, sheep, chickens, and five wonderful children. The farm is her happy place. But the one thing she never had was close neighbors. It can be lonely on a farm. She is very excited about Burns Village and Farm, a happy place where dear friends will join her to cook and eat, garden, gather eggs, play games in the common house, and chat on the front porch.
Though she has a BS in Civil Engineering from Brigham Young University, after raising her children full-time for 16 years, she changed course and became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. She works primarily with children and families, specializing in Attachment and Polyvagal Informed Therapies. In addition to the five farm-raised biological children, she has two beloved adopted children and 13 grandchildren. She enjoys visiting them where they have scattered across the world. When she is at home in Utah, where she and Kent currently live, she enjoys hiking, gardening, serving in her church, singing in choirs, yoga and reading. She is hoping to recover her skills in sewing, tatting, spinning and weaving when she “comes home” to Burns Village and Farm.
SANDY & TOM, Members
Sandy was born and raised in the Greater St. Louis area, happily growing up on 3 acres with gardens and fruit trees surrounded by woods to explore with the neighborhood kids. After graduating high school she married Tom Melton and they raised 3 boys that she home-schooled through their elementary years. After the boys entered public school she used her clerical/bookkeeping skills at a large, strictly equine veterinarian clinic and hospital that she thoroughly enjoyed. Once the boys were out on their own she enjoyed more time for hobbies such as quilting, adventures in the travel trailer as well as some trips overseas. Faith, family and friends are a major part of her life.
It has been many years since the concept of cohousing first entered her realm of thought. After discovering it is a real thing and following it for 25 years, waiting for the right place and time, along popped up BVF! Puttering in a garden (farm), nature walks, exercise, making food, and eating together in the common house are just a few of the activities that she is looking forward to sharing with Tom while aging in place with Burns Village & Farm friends and neighbors.
Tom was born in Great Falls, MT, and spent the next 16 years as a military “brat” with stints at several Air Force bases in the U.S. and overseas in Japan and the Marshall Islands. After his father retired in 1965, St. Louis became home base and Tom has been there ever since. After college, earning a degree in education, he spent the next 30 years both in elementary teaching and administration. Along the way, he met and married Sandy and they raised 3 boys. Two of the three still live in the St. Louis area and are raising their own families.
Tom enjoys playing golf, reading, and puttering around. He likes classic cars (having owned 3 1960's Mustangs) and occasionally attending car shows. Also, like Sandy, he is a person of faith and a regular church attender.
Cohousing appeals to him for the intentional aspect of community; the impromptu connections and conversation over a cup of coffee, and the enjoyment of getting to know others beyond a surface level.
Forward Ho wagons!! (he also likes westerns!)
DONNA & ERIC, Members
Donna was born in Milwaukee and grew up all around the Great Lakes from Ohio to Minnesota until she made the move to California and met Eric. She has been a lighting fixture designer most of her career but wanted to do something that helped people more directly. She has always been into health, fitness, and meditation so she became an energy healer in two methods and then a massage therapist. Over the last year, she has become a Rifer and heals others with resonant frequencies. Presently, she is studying to get her Naturopathy Practitioner certification. She enjoys sewing, knitting, crochet, and yoga.
Eric is a mechanical design engineer with experience in biotechnology and LED lighting and plans to retire in Q4 2025.
Using a "Food is my Medicine" philosophy, he has adopted Donna's vegetarian, organic lifestyle. They grow as much food as they can in a 1/4 acre suburban lot. California offers an extended growing season, so they have been planting all year long.
They have moved frequently over the last 10 years, where they usually meet good neighbors, but the community is largely missing. He visited his grandparent's farm in Michigan when he was a child and, looking back, he can see community slipping away over the generations.
BRIAN & BARB, Members
Brian started playing drums professionally when he joined the Musicians Union at age 14. He also has a day job which is not helpful to being a musician. Brian likes to have a dozen projects going at all times, so he doesn’t feel lonely. Someday soon, he wants to retire to the country, but he’ll need something to keep him busy…. and he figures that BVF could provide this opportunity.
Barb has been interested in cohousing for decades. She was involved with a co-housing project in Austin, TX that sadly failed, and then lived in Germantown Commons cohousing in Nashville for five years. She is a bit of a homebody and knows she does better when her community is right outside her door. Barb is a lazy gardener but loves to play with food (cooking, baking, canning, etc). Having a real farmer on the land will be a big plus for her.
RUSSANE, Member
Born and raised in Nashville. I had a good youth growing up with 4 siblings. I went away to Florida for college where I got my degree in Sociology and then moved to Breckenridge, Colorado where I worked or 8 years with the Colorado Outdoor Education Center for Special Needs. I went back to school for a short stint during this time to learn sign language in working with our deaf clients. I was married and we moved back to my roots here, in ’84 where we raised 2 children of our own and fostered many others. I worked at the Metro Health Department as a Mental Health Specialist for 27 years. This was mostly on the streets working with the homeless but I did some work towards the end of my career in the clinic with HIV patients. I now volunteer with several different agencies but most of my energy goes into trying to get common sense gun laws in place (Moms Demand Action), concerns about our planet and its climate (TN Interfaith Power & Light) & voting rights(League of Women Voters). Although new to the co-housing idea, I love the concept. I look forward to being a part of this developing community and this new chapter in my life.
