About Our Team.
At Land Access Alliance, a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit, we're not only working towards equitable land access but also equitable organizational practices. We operate within a horizontal leadership model. We value collaboration, shared decision-making, and distributed power.
Rumbidzai Masawi
Rumbidzai Masawi is a teacher, supervisor, trade unionist, marketing executive, trainer, manager, sustainable development professional, researcher, consultant, farmer, and urban gardener respectively. These diverse responsibilities and capabilities span over twenty-three years of government, private, and not-for-profit work.
Rumbidzai’s multidisciplinary gifts have found a home at Land Access Alliance, where she will reconnect with her innate compass - a legacy of Matriarchs who were rural community healers, midwives, and family providers. Having orbited the world of modern work, she nests on ancient wisdom guiding grassroot innovation and initiatives.
At Land Access Alliance, she will provide leadership in developing workable models of collective action that reflect the culture and diversity of communities. Focus will be on creating a community-based arrangement to provide access to farmland and foraging to those traditionally marginalized. This role is a natural progression from Rumbidzai’s efforts towards building a web of urban gardening communities, as well as active participation within the University of Minnesota Extension Regional Sustainable Partnerships, where she serves as Board Member, Vice Chair, member of the Agriculture and Food Systems Work Group, as well as the Northeast Representative and Chair of the Statewide Coordinating Committee.
Rumbidzai is gathering and partnering a diverse team of land and community stewards, to reinterpret land ownership and build relationships that support sustainable local food and farm systems that endeavor for markets, ecologies, and cultures that esteem land and cherish the people who work on it. In the process, she will build and maintain alliances with other organizations and related state and local agencies to identify and tackle conventional practices and structures that are barriers to a community’s ability to control land use, avail housing, grow the local economy, and create wealth. She will work with the board, legal team, funders, and volunteers to acquire land and case study bottom-up initiatives that prioritize meeting people’s needs through community stewardship and non-traditional models.
Meghan Mitchell
Meghan is fairly new to the nonprofit landscape, but immediately found herself inspired and at-home three years ago when she moved to Finland, MN and started working in and around organizations focusing on issues that deeply aligned with her values: local food systems, sustainable/regenerative agriculture, food sovereignty, and environmental justice. Although she is a transplant to the area from southern MN, Meghan quickly fell in love with the local community and its impressive resilience; and also with the land and waters, and plant and animal relatives. After 15 years of travels with an ever-growing feeling of disillusionment, these recent experiences in the north woods have allowed her to find purpose and hope by learning how to build relationships with place, and how to start viewing the world through the lens of decolonization.
From the perspective of a low income laborer who wishes to forage for food and grow/work with plant medicine; from the life of a traveler who has seen the wave of gentrification and short-term-rentals decimate and displace communities (especially BIPOC); and from the view of a millennial who has seen late-stage capitalism dissolve opportunities for land access and wealth that were afforded to previous generations; …Meghan believes strongly and passionately in LAAs interests in transforming how communities relate to land, building community resilience, sharing wealth, and providing access to land for farming and foraging for people who have been traditionally marginalized.
Meghan has been on the Vision Keepers Board of Land Access Alliance since early 2023, and in that time has been excited to see the progress of the organization and to be part of the process of growing it towards its mission.
Matthew Mark Unzeitig
Matthew believes that the solutions to our collective problems need to be simple in order to be workable and sustainable. He also believes that there always exists a simpler, more effective solution.
Matthew spends much of his time creating long-term rental housing in Two Harbors, MN by remodeling abandoned and blighted houses, adding units to existing buildings, and improving existing rental housing that is substandard. He spends most of his time and energy raising his 5 and 6 year old boys. He also has interests in helping anyone who wants to start businesses that meet a community need. Matthew envisions a world where people can buy the majority of their food locally and can afford to do so.
Matthew holds a Master of Urban and Regional Planning degree with minors in Ecological Restoration, Sustainable Agricultural Systems, and Integrative Therapies and Healing Practices. He is a two-tour Army veteran with incurred disabilities. He worked in the environmental field in the oil and mining industries until his body couldn't handle the toxicity and stress involved with such work. He currently runs multiple businesses in housing and construction.
After major health problems incurred in the military, leading to unemployment, with majorly insufficient help from the government that had worn out his body, Matthew began to question everything he had ever learned about our society and the system that underlies it. Fast forward to today, having completely reconfigured the way he thinks about and functions in the world, Matthew wants to spread the knowledge that he has learned thus far on his healing journey to anyone who can benefit.
At Land Access Alliance, Matthew brings his knowledge and perspective on land and housing into the conversation about land access. He believes that housing is a key component to provide access to farming land and is also a tool to provide financial equity to people farming collective land.
Matthew believes that all people have something to contribute to our world and that our world is much better when people are allowed the opportunity to do so. Furthermore, Matthew feels that people have a deep-seated NEED to contribute to our world. Without the opportunity to contribute in meaningful ways, people can feel powerless and even worthless. Let’s do what we can to provide people with opportunities to make meaningful contributions to our world.
Lise Abazs
Lise was part of the Land Access Alliance founding group that gathered in 2020 to manifest a vision of more equitable access to land for farming and foraging in Northeast Minnesota. She is deeply rooted in the community of Finland, Minnesota, where she has lived for almost 40 years. Having grown up in southern Minnesota farm country, she left home for college (focusing on environmental and intercultural studies) and then world exploration (working with agricultural and community development projects on four continents) before she found herself longing to return to the Upper Midwest. She and her husband planted themselves in a place they call Round River, where their lives are intricately entwined in the northern landscape and seasons.
Lise is passionate about growing healthy food and living in a way that sustains the land and respects the other beings who also reside here. Round River Farm is an off-grid homestead that straddles wilderness and culture, striving to find balance between human needs and desires and what the Earth offers. This journey has been shared with hundreds of visitors, apprentices, and cohabitants at Round River. Over the years, these experiences and relationships have led to deep reflection on society’s assumptions about land ownership and community wealth. Land Access Alliance is a way of further exploring new ways of relating to the land and each other, ways that provide an alternative to society’s current focus on the commodification and exploitation of land and labor.
Lise brings several decades of practical experience as a farmer (in the form of community supported agriculture, market gardening, tree seedling nursery, and small livestock) as well as nonprofit leadership (management and accounting for sustainable agriculture, environmental advocacy, social service, and community organizations). Being keenly aware of both the fragility and resilience of northern ecosystems and communities, she seeks to find positive responses to current environmental and social challenges, trusting in the possibilities created by working together, and focusing on bringing thoughtful reverence to our way of being in the world.
Shannon Walz
Shannon Walz is part of the foundational volunteer group that formed Land Access Alliance. She is excited to participate in starting an organization that is rooted in place, community and justice. She has eagerly put her heart and skills into establishing an organization deeply dedicated to building a just and equitable future for human and more than human communities. A key component to living into this future is to redefine our relationship with land and the ecological communities we live in.
Shannon has a background in environmental education, nonprofit leadership and community engagement. She has a B.A. in English, a certificate of Environmental Education and a Master’s of Teaching with an emphasis in inquiry based learning and conservation biology.
A southern Minnesota native, Shannon fell in love with the beauty of Lake Superior and the North Shore at a young age. After college, Shannon spent two transformative years at Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center. It is there that she fell in love with teaching and learned what it means to develop a sense of place. Wolf Ridge also instilled a passion for sustainability and environmental conservation. After a decade of adventures on the West Coast, she was fortunate enough to move back to Northern Minnesota and have the lake as a neighbor once again.
After living on the North Shore, she moved to Portland, Oregon and then Port Angeles, Washington to further her career in environmental education. During that decade she explored what meaningful education looked like and found that she was deeply passionate about organizational leadership. She developed skills in facilitation, strategic planning, decision making, grant writing and fundraising and organizational leadership. Through her work she has become especially interested in collaborative leadership, people centered workplaces, and restorative workplace practices.
David Abazs
David Abazs and his wife Lise run Round River Farm and David had the opportunity to design and build Victus Farm, an aquaponics facility in Silver Bay, instigate, lead and manage the design and construction of the Wolf Ridge Farm and initiated the design and early building years of the North Shore AgroEcology Center, Finland MN. He transitioned five years ago from those farms to become the Executive Director of the Northeast Regional Sustainable Development Partnership at the University of Minnesota. David is a former UMN Endowed Chair in Agriculture Systems and has authored the Western Lake Superior Food Capacity study and the Local Food as an Economic Driver study and continues research on Agrophenology. His greatest joy is his family, living connected to land, and imagining and leaning into a more just and sustainable country and world!
Alex Kmett
Alex Kmett, or Bagwajinini in Ojibwe, is a member of the Eagle clan of the Red Lake Nation, with close family ties to Leech Lake Reservation. He harvests wild rice, various wild edible and medicinal plants, and farms vegetables for his family and community. He holds a Masters of Arts in Indigenous Education from Arizona State University and a Bachelor of Arts from University of Minnesota Morris, where he returned in 2017-2018 to serve as both Staff and Faculty as a College Student Success Coordinator for first-year Native American Students, and as Ojibwe Language Instructor. Since then, he has become a co-founder and the Director of Curriculum for the Endazhi-Nitaawiging Charter School in Red Lake focusing on Ojibwe language and Land-Based Learning and grounded in cultural understandings of relationality and reciprocity, and is a co-founding parent of the Gookonaanig Endaawaad language nest at Fond du Lac Reservation, where he currently resides. Aside from his work in language revitalization and building educational infrastructure, he is a strong advocate for rematriation of Indigenous land and life.
Teresa Kittridge
Teresa Kittridge, founder of 100 Rural Women, lives in Marcell Township in Northern Minnesota. She has spent much of her life serving rural people across the country, with a career that includes executive level leadership in the private, public and nonprofit sectors as well as serving in elected office. 100 Rural Women models her life’s work, by serving women in rural places to inspire leadership, create connections, networks, support civic engagement and encourage leadership.
The first twenty years of her career were spent serving as an officer of the Minnesota House of Representatives. Following her time in the legislature, she built the Washington D.C. office of RUPRI (Rural Policy Research Institute) and served as Director of National Policy Programs. She has over a decade of experience in leading and building national and international businesses, as a publishing executive for MN based Coughlan Companies and then as founder and president of MNREM (Minnesota Renewable Energy Marketplace) a non-profit organization. Kittridge returned to RUPRI in 2014 as Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. She is the founder and President of 100 Rural Women.
Teresa is an active civic and community volunteer. She is an elected Trustee and Secretary of the Board for the Bigfork Valley Hospital Northern Itasca Hospital District, serves on Marcell Township Business Loan committee and on committees of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Rural Innovation. Kittridge served as Board Chair and as a Director on the Waconia School Board. She holds a M.A. in Organizational Leadership and a B.A. in Business Administration.
Greg Schweser
As the statewide director for sustainable agriculture and food systems for UMN Extension’s Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships, Greg Schweser connects community-led innovation to resources available at the University of Minnesota. Using this approach, Schweser helps develop the sustainability of agriculture by elevating the knowledge and understanding of new and innovative concepts among farmers, advocates, and University faculty, staff, and students. Greg holds a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
Schweser’s work focuses building community partnerships to develop agricultural innovations that have the capacity to provide major positive environmental and economic transformations for Minnesota farmers, consumers, and residents. Recent projects of note include the Farm Scale Deep Winter Greenhouse Initiative. Schweser is connecting farmers in Greater Minnesota with researchers at the UMN’s Center for Sustainable Building Research to field test the newest model of passive solar winter greenhouses. This initiative is intended to draw attention and interest to affordable greenhouse technology that allows farmers to capture and store heat from the sun rather than relying on delivered fossil fuel heat. Schweser is also working on a hybrid hazelnut research development initiative to connect Minnesota farmers to University of Minnesota hazelnut researchers. Farmers in the Upper Midwest are field testing the first-generation varieties of hazelnut cultivars which are intended to serve as a major oilseed and food crop that, with its deep roots, can capture and store atmospheric carbon dioxide while also providing wildlife habitat, protecting groundwater, and reducing soil erosion.