Our Team
Mercedes Perez Whitman
(she/they)
Mercedes Perez Whitman is an earthworker and citizen mycologist. She is the founder of MycoSprings, which was part of the landscaping cooperative OrganaGardens for four years, and continues to offer landscaping services. It also offers educational events focused on mushroom cultivation and working with fungi to address environmental issues prevalent in the Southwest. Their work is embedded in improving land health by cultivating native, climate-relevant, and drought-tolerant plants and fungi, alongside land, environmental and food justice advocacy.
Anna Wermuth
she/her
Anna was a part of MycoSprings from the fall of 2021-2022, and had a powerful time co-creating fungal community with Mercedes. Anna is a myco-ecologist, artist, and animist born and raised in St. Louis, MO. She loves to sing freely, cook experimentally, transform death into life, and explore the forests of the world. Anna received her BA in Organismal Biology and Ecology from Colorado College in 2019. She has volunteered with Food to Power and other Colorado Springs food equity efforts since 2015. Anna seeks to call upon the powers of embodied remediation to co-create resilient soils and communities that are centered around the cultivation of food as medicine.