Our Staff

**Caroline Singleton,** Sanctuary Director

Caroline started her journey to Rancho Compasión on broken foot and crutches, determined to volunteer in the barn no matter her questionable condition. She remained a steadfast volunteer, eager to cover shifts and learn piece by piece how to perform chicken health checks or help with an event. She began working part-time in 2021, quickly moving her way up to Sanctuary Manager where she oversaw resident care and volunteers and now serves as our Sanctuary Director, where she steers all our operations. Caroline leads children in our afterschool and field trip programs, gives tours, trains volunteers and staff, keeps a keen eye on the residents’ health and medical care, and pretty much everything you do and don’t see around here. When she’s not at work, she can be found rocking out at metal shows, adding to her rad tattoo collection, or foraging medicinal plants for healing concoctions that she sells at our events!

**Robbie Coleman,** Facilities Assistant & Caregiver

Robbie’s first foray to the sanctuary was on a visitor day tour with his family back in 2022, and he instantly became reliable member of our farm-ily! Robbie’s handy skills have given many a much-needed update to our structures, while his gentle demeanor and hardworking spirit keep the sanctuary a safe and caring home for our residents. He brings a strong sense of justice and respect for nonhuman life, and dedicates himself to a vegan lifestyle. He’s also a Japanophile, is fluent in Japanese, and practices tae kwon do!
(Pictured with geese Alley and Zamora, sheep Felix and Luna)

**Derek Clary**, Sanctuary Assistant

If this were school, Derek would have earned the “perfect attendance” award as a volunteer for the first few years. His passion and dedication toward cleaning the aviary every Friday and spending time with the residents were just another extension of his compassionate vegan lifestyle and activism for animals. In 2021, he began CaliCatCrew, a Vallejo-based feral cat TNR project. An avid wildlife photographer, his adventures photographing the tule elk of Point Reyes National Seashore led him to become involved with local activism to protect the endangered native ruminants from ranching. He has recently become an amateur ecologist and forager, now leading our summer camp students on foraging walks, creating tinctures, and even made a mushroom bed in our garden. His enterprising creativity, curiosity for learning, and energetic tenacity are invaluable to the sanctuary!
(Pictured with Prunella)

**Tracy Thatcher**, Compassion Garden Director

Bio coming soon! Learn more about our program here.

Our Board of Directors

Featured

Miyoko Schinner, Chair

Miyoko Schinner is an award-winning chef, author, entrepreneur and speaker. She is the founder of Miyoko’s Creamery, a leading plant-milk dairy company whose products are sold internationally, which she started at the “young” age of 57. At the same time, she founded Rancho Compasión, running it almost entirely by herself for the first two years.

Calling herself an epicurean activist, she has worked tirelessly for over thirty years to reimagine a food system built on sustainability, equity, and compassion for animals. Her popular cookbooks, products, and thought leadership have inspired people across the globe to reconsider their food choices and take personal joy and responsibility in helping to participate in a better food system.

Photo by Joanne MacArthur.

Cathy Gries, Treasurer

Cathy's love of animals started as a child when she begged her parents to rescue a puppy and would not take no for an answer. She was a long time volunteer at the sanctuary, both with animal care and maintenance projects, before she joined the Board in 2023 to lend her financial expertise as the Treasurer. After many years in Chicago, she moved to the Bay area in 2011 and spends much of her free time enjoying the incredible cycling, hiking, swimming and kayaking the area has to offer.

Kimberly Teal

Kimberly grew up on a small ranch in the foothills of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles with horses, dogs, cats, rabbits, a goat, and chickens next door. She chose to stop eating red meat at age 15. Now living in San Anselmo she has a rotation of foster cats in and out of her home. She and her then-teenage daughter adopted a fully-vegan lifestyle in 2015 after giving up all meat and most dairy over the years prior. They dreamed of one day owning a small pig sanctuary together when Kimberly learned about Rancho Compasión and started volunteering in 2019. She loves the challenge of getting all the residents dinner and putting them to bed by herself. She has arranged contributions of unsellable fruits and vegetables from local markets twice a week to help supplement the resident’s diets. Kimberly has a master’s degree in Health Education and experience as a grant writer. She spent some years flipping homes and looks forward to helping with construction projects around the ranch. She works full-time as a Real Estate Broker serving residential sellers and buyers across the San Francisco Bay Area.

Samantha Miller

Samantha grew up nearby in the hills of Fairfax. She has always loved animals, which led to a study of biology and a vegan lifestyle. She’s had a successful career as a biopharma entrepreneur, and now realizes that her ultimate calling is to help animals, especially ‘farmed animals’, and the planet, by working to convert the world away from using animals for food and other products. She sees animal sanctuaries playing an important role in helping people develop compassion for these beautiful creatures. She lives with her husband, son, and 2 dogs in Piedmont, and loves to experiment with whole food plant-based cooking.

Dave Osborn

Dave Osborn lives in Point Reyes, is a retired Contractor and currently performs mold and water damage investigations throughout the Bay Area. He became a vegan after being diagnosed with cancer over 11 years ago. Because of his plant-based diet he conquered the cancer but also became aware of the effects of animal-based diets on the environment and the terrible treatment of the animals raised for food.

Dave has written and published articles in the local newspaper to bring awareness to the local dairy and ranch based populace of the negative effects of animal agriculture. He was fortunate to meet Miyoko Schinner, the founder of Rancho Compasión, and they hatched a plan to hold a film festival focusing on the many harms that a meat-based diet does to our health, the environment and the animals with the help of the volunteers and Board members of Rancho Compasión. At that time Miyoko asked Dave to serve on the Board of Directors and he readily accepted.

Because of his construction background and ranching experience he helps oversee the maintenance and new improvement projects for Rancho Compasión.

Brad Widelock

Brad lives in Fairfax with his wife and dog and, when he's home from college, his son. Now that Brad has retired from teaching middle school math, he is able to dedicate more time to both vegan cooking and baking and helping out at Rancho. Brad has been volunteering at Rancho from the beginning, and has loved being a part of its growth. Brad has been vegan since 2002, and loves planning events, helping out in the kitchen, and being with the animals.

Camellia Schinner

Camellia Schinner was previously the Sanctuary Director of Rancho Compasión, and has been involved since its inception when her family started the sanctuary in 2015.

She embodies an anti-oppression, total liberation philosophy in her vegan practice. She asks how farmed animal sanctuaries can be transformative spaces for reshaping and reimagining our relationship to the other-than-human world, while modeling interspecies community care. Camellia boasts no accolades nor credentials, but is a regular recipient of Goober’s “hot breath” (a gorilla grunt-like greeting pigs give to their friends), which is all that really matters to her.

Heather LeGrand

My vegan journey stated at age 14 with one leaflet. There was a group of PETA volunteers at my local shopping mall asking people to have a “Compassionate Christmas and Humane Hannukah”. I was intrigued because I couldn’t imagine how I was being non-compassionate that holiday season. Their plea was asking people to abstain from fur or leather. I honestly had not considered how my choices affected other animals until then. I read that leaflet carefully and eventually signed up for their mailing list. A few months in, after reading about downed cows and an undercover operation at a Perdue chicken farm, I was well on my way. That was over 35 years ago.

Volunteering has always been an important part of my life. As a teenager, I worked with children with learning differences at a local elementary school. As a college and graduate student, I was able to work with local animal non-profits. And as a mom, volunteering at our local elementary school, leading small groups in reading and math skills. I have raised two amazing, empathetic, compassionate vegan boys whom I hope are having a positive influence on their community of friends.

My professional background revolves around my skills in Math and Statistics. I enjoy working with data and finding the hidden stories in the numbers. Either in marketing, customer satisfaction, or sales trends, data drives my desire to understand people’s behavior and leverage that behavior to provide a better experience for them and the people with whom they interact. At Rancho, my goal is to share our mission of compassion, environmental stewardship, and education to a broad and diverse group of people, as well as keep our existing donors updated on all of our events and opportunities.

Our Advisory Board

Rancho Compasión’s dedicated and passionate Advisory Board members serve as instrumental resources and consultants, enabling us to fulfill our mission through locally relevant and effective programs and care for our animal residents.

Featured

Sid Garza-Hillman

Author, Podcaster, Speaker, Stanford Inn & Resort’s Wellness Programs Director

Sid is the author of Approaching the Natural: A Health Manifesto, Raising Healthy Parents: Small Steps, Less Stress, and a Thriving Family and Six Truths: Live by these truths and be happy. Don’t and you won’t. He holds a BA in Philosophy from UCLA, is a public speaker, podcaster (What Sid Thinks Podcast), certified nutritionist & running coach, Oxygen Advantage breathing instructor, and founder of smallsteppers.com. He is the Stanford Inn & Resort’s Wellness Programs Director and Race Director of the Mendocino Coast 50K trail ultramarathon (one of only two vegan ultras in the US and has sold out every year!).

Jasmine Leyva

Producer, The Invisible Vegan

Jasmine is a filmmaker and actress based in Los Angeles. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in TV, Film, and Media and a Masters of Fine Arts in Screenwriting. Leyva worked as an Associate Producer on the NAACP Award-winning docu-series, Unsung, and was subsequently a writer and producer for Being, a docuseries highlighting dynamic entertainers in film and music. In 2019, Jasmine and Kenny Leyva released their own feature-length documentary, The Invisible Vegan, a film that chronicles Jasmine’s personal experience with plant-based eating. The film examines how plant-based eating is directly linked to African roots and how African-American eating habits have been debased by a chain of oppression stemming from slavery, economic inequality, and modern agribusiness. She currently teaches media writing at California State University Northridge and is in pre-production for two new self-produced projects.

Louie Psihoyos

Director, “The Cove”, “Racing Extinction”, “The Game Changers”

The Executive Director of Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), Louie Psihoyos is widely regarded as one of the world's most prominent still photographers. He has circled the globe dozens of times for National Geographic and has shot hundreds of covers for other magazines including Fortune, Smithsonian, Discover, GEO, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine and Sports Illustrated.

Psihoyos' first documentary film, "The Cove," has won over 100 awards globally from festivals and critics, became the first doc in history to sweep all the film guilds and won the Oscar® for Best Documentary Feature in 2009. The activism around that film help lead to an over 93% drop of dolphin and porpoise deaths. His second film, "Racing Extinction," about the global extinction crisis was seen by 36 million people in 220 countries and territories the first day it aired and led to laws banning the trade of some of the world’s most endangered species.

Dr. Joseph Sky

Cardiologist

Dr. Joseph Sky was raised in in a community closely connected to one of the Blue Zones areas and graduated from the only medical school located in a Blue Zone. Lt Col (Dr) Joseph Sky is a cardiologist in the U.S. Air Force and his passion is finding and working with patients willing to use diet and lifestyle as medicine. He believes the science now clearly shows the value of preventive cardiology, complementary medicine and whole person care which includes the community in which we live.