Meet the Team!
Like so many organizations, We Want the Land Coalition grew organically out of conversations among various friends and colleagues whose lives were, in some way, impacted by the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. The women soon realized that they had all been basically discussing variations on a theme, and that they shared one single common goal: to preserve the Land for the use of our community. As a result, the WWTLC organizing team was formed. The women who form the board of directors for WWTLC are visionary, bright, resourceful, creative, and fiercely determined. Their process has been very much rooted in “everything is possible – we just have to figure out how to make it happen.” Click on the tabs by board member name to get to know WWTLC’s founding board of directors.
Toni graduated from Michigan State University with a bachelor’s degree in education. She served as the Holly Township Parks and Recreation director for over 32 years. In this capacity she took a park system that only operated for 3 months a year and turned it in to a multi park year round park system. She has lots of experience in land management, grant management, finance, budgeting and board administration. As a festy Toni attended 28 festivals. She helped organize the singles group. She raised her daughter Cassidy on the land. She credits Cassidy and her time on the land as a big part of the reason both are strong independent womyn.
Toni joined the board because she believes in giving back and helping to continue to steward the land for all womyn and girls forever.
Deslie holds a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and a Masters of Science in Occupational Therapy from the College of Saint Mary with a certification in Physical Agent Modalities and is a Certified Lymphedema Therapist with a focus on developing strategies for compassionate caretaking of individuals with moderate to severe dementia. Currently, she works as an OT at the VA, serving those who served, and releasing resources to modify home environments, providing adaptive equipment, training care takers, providing recommendations for safe discharge settings, and providing, as well as training in mobility devices to optimize functional independence for individuals with transitioning functional needs.
She first attended Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in 2007 and knew she was home. In 2013 she was able to transition to short crew, working flex crew, and was tapped to fill in temporarily with the amazing WOC crew for 2 years. During the final festival she was assigned to Performer Shuttle and loved it.
Deslie has been involved with WWTLC from nearly the beginning, volunteering on the Land Committee, in order to hold space and vision for the continuity of accessible spaces for all women and girls, as WWTLC was envisioning hosting events on The Land. In the summer of 2018 she assessed the existing paths and infrastructures, providing recommendations for both permanent structural considerations and temporary modifications to facilitate accessibility for the enjoyment of women and girls of a variety of abilities. During summer 2019, the first summer of events, she volunteered for a month, providing support where needed, including but not limited to: Signs, Crew of the Willing, Volunteer Kitchen, and overseeing the Community Kitchen, as well as working as a liaison between Event Organizers, the Land Managers and volunteers regarding kitchen safety and sanitation. She was one of the first to recommend canceling events in 2020, as the pandemic was unfolding and helped to develop the Covid mitigation strategies and responses that are currently in place. Her goal is to make prior inaccessible parts of The Land accessible for all Women and Girls to enjoy.
Deslie lives in Omaha Nebraska with her wife Leigh Suhr, 3 dogs (Luzi, Malcolm X Parker Lorde, and Stevie Artemis Nyx), and cat (Labron James).
Fun Fact: Deslie was on multiple MTV shows in the “90’s. She was a regular on MTV Jams with Bill Belamy, Fashionably Loud, and 12 Angry Viewers.
Phyl earned both a Masters Degree and PhD from the Ohio State University in Sociology with scholarly specialization in gender studies and social movements. She taught part-time for 35+ years while pursuing a public sector career in a wide range of human resource leadership roles for the State of Ohio. A founding member of momazons – a lesbian mom’s organization, Phyl was also a long crew plumber for eight of the 32 years she served in the Main Kitchen of Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Now retired, she lives in Columbus, Ohio with her partner Dr. Diana Erchick.
Nedra Johnson is an openly lesbian singer songwriter and instrumentalist. Her work has primarily focused on women, love and liberation. She attended the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival as a performer and/or worker for 28 years, missing only one between her first and the final festival.
Nedra does things “the lesbian way”: If something needs to be done, she learns how to do it. Although Nedra’s formal education ended after “some college,” she has remained an avid learner and has acquired skills throughout her life that have enabled her to work in fields that generally require a college degree. In addition to being a musician, Nedra has worked in retail as a Produce Manager/Buyer. She has freelanced as a web designer and podcast producer as well as worked in web and multimedia production and in web based technical support. In her spare time, she writes and performs songs, is a passionate advocate for women and girls, and crafts deeply thoughtful essays on social justice issues on her blog. She has been credited for shifting the perspectives of countless readers who take the time to consider and process her words.
Fun Fact: Nedra likes to match plaids, sometimes wearing 2 to 3 variations at a time. especially on Thursdays, aka “Plaidy Thursday.”
Brenda Millhouse-Huebner has spent her life fighting for and working with women. She works as a financial architect where she helps her clients forge paths from where they are currently in their financial process to where they want to be. She prides herself on having the ability to make the complex simple and easy to understand. One of the ways that Brenda gives back to women is by working with women in the prison system. She volunteers one morning a week to teach the women financial education so that they have a good foundation to be successful when they return home.
Brenda is a member of DamesBond, which is a local networking group for women business owners as well as a founding member of Speaking of Gender (SoG). With SoG, we strive to make women’s voices heard on every conference panel we find. She was passionate about Fest and wanted to be involved to help save and maintain the Land for women and girls in perpetuity.
Brenda has 3 children and 2 grandchildren. She has 2 dogs. She spent 2 ½ years in Okinawa, Japan.
Fun Fact: Brenda and her wife, Barb, raise and release Monarch butterflies. By September 1, 2017, they have released approximately 500 butterflies this year alone.
Annemarie Serra holds a BA in Materials and Logistics Management from Michigan State University and an MBA in Marketing, Strategy, and Organization Behavior from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. By day, Annemarie leads very large cross functional teams to deliver new products. She is known for breaking complex problems down into manageable chunks, maintaining a big picture perspective while digging into details, and creating process and order out of chaos.
Her love of music has shaped her involvement in the arts and culture community, including the Woodstock Folk Festival, First SaturdayMusic, and Women in Music Say Yes – a women’s song circle she founded to help build the women’s music community, provide a safe environment for growth and learning, and showcase their talent and abilities. Annemarie first attended MichFest in 2002 as a first-time camper. One time was all it took for her to start planning her year around the Festival, including serving on short crew for 3 years. After learning that the 40th Festival in 2015 would be the last, Annemarie began brainstorming ideas for sustaining and growing the Festival’s culture beyond its end. Serving on WWTLC’s board is a true labor of love.
Fun Fact: A life-long learner, after finishing her MBA program Annemarie became a student of the guitar and recently began playing the ukulele. She has joined an all-girl ukulele band called the Ukulele Superheroes. She’s also an amateur arborist and grows mighty oaks from wee acorns on the regular.
Kathleen has worked crew multiple years for several women’s festivals, including Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Ohio Lesbian Festival, Michigan Framily Reunion, and Cinema Systers. Working the “House Crew” at National Women’s Music Festival was in the works for 2020, and is a gig she is looking forward to in 2022. She co-produces Welcome Home Week as part of WWTLC’s summer events on The Land. One of her dream jobs has been to work as a full-time women’s festival roadie. By volunteering for WWTLC, she feels she is close to experiencing that.
Kathleen comes from a long corporate background specializing in technical operations and customer relations/sales support. She also was an owner/operator of a small business. As a visual communicator, she loves to brainstorm and “whiteboard,” looking for the win-win in every situation. Collaborating with other women on things they are passionate about brings her much joy.
Building and experiencing women’s community is something she has done for years — especially in Cleveland and currently in southeast Florida, where she is an assistant organizer with BLAST (Bi, Lesbian and Straight Together) Women of the Palm Beaches.
She loves animals of all kinds, especially dogs. Her favorite hobby is a newfound love for snorkeling, now that she lives near the ocean and waterways of Palm Beach County.
Fun Facts: Many friends gift her with seahorse items, as seahorses are among her favorite things. Precious nicknames include variations on “Seahorse.”
Mads Young is honored to serve as the Donor Relations chair. She holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Olin College. She is currently working in the construction industry, helping to increase productivity through off-site manufacturing. She lives in Arizona with her rabbit.
Mads found lesbian and feminist community while attending college. Cultivating those connections has been a focus of her life ever since, and she has experience with organizing both virtual and in-person events and workshops. In 2019 she learned about WWTLC while attending Ohio Lesbian Festival, and made a goal to attend a festival on The Land then, after hearing so much about Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Her first trip to The Land in the summer of 2022 was life-changing. She is thrilled to be able to serve WWTLC’s mission.
Fun fact: Mads loves to tinker and has built more than 10 mechanical keyboards.
