Directors

Marisa DeDominicis, Co-Founder, President/Director

Charlie Bayrer, Co -Founder, Operations Manager/Director

Kendall Morrison, Co-Founder, Treasurer/Director

Marisa DeDominicis is a part-time volunteer for Earth Matter NY. Marisa has a BA in Business and Organizational Communications from Emerson College, Boston. She worked for the Trust for Public Land as an environmental educator and site coordinator for 18 years. She was an activist in the urban homesteading /squatting movement in the East Village, where she lived, for 25 years. Her parents owned L & A Blacksmith Shop in Beacon NY, and her maternal grandmother was the village mid wife and butcher in Cugnoli, Italy. She currently consults for NYC Housing Authority on coordinating the soil health initiative of their gardening and greening program.

Kendall Morrison, Co-Founder, Treasurer/Director

Kendall at Bushwich Farmers MarketKendall Morrison is a semi-retired entrepreneur and full-time volunteer for Earth Matter NY and the Brooklyn-based Secret Garden Farm and Nature Preserve. His early entrepreneurial ventures were in telecommunications; he founded the seminal magazine Outweek in the 1980s (a politically-charged gay magazine founded in the early days of the AIDS epidemic), and later helped found LGNY (Lesbian/Gay New York), a biweekly local newspaper. He is co-founder of JournalsAndBooks.com, an online retailer of writing journals. The grandson of a farmer and the son of a computer scientist, Kendall has utilized his inherited skills, applying both scientific research and traditional composting and growing techniques in establishing Bushwick’s first organic farm at the Secret Garden.

Charlie Bayrer, Co-Founder, Operations Manager/Director
Charlie Bayrer is a a part time volunteer for Earth Matter NY. He has been an active community composter/gardener for 13 years. Co-chair of the Brooklyn Queens Land Trust Health Soils Initiative which sampled and tested the soil in all 34 member gardens in 2007 to 2008. He helped develop the sampling protocol, guidelines for remediation, gardener education on contamination and test interpretation, and implementation of remediation plans. Organizer of the Fort Greene Compost Project, an all volunteer community-based collaboration, currently composting over 40 tons per year of residential food waste for local use. Founding partner of Earth Matter, a membership organization dedicated to the local composting of organic waste by encouraging neighbor participation and leadership. All of these efforts are centered primarily across central Brooklyn from Red Hook to Bushwick.