Saving the planet can be fun!

GreenAgers is a community force, giving us the most important resource we need to rebuild our world: each other.

GreenAgers is an organization run by teens for teens. We act as a networking agent for the Green community, linking together existing school environmental teams, youth organizations, grassroots organizations, and projects, helping new ones get started, and creating projects of our own to fill unaddressed niches in the grassroots movement.

With a think tank approach, GreenAgers recruits teens into an environmental army to awaken parents, teachers and fellow students into action around the issue.

Eventually, there will be GreenAgers across the country, and the planet. The pilot program is now running in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

Berkshire County is incredible in its potential for pro-environmental change. GreenAgers believes that the best way to make things happen is to let things happen, and aims to be a catalyst, weaving the ideas, desires, and abilities of local people, clubs, organizations, businesses, and other entities together to create a fabric strong enough to produce significant and permanent changes in the way we treat our planet.

About our Staff

Our Director

Brenda Mathisen is GreenAgers' Program Director. A native of Brooklyn, New York she moved to the Berkshires in 2003 to attend Simon's Rock College, where she received her Bachelor of the Arts degree in Music and Quantitative Studies, summa cum laude, in 2006.

Brenda Mathisen and Lindsey Longway

In the year and a half since her graduation, Brenda has worked at Farm Girl Farm, the Berkshire Co-op Market, and at Simon's Rock College as a professional tutor. She was also involved in a project to create a sustainable community in southern Vermont.

For about nine months of that time, her residence has been a tent or other small simple shelters in the woods. "It wasn't that I couldn't afford a 'real house,'she says. "It was just more fun that way. I've been called homeless, but I felt more at home in the woods than I could in any apartment."

Brenda's many interests include math, music, philosophy, outdoor recreation, sustainability, community, teaching, and alternative medicines.

Our Intern

Lindsey Longway, a Freshman at Simon's Rock, is the GreenAgers intern. Originally from Oregon, she came to Great Barrington this year to attend college. She worked for Lewis and Clark State and National Historic Park this past summer and is excited to be involved in another enviornmental organization. Lindsey is interested in art, theater, music, biology and everything to do with plants, alternative energy, sustainable living and getting others excited about the environment.

GreenAgers is a program of the Center of Peace through Culture (CPC), a non-profit organization whose goal is to promote a culture of peace through transforming personal and cultural beliefs that create conflict and division among people, into attitudes of inclusion, acceptance, and cooperation.

CPC strives to bring people together from diverse groups to creatively and cooperatively address the issues of the world that cause suffering and discord.

GreenAgers supports this mission by working to unite the young people of the Berkshires through recognizing our shared consciousness, ideas, and pursuits—and most importantly,
our shared future.

For more information on CPC, email info@centerforpeacethroughculture.org