The Team

The New Garden Society is run by horticulturists, landscapers and farmers who seek to expand green industry opportunities for our incarcerated and formerly incarcerated neighbors in Greater-Boston. 

Renee Portanova, Co-Founder and Director

Renée Portanova is a dedicated horticulturist and environmental educator with a strong foundation in the scientific and social dimensions of land care. She holds a B.A. from Manhattan College, a Certificate in Conservation Biology from Columbia University, and an M.S. in Education from Lesley University. Renée’s teaching spans diverse horticultural topics, engaging communities with an approach that blends science and social justice. She emphasizes horticulture's essential role in shaping societal well-being and personal growth. With extensive field experience across various settings, including fine gardening, specialty cut flower farms, and ecological restoration. Renée brings practical expertise and a passion for learning to every teaching environment.

As co-founder and director of The New Garden Society, Renée has found a perfect fusion of her passion for horticulture, education, and ecological stewardship. Beyond TNGS, she works as a horticulturist at Mount Auburn Cemetery.  Originally from Long Island, NY, she now resides in Boston, MA.

Erika Rumbley, Co-Founder and Director

sydney mark, media coordinator and educator

Sydney Mark is a horticulturist with a special interest in botany, plants as medicine, and flowering plants. She has a bachelors in Plant and Soil Sciences from the University of Massachusetts’ Stockbridge School of Agriculture, where she worked closely with her advisor and assisted in teaching a botany lab. There, she also interned with UMASS’ landscape department to design a green space on campus. After graduating, she jumped into nonprofit landscaping work at the Esplanade Association where she met her friend, mentor and Co-Founder of TNGS, Renée Portanova. She started volunteering as an educator in spring of 2019 and has felt welcomed and at home with her fellow members and their shared love and passion for both horticulture and social justice. She took on the role of media coordinator in the spring of 2021 and is excited to be using her millennial tech prowess for something so important to her.

Rachel Lewis, Operations & Development Manager

Rachel Lewis is a writer, educator, and home gardener with an interest in community education and local literacy systems. They hold a B.A. in English (and concentration in community anthropology) from UMASS-Amherst, and an MA in Rhetoric and Composition from Northeastern University. Rachel is an avid Boston community gardener with experience in administrative program assistance and prison literacy studies. Their research on incarcerated gender and sexual minorities won the Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (2016) and they have collaborated and taught on writing and communication topics in a number of detention-based and university programs and classrooms. At TNGS, Rachel gardens with students and manages administrative operation and development tasks. Their activities outside TNGS include teaching writing at Northeastern University, co-ordinating community gardens in Dorchester, and fermenting, cooking, pickling, and eating anything eligible that grows nearby.

Mark Smith, Programs manager

Mark Smith first fell in love with horticulture and farming while working on a small dairy and apple farm in northeastern Connecticut.  Year’s later, he served as Communications Director at the national family-farm advocacy group Farm Aid, where he focused on strengthening the demand for locally and sustainably produced food. In 2006, Mark co-founded Brookwood Community Farm and CSA, whose mission is to engage CSA members and the wider community in the agricultural operations on the farm as well as increase access to heathy, fresh food for underserved communities of Boston.  For the past sixteen years, he directed the Mary Wakefield Arboretum in Milton, which serves as a horticulture teaching site for school age children and the general public. Mark lived in El Salvador for five years and is fluent in Spanish, and enjoys ensuring that the TNGS programs are accessible to Spanish speaking students.

Horticulture Educators

Our Horticulture Educators have built careers in Greater-Boston’s Green Industry and volunteer to share their skills each week with our incarcerated neighbors. Farmers, landscapers, horticulturists and landscape designers team-teach to offer a well-rounded education in the fundamentals of horticulture, extending our professional networks to include incarcerated horticulturists as we extend the land we steward to include prison yards. Each year, 5-8 generous professionals from all corners of the local plant world join our team.

Board of Directors

The New Garden Society's strategic vision and activities are guided by professionals from the fields of vocational training, horticulture, social work, public health and higher education.  These generous individuals lead our work in collaboration with the team, with ongoing feedback from our students.

Jonna Iacono

Jonna serves as the Director of the Scholars Program and Office of Undergraduate Research and Education at Northeastern University. She earned her PhD in Early American Literature and Cultures at Brown University and graduated with honors from Princeton University. Iacono guides students through the process of conceptualizing, designing, and realizing undergraduate research projects, experiential learning opportunities, and fellowship applications. Her students have applied for and earned a number of nationally competitive fellowships, such as the Rhodes, Marshall, and Fulbright Scholarships.

angela phinney

Angela is a labor and employment attorney who represented a death-row inmate in Alabama for 18 years. She currently works as the Director of Development for Bikes Not Bombs. Angela co-owned Yew and I, a small organic garden design company, for several years.

Bridget Conley

Bridget Conley is Research Director at the World Peace Foundation and an Associate Research Professor at The Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Carrie Burke

Carrie Burke is Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker, and is the Director of Social Services Advocacy for the Public Defender Division of the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS). Carrie has worked with the Public Defenders since 2009 as a staff social worker and social work supervisor before becoming director in 2019. Prior her start at CPCS, Carrie was a community organizer with various immigrant rights organizations in the Boston area. Carrie received her MSW from Boston College Graduate School of Social Work.

Megan Crowe-Rothstein

Megan is a social worker, educator, and lover of plants. She is currently a faculty member and BSW field director at Lesley University, working with undergraduate social work students. She has over a decade of experience in defense-based social work in NY and MA, focusing on the intersection of incarceration, mental health and poverty. Megan finds tremendous hope and community in policy and organizing efforts to imagine a world without prisons.

Past Collaborators

These people and many others have contributed to our work through the years…

Lisa Lee

Lisa Lee provided administrative, fundraising and programming support to TNGS. Starting with us in 2018, she has gardened with incarcerated students as a TNGS Educator. She came to TNGS with a background in plant biology, organic vegetable farming and organizing in solidarity with vibrant movements for self-determination in Central America. She got her first taste of people organizing to create a better society in the temperate rainforests of Oregon and that seed blossomed into a full-fledged passion in the complex political environment of tropical El Salvador. Her organization in her role has lasting effects on our organization and in her role orienting new volunteers within our organization she has passed on her kindness and engagement onto all who learned from her.

Erin Espinosa

Erin Espinosa is an organic vegetable farmer with experience in garden education and non-profit administration. She worked with us as the Development Associate, building resources and funds that will have lasting effects of sustaining the transformative work of The New Garden Society. Erin was such an asset to our operation, aside from the day to day work involved in our massive fundraising efforts, she also spearheaded several new relationships and connections that our organization is better for having made, including providing educational materials to DYS services, something we had never done before. Erin continues to volunteer her time with us and students and to collaborate on big picture projects.

Sarah Cadorette

Sarah Cadorette is a teacher and organizer with over 10 years of experience in adult education, and over 15 years of experience in nonprofit management and administration. She has lived on sustainable communities and permaculture farms in India, Haiti and Costa Rica, which confirmed for her the transformative power of nature and meaningful work. Sarah has also worked on issues of food access for low-income and immigrant residents of Boston. She currently develops garden-based and leadership development curriculum for high school students, while helping to run a nonprofit that supplies reading and writing materials to people who are currently incarcerated.

Hadas Yanay

With a certificate in Permaculture Design and Yoga Teacher Training, Hadas is interested in the role of horticulture as a rehabilitative tool, which led her to become a volunteer horticulture educator with TNGS.  In previous roles, she has apprenticed and facilitated educational programming related to sustainable agriculture on farms in Israel, India, New York, and Cuba, and more recently, worked towards converting municipal and commercial spaces into urban farms in the Boston metro area. As an educator, she is committed to sustainable agriculture, food justice advocacy, and health and social equity issues, and is excited by TNGS's efforts to reach those incarcerated through horticultural vocational training. Today, Hadas is dedicated to finding ways to support and empower individuals through sustainable agriculture and food access.

Sara Riegler

Sara Riegler is an organic vegetable farmer and agriculture educator, with a passion for the intersection of social justice, mental health, and local food production and access. She started farming as an apprentice on farms in Vermont and Massachusetts for three seasons.  On Long Island in Boston, she became an assistant manager at Serving Ourselves Farm, a production farm that provided vocational training and rehabilitation programs for homeless adults and court-involved teens.  Following the closure of Long Island in 2014, she went on to become the farm manager at Littleton Community Farm.  During her two years at Serving Ourselves Farm, she discovered her deep passion for cultivating therapeutic working environments for at-risk populations and the joy that can be found in working as a team to improve health for others.  Farming and horticulture proves continuously to be a source of therapy and connection for her, and she is passionate about introducing others to this work. 

Laura Quincy Jones

Laura Quincy Jones is a Somerville-based teacher, artist, writer, community organizer, and gardener.  She has spent most of her professional career teaching literacy in inner-city high schools in Boston, MA and Oakland, CA, where her passion and commitment is to helping students open doors for themselves.  Her students have been her greatest teachers, and energetic inspiration.  In 2011, Laura decided to follow her curiosity to learn more about the real origins of good food as a gateway to broader social issues.  She lived and worked on organic farms and rural and urban homesteads throughout Australia and Japan, learning and sharing from expert farmers.  She taught environmental education at a community environment park in Melbourne for seven months.  Further international travels have taken her to Southeast Asia, New Zealand, Siberia and Russia, and Berlin. Laura holds degrees from Brown University (BA), Cambridge University (MPhil), and Tufts University (MAT).

Kristina marcus

Kristina earned her graduate degree in Clinical and Community Psychology in Germany. She currently works at the Brookline Center for Community Mental Health, where she provides case management and care coordination to people with multiple chronic health conditions as well as psychiatric diagnoses. She has been a bright light in our organization for several years while being a member of our board, and has contributed, among other things, to our outreach, recruitment & training efforts.

Brandy Henry

Brandy Henry, PhD, is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker, with many years of experience working as a clinician in legal settings. She worked and advised as a member of our board for several years while working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Columbia University School of Social Work where her research focused on improving the health of criminalized populations.Brandy is now an Assistant Professor of Education at Penn State, with a focus on rehabilitation and human services.

GIna Foglia

Gina joined us as a volunteer and advisor in 2017, and worked with us until her sudden passing in fall of 2021. Gina had a long and impressive list of achievements in and outside of Boston, but she left every project she collaborated on better than she had found it. She was an avid and eager learner and volunteer, and had her hands in so many community based projects, which is why her presence is felt in many green spaces and parks in and around Boston. A lovely piece and remembrance to Gina can be found here. She brought her enthusiasm for healthy landscapes and healthy communities to prison gardens and board meetings alike. Gina was straight forward, caring and persistent. She had a big vision for what gardens could do and didn't mind getting in the weeds to get there.