Rafter has been active in the global justice movement for over a decade as organizer, participant, and scholar. He has been learning and teaching Permaculture design since 2003. He has been a student and teacher of social project design since working with School for Designing a Society from 2004-2006. His work as consultant, designer, and researcher, covers themes as diverse as ecological waste and water treatment, integrated mushroom production, whole farm design, and urban agroforestry. Seeing a need for a curriculum that helps create constructive strategies for connecting social justice and sustainability, he has been developing and sharing the Liberation Ecology workshop for the past five years. He co-founded the non-profit Ecological Learning Institute in 2009, in order to help connect the resources of the eco-design movement with the leadership of grassroots community projects. He consults and teaches permaculture professionally, and studies ecological design at the graduate level. He’s currently working with Milwaukee’s flagship urban farm, Growing Power, to integrate mushroom production with their intensive urban agriculture system. He was recently awarded the prestigious James Baldwin Turner Fellowship to continue his graduate studies as a PhD candidate at University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
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