Rhonda Baird is a permaculture teacher and design consultant in the Midwest USA. She cut her teeth on labor (AFL-CIO) and community organizing (ACORN) before settling near home and working in a domestic violence program and volunteering with forest protection groups (Indiana Forest Alliance, Heartwood). Through a quirk of fate, she came home to permaculture when her graduate work led her to a PDC in 2005. Since then, she has been teaching and organizing community groups and workshops around permaculture, as well as getting her own hands in the dirt at her home on Green Road.

Rhonda is the former director of the Indiana Forest Alliance and currently serves on the board of directors for Heartwood and for the Association for Regenerative Culture. She runs Sheltering Hills Design, organizes the Bloomington Permaculture Guild, and works on the Permaculture Activist. Her contribution to Transition Bloomington is to help organize the Community Exchange program.