Our Staff

Staff bios coming soon!

Caroline Singleton, Sanctuary Director

Sarah Thorson, Director of Programming and Development

Our Board of Directors

Featured

Kimberly grew up on a small ranch in the foothills of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles with horses, dogs, cats, rabbits, a goat, and chickens next door. She chose to stop eating red meat at age 15. Now living in San Anselmo she has a rotation of foster cats in and out of her home. She and her then-teenage daughter adopted a fully-vegan lifestyle in 2015 after giving up all meat and most dairy over the years prior. They dreamed of one day owning a small pig sanctuary together when Kimberly learned about Rancho Compasión and started volunteering in 2019. She loves the challenge of getting all the residents dinner and putting them to bed by herself. She has arranged contributions of unsellable fruits and vegetables from local markets twice a week to help supplement the resident’s diets. Kimberly has a master’s degree in Health Education and experience as a grant writer. She spent some years flipping homes and looks forward to helping with construction projects around the ranch. She works full-time as a Real Estate Broker serving residential sellers and buyers across the San Francisco Bay Area.

Samantha Miller

Samantha grew up nearby in the hills of Fairfax. She has always loved animals, which led to a study of biology and a vegan lifestyle. She’s had a successful career as a biopharma entrepreneur, and now realizes that her ultimate calling is to help animals, especially ‘farmed animals’, and the planet, by working to convert the world away from using animals for food and other products. She sees animal sanctuaries playing an important role in helping people develop compassion for these beautiful creatures. She lives with her husband, son, and 2 dogs in Piedmont, and loves to experiment with whole food plant-based cooking.

Dave Osborn

Dave Osborn lives in Point Reyes, is a retired Contractor and currently performs mold and water damage investigations throughout the Bay Area. He became a vegan after being diagnosed with cancer over 11 years ago. Because of his plant-based diet he conquered the cancer but also became aware of the effects of animal-based diets on the environment and the terrible treatment of the animals raised for food.

Dave has written and published articles in the local newspaper to bring awareness to the local dairy and ranch based populace of the negative effects of animal agriculture. He was fortunate to meet Miyoko Schinner, the founder of Rancho Compasión, and they hatched a plan to hold a film festival focusing on the many harms that a meat-based diet does to our health, the environment and the animals with the help of the volunteers and Board members of Rancho Compasión. At that time Miyoko asked Dave to serve on the Board of Directors and he readily accepted.

Because of his construction background and ranching experience he helps oversee the maintenance and new improvement projects for Rancho Compasión.

Brad Widelock

Brad lives in Fairfax with his wife and dog and, when he's home from college, his son. Now that Brad has retired from teaching middle school math, he is able to dedicate more time to both vegan cooking and baking and helping out at Rancho. Brad has been volunteering at Rancho from the beginning, and has loved being a part of its growth. Brad has been vegan since 2002, and loves planning events, helping out in the kitchen, and being with the animals.

Camellia Schinner

Camellia Schinner was previously the Sanctuary Director of Rancho Compasión, and has been around since its inception when her family moved to Nicasio in 2015. Having had very little farmed animal caregiving experience prior to her involvement with the sanctuary, her love for nonhuman animals motivated her to learn on-the-job to enrich and organize the animal care, volunteer, and outreach programs.

She is deeply invested in matters of social justice and embodies a consistent anti-oppression, total liberation framework in her vegan praxis. Applying this to her work at the sanctuary, she asks how farmed animal sanctuaries can be transformative spaces for reshaping and reimagining our relationship to the other-than-human world, while modeling radical interspecies community care.

Camellia boasts no accolades nor credentials, but is a regular recipient of Goober’s “hot breath” (a gorilla grunt-like greeting pigs give to their friends), which is all that really matters to her.

Our Advisory Board

Rancho Compasión’s dedicated and passionate Advisory Board members serve as instrumental resources and consultants, enabling us to fulfill our mission through locally relevant and effective programs and care for our animal residents.

Featured

Sid Garza-Hillman

Author, Podcaster, Speaker, Stanford Inn & Resort’s Wellness Programs Director

Sid is the author of Approaching the Natural: A Health Manifesto, Raising Healthy Parents: Small Steps, Less Stress, and a Thriving Family and Six Truths: Live by these truths and be happy. Don’t and you won’t. He holds a BA in Philosophy from UCLA, is a public speaker, podcaster (What Sid Thinks Podcast), certified nutritionist & running coach, Oxygen Advantage breathing instructor, and founder of smallsteppers.com. He is the Stanford Inn & Resort’s Wellness Programs Director and Race Director of the Mendocino Coast 50K trail ultramarathon (one of only two vegan ultras in the US and has sold out every year!).

Jasmine Leyva

Producer, The Invisible Vegan

Jasmine is a filmmaker and actress based in Los Angeles. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in TV, Film, and Media and a Masters of Fine Arts in Screenwriting. Leyva worked as an Associate Producer on the NAACP Award-winning docu-series, Unsung, and was subsequently a writer and producer for Being, a docuseries highlighting dynamic entertainers in film and music. In 2019, Jasmine and Kenny Leyva released their own feature-length documentary, The Invisible Vegan, a film that chronicles Jasmine’s personal experience with plant-based eating. The film examines how plant-based eating is directly linked to African roots and how African-American eating habits have been debased by a chain of oppression stemming from slavery, economic inequality, and modern agribusiness. She currently teaches media writing at California State University Northridge and is in pre-production for two new self-produced projects.

Louie Psihoyos

Director, “The Cove”, “Racing Extinction”, “The Game Changers”

The Executive Director of Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), Louie Psihoyos is widely regarded as one of the world's most prominent still photographers. He has circled the globe dozens of times for National Geographic and has shot hundreds of covers for other magazines including Fortune, Smithsonian, Discover, GEO, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine and Sports Illustrated.

Psihoyos' first documentary film, "The Cove," has won over 100 awards globally from festivals and critics, became the first doc in history to sweep all the film guilds and won the Oscar® for Best Documentary Feature in 2009. The activism around that film help lead to an over 93% drop of dolphin and porpoise deaths. His second film, "Racing Extinction," about the global extinction crisis was seen by 36 million people in 220 countries and territories the first day it aired and led to laws banning the trade of some of the world’s most endangered species.

Jasmin Singer

Vegan Speaker, Editor, Podcaster

Jasmin is a worldwide leading expert on veganism; a coveted speaker on topics including radical body positivity, personal narrative as a means of social justice, and how to change the world for animals. She is the author of The VegNews Guide to Being a Fabulous Vegan (Hachette, 2020) and Always Too Much and Never Enough: A Memoir (Berkley, 2016). Jasmin also narrated the audiobook for both.

She is the editor of the anthology, Antiracism in Animal Advocacy: Igniting Cultural Transformation. Along with animal law professor Mariann Sullivan, Jasmin is also the co-host of the long-running Our Hen House podcast, an award-winning show (honored several times by the Webbys) that centers around animal rights. She is the former Senior Editor for VegNews Magazine—the world’s leading plant-based media brand—and the longtime love columnist and celebrity interviewer. Her interviews have included Joaquin Phoenix, Cory Booker, Mena Suvari, Tig Notaro, and Bob Barker.

Dr. Joseph Sky

Cardiologist

Dr. Joseph Sky was raised in in a community closely connected to one of the Blue Zones areas and graduated from the only medical school located in a Blue Zone. Lt Col (Dr) Joseph Sky is a cardiologist in the U.S. Air Force and his passion is finding and working with patients willing to use diet and lifestyle as medicine. He believes the science now clearly shows the value of preventive cardiology, complementary medicine and whole person care which includes the community in which we live.