A capsule of Karen's life story: her 1 paragraph bio in the Walnut Street Investors' Packet: "Karen Mercer has been co-creating nurturing social and political contexts for over 35 years. For the past six, she's been helping the Co-op nurture life-affirming and self-aware activists, activism and eco-practices. Her prior education — she has an MSW in social change theory and practice and an MSU in Making Stuff Up — is quite useful in the constant "learning opportunity" that IS life in the Co-op. She brings a wide range of experience and world-work — from direct action at Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, working with poor alcoholics taking care of each other and their San Francisco Sixth Street People's Park, organizing war relief contributions for the Biafra Christmas Ship, to teaching her course in Creating A Life That Makes More Sense, and teaching and doing peer counseling as part of the Re-evaluation Co-counseling community. Karen's early environmental work — with NYC's first EPA, at the Berkeley Ecology Center, in India on the Ganges, and in Czechoslovakia — combined with profound spiritual experiences to inform the deep earth-connection that she feels today."