meet our team of Staff and Board Members

Co-Director / Board President - Andrew “Birch” Kemp is a lifelong Detroiter and a former Detroit high school teacher. He taught English and built arboretums with students at three different high schools. He has been planting trees in Poletown for over 20 years and started the nonprofit Arboretum Detroit with his partner, Kinga Osz-Kemp in 2019, to expand and formalize this work. He has recently left teaching to devote himself to the dream of building an arboretum.

Co-Director / Board Secretary and Treasurer - Kinga Osz-Kemp has a deep love for growing food, medicine and community, for old growth forests and the Great Lakes. She was born in Hungary, and has lived in Detroit for 27 years. She has a BS in Art Education from WSU, raised children in Southwest Detroit and Poletown, founded and managed Ocelot Print Shop for ten years, and then more recently, co-founded Arboretum Detroit.

Outreach Coordinator / Board Member - Elizabeth Underwood is a writer, archivist and community organizer - recently returned home to Detroit after 25 years in New Orleans. Escaping the Gulf Coast climate crisis, Eli is grateful to be reconnected to their ancestral lands and beloved pine, crabapple and birch trees.

Park Maintenance Assistant - Robyn Redding is a lifelong Detroiter, and since the age of thelve has been actively engaged in community development. Starting a block club with her mother and five other women in their neighborhood, she remained the historian until age eighteen. Now at age 22, since moving back to East Poletown, her family’s neighborhood of 68 years, she devotes all of her time to loving and listening to music, gardening, laughing, being a jokester, and helping out to increase biodiversity in her neighborhood by working with Arboretum Detroit. It is the best partnership she could have hoped for!

Park Maintenance / Volunteer Engagement Assistant - Jennifer Fassbender has a passion for environmental justice and engaging her community in positive climate action to reduce ecological grief in the face of climate chaos. She lives within walking distance of her workplace: the Arboretum parks.

Board Members

Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. is an American printer, book artist and papermaker best known for social and political commentary, particularly in printed posters. One critic noted that Kennedy was “...unafraid of asking uncomfortable questions about race and artistic pretension”

Carolyn Leadley, with a degree in plant ecology from the University of Michigan, has lived and worked in the City of Detroit since 2007 as a farmer and activist. She and her partner, Jack VanDyke, have spent most of that time establishing their family farm homestead and business, Rising Pheasant Farms, located in the Poletown East Neighborhood where Arboretum Detroit is centered. She is a mother of 4 wild nature-loving kids often seen at Arb Detroit events, Eastern Market or riding their bicycles throughout the City. Her interests include honoring the native plants of Michigan and restoring them to their ancestral homes, developing simple-living/homesteading skills for long-term community resiliency and Celtic nature-based spirituality.

David McGuffie is an illustrator, printmaker, and amatuer naturalist interested in inspiring engagement with place, and home.

Kat Cameron is a filmmaker turned urban planner. She is currently a graduate student at the University of Michigan, where she studies climate resilience in Great Lakes communities. Kat is also an avid cyclist, gardener, and dancer.

Kyle Schanta is a horticulturist and birding guide with a deep passion for Detroit's native flora and fauna. He gardens and does other plant things around Detroit. Kyle is a board member of Detroit Bird Alliance and received their 2022 Conservation Award for his work with the Detroit Bird City parks, including Poletown's Callahan Park. He is a birding tour leader with Eagle-Eye Tours, guiding in South and coastal Texas, Southeastern Arizona and South Florida. He has traveled the US, Canada and Europe as a touring musician and holds a bachelor's in History from Wayne State University. He loves to plant trees with others.

Paul Weertz is Vice President of the Board. He is a retired Detroit high school teacher and journeyman pipefitter. He has lived and stewarded greenspaces in the Poletown neighborhood for over 30 years, baling hay, planting trees, and helping others build their dreams and homesteads.

Poppy Kemp is a lifelong Detroiter. When she's not slinging ice cream or a squeegee, she loves to marvel at the Moon, play with colors in drawings and embroidery, and be mesmerized by the beauty of a meadow in the sun.