Our team · Alliance of Native Seedkeepers · Bertie County Seeds

The work is carried by many hands.

Seeds reach gardens because people share knowledge, solve problems, and step in for one another. Meet the co-founders, leaders, staff, project supporters, and volunteers who help carry Alliance of Native Seedkeepers and Bertie County Seeds from Colerain outward.

Meet the leadership Meet the Bertie County Seeds team

Members of the team outside the seed shed in Bertie County, North Carolina.

Leadership and daily stewardship

Two different paths meeting in the same responsibility.

Beth and Frank lead the daily work of AONSK and Bertie County Seeds. Beth carries policy, partnerships, finance, and long-term structure. Frank carries seed systems, production, digital growth, equipment, and operations. Their work meets around land, water, food, health, culture, and responsibility.

Co-founder · Nottoway leader · Policy, partnerships, and finance

Elizabeth “Beth” Roach Cain

Beth connects tribal governance, clean water, environmental justice, food sovereignty, climate resilience, public policy, storytelling, coalition building, and finance. She helps hold the relationships and long-term structure around the work while asking who is at the table, who is missing, and what responsibility requires.

Tribal, state, and federal policy
Clean water and environmental justice
Climate and coastal resilience
Food sovereignty and cultural revitalization
Finance, partnerships, and organizational strategy

Read Beth’s extended biography

Beth is a Nottoway leader, storyteller, environmental-justice advocate, and co-founder of Alliance of Native Seedkeepers. Her career has moved through tribal governance, nonprofit leadership, public service, environmental education, clean-water campaigns, climate resilience, and coalition building. Across those spaces, she has worked to make sure Indigenous and rural communities are not treated as an afterthought in decisions about land and water.

Her work has included leadership within the Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia, the Virginia Council on Environmental Justice, the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs, Tribal Coastal Resilience Connections, Sierra Club campaigns, and partnerships connecting tribal communities with agencies, researchers, and environmental organizations. She has carried that work across tribal, state, and federal policy systems.

Inside AONSK, Beth’s role is both public and largely unseen. She helped sustain the store through the pandemic, built partnerships, communicated the mission, supported the return to Bertie County, and now carries financial responsibilities that include cash flow, payroll, debt, inventory purchasing, vendor payments, taxes, equipment financing, building costs, and the timing of capital before seed season.

Beth believes people have a better chance of building a livable future when they return to knowing land, water, and plants as relationships rather than resources. That belief shapes her policy work, storytelling, and the way she connects seed sovereignty with clean water, climate resilience, local jobs, and long-term community power.

Co-founder · Tuscarora seedkeeper · Operations, systems, and growth

Frank J. Cain

Frank’s work joins the field, warehouse, website, and repair bench. His background in farming, emergency medical services, dialysis care, biomedical engineering, and seedkeeping shaped a practical view of food sovereignty: a mission needs equipment, inventory, software, trained people, and systems that work.

Seedkeeping and grow-outs
Shopify development, SEO, and digital marketing
Inventory, fulfillment, and warehouse systems
Equipment, production, and operational design
Food access and public-health connections

Read Frank’s extended biography

Frank grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, with deep connections to the waterways, farms, forests, and relatives of eastern North Carolina. Time spent with family, shelling peas and beans, tending corn, fishing, and learning the rhythms of the land kept farming close even when life carried him through very different work.

As a young man, he worked as a farmhand and farm manager near the Black River and the Carolina Bays. He later worked in manufacturing, emergency medical services, dialysis care, and biomedical engineering. In clinics, he saw the human cost of diet-related illness, food insecurity, environmental harm, and systems that leave healthy food farther away than processed food. Those experiences made food sovereignty tangible, not theoretical.

Frank began gathering and growing seeds tied to the stories and foodways of Native communities. He helped connect seedkeepers across the Southeast and worked around land, water, pipelines, sacred places, and cultural continuity through efforts that preceded AONSK. Dwayne Painter and Vicky Ferguson were among the people whose relationships and practical work helped shape the Alliance’s founding circle.

When AONSK opened its public store in 2019, Frank built much of the operational foundation by hand: product pages, packet systems, inventory, marketing, SEO, printing, order fulfillment, equipment, and the increasingly complex digital infrastructure behind the business. His current work continues to connect Shopify development, organic search, paid advertising, inventory readiness, production planning, and the physical movement of seed.

The founding circle

Four co-founders brought different knowledge into one alliance.

Alliance of Native Seedkeepers was formed in 2018 by Elizabeth “Beth” Roach Cain, Frank J. Cain, Victoria “Vicky” Ferguson, and Dwayne Painter. Their work came together through seedkeeping, foodways, land and water defense, tribal governance, community relationships, and the practical work of growing and moving seeds.

Co-founder · Monacan seedkeeper, public historian, and educator

Victoria “Vicky” Ferguson

Vicky is an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation whose work connects seedkeeping with Eastern Siouan history, foodways, public interpretation, and care for Monacan places. Her early work preserving and growing Tutelo Red Corn helped bring the founding circle of AONSK together.

At Virginia Tech, she serves as Program Director for Solitude/Fraction and Presidential Ambassador to Native Nations. She is also a History faculty affiliate whose specialties include the history and culture of Eastern Siouan peoples and public-history interpretation.

More about Vicky’s work

Vicky is a graduate of Marshall University with a degree in dietetics. Her public-history work grew from decades of research into the daily lives of Eastern Siouan peoples, using first-person documentation, archaeology, foodways, and material culture to support accurate interpretation.

Before her current Virginia Tech work, she spent years interpreting Monacan foodways at Natural Bridge State Park. In 2014, she helped establish Virginia Tech’s Indigenous Community Garden and became the university’s first Elder in Residence for its American Indian and Indigenous Studies program.

Her work at Virginia Tech now includes the Solitude-Fraction site, Indigenous representation, teaching, community engagement, and helping the university tell a fuller history of land, enslavement, Native presence, and the communities whose lives shaped the campus.

Explore the Solitude-Fraction project at Virginia Tech

Co-founder · Monacan seedkeeper and land defender

Dwayne Painter

Dwayne was among the earliest seedkeepers to work closely with Frank. His grow-outs of Tutelo Red Corn and other ancestral corn helped shape the relationships, practical knowledge, and community responsibilities from which AONSK formed.

His work also connected seeds with the protection of land and water. As a Monacan Nation member and a representative of the Coalition of Woodland Nations, Dwayne spoke publicly against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and its threat to Monacan sacred and archaeological places.

More about Dwayne’s work

Dwayne helped carry the early grow-outs and the patient, practical work required to keep ancestral corn alive, selected, and moving through relationships. Alongside Vicky and Frank, he helped return ancestral corn to communities in Virginia and North Carolina and made the Alliance possible before it had a public store.

His public advocacy reflected the same understanding that shaped AONSK: seedkeeping cannot be separated from land, water, sacred places, and the right of Native communities to protect the conditions that allow culture and foodways to continue.

The Bertie County Seeds team

The people who bring the work to life.

Every seed packet, customer order, storefront visit, and growing project is carried by real people who bring care, patience, skill, humor, and hard work to the mission. Some are here every week, some step in during busy seasons, and others lend their hands to special projects, but each person helps make Bertie County Seeds what it is.

More than a staff, this is the community behind the seeds.

Our team prepares seed, prints packets, fills orders, welcomes customers, keeps the shelves stocked, cares for the space, answers questions, and helps the company keep growing. Much of that work happens quietly, long before a packet reaches a garden, but it is the reason customers can trust what arrives in the mail or meet us on Main Street.

Jessica, Wak, Teri, Jay, Lik, George, Ryan, Tyler, Tat, and Will are part of the current staff and active support network. We are grateful for the different strengths, personalities, and experiences they bring to the company, and for the way their work helps carry the mission from Bertie County into gardens across the country.

The people behind the daily work

Our current team

Jessica, Wak, Teri, Jay, Lik, George, Ryan, Tyler, Tat, and Will

Hands that help us build

Project and seasonal support

Josh Hardy, Stephen Hardy, and Aaron

Community care in action

Seed packing and donation support

Susan, Joseph, Wanda, and Deborah Bischlar

Care behind every packet

From counting seed to printing and packing, our team helps make sure every order carries the quality and attention our customers expect.

A warm welcome in Colerain

The storefront team helps visitors discover seeds, local goods, growing supplies, and the story behind the work.

Keeping the work moving

Inventory, fulfillment, customer care, equipment, and daily problem-solving all come together through the people working behind the scenes.

Growing with the mission

As the company grows, our team is growing too, carrying new skills, ideas, and leadership into the next chapter of Bertie County Seeds.