Faculty & Staff
Ashley Campos, RH (AHG)
Executive Director
Ashley Campos is a clinical Western herbalist and holistic health practitioner deeply committed to re-wilding, healing, and forging connections between land and people through the profound wisdom of herbs.
Beyond her clinical practice, Ashley serves as the Executive Director of the Berkeley Herbal Center. Her journey with plant medicine began as a student at BHC, where she discovered the power of herbs and the importance of community-based learning under her mentor Pamela Fisher. This transformative experience ignited a passion for accessible herbal education and community wellness, which she now brings to the forefront in her leadership role. Guiding the center with a deep understanding of its roots and a vision for its future, Ashley is dedicated to empowering individuals with plant-based knowledge and care within the vibrant Berkeley community.
Dana Aronson
Instructor & Village Herbalist Program Director
Dana Aronson is a trained clinical herbalist who takes joy in community based, hands-on learning. She focuses her studies on bio-regional plants from the Pacific Northwest and intertwines them into her small practice and teachings. As a clinical herbalist and member of the American Herbalist Guild, she looks for more than just symptomatic patterns when working with clients. She offers support where healing can express itself in all facets – mind, body, spirit.
Dana uses curiosity to dig deeper into the body’s mechanisms and usher people to find their practices around overall well-being living. Dana’s interests include mobile first aid clinics, working with folks around addiction, and harm reduction.
Dana believes in offering accessible herbal medicine and digestible herb information so that people can feel empowered around their health.
Mercy Tyne
Instructor & Lead Medicine Maker
Mercy Tyne’s connection to the plant-path grew as a way to heal herself from Lyme and other health struggles, and took her on an informal pilgrimage searching for teachers until she arrived at Berkeley Herbal Center where she graduated from the Apprenticeship and two-year clinical programs. She now works as a medicine maker and teaches short course offerings. She loves the quiet hum of processing the armfuls of fresh plants for the school’s apothecary, creating retail products and client formulas, and exploring the depths and limits of life. To her, herbalism is a bridge connecting the spiritual and physical realms, weaving together medicinal and mystical, tying us back again to the ancient rhymes of nature. She loves working with clients, guided by belief in the healing power of beauty, embodiment, curiosity, and creativity.
Some of her close plant allies are Blue Vervain, medicine of the wild women and the in-between; tulsi the divine; nettles, the tough-love granny with the medicine you need; schisandra, for zing and zest and confidence; and cacao, who holds our grief and enchants our love.
Abby Silverman
Retail Manager & Community Events Organizer
Abby (she/her) is the Retail Manager and Community Events Organizer. Her focus is to uplift local entrepreneurs by inviting healers and makers to share their work to continue to live authentically with their personal magic. She feels grateful for the opportunity to be immersed in the world of plants, spirit, and all of their allies who are working toward collective care.
Lisa Fox
Instructor & Clinic Advisor
Lisa Fox is a clinical herbalist and licensed midwife residing in Chonchenyo Ohlone land, aka Oakland, CA. Her practice has a foundation in western herbalism from teachers such as Michael Moore, Adam Seller and Karen Saunders. Her training, long ago, as a medic at the Berkeley Free Clinic formed the basis of her clinical skills including acute care and gynecology.
She has offered care in a wide variety of settings including remote villages of southern Mexico, a borderland birth center, an integrated clinic alongside doctors and nurses and in the streets and houseless encampments of West Oakland.
She is the founding member of the Curbside Care Clinic, since 2018. Lisa is passionate about health education with an emphasis on prevention strategies, and is excited to share about the potent medicine of plants to promote community health and resilience.
Erika Larsen
Clinic Supervisor
She has studied herbalism and worked in free clinics and as a community and clinical herbalist in various forms for over 20 years.
A queer weirdo in their mid 40’s, Erika comes to herbalism from an animist perspective and believes in access to client centered healthcare for all.
Their current sliding scale for one-on-one consultations is $30 to $120. For more information, please visit: Erika-Larsen-Clinical-
Erika currently lives on Wiyot land in Eureka, CA and loves the fog and a dawn walk with some coffee.
Shereel Washington
Instructor
Shereel Washington graduated from the California School of Herbal Studies, Forestville, CA in the Community Herbalist Program as a Clinical Herbalist, as well as certificates in Body Systems, and Herbal Crafting. She has completed over 1200 hours of herbal craft making training.
As an educator, Shereel teaches Black North American Herbalism and Medicine Making in various herbal certification programs in schools across Northern California, primarily, San Francisco Bay Area. As a herbal health, healing and nutrition practitioner and consultant, Shereel serves diverse ethnic communities in promoting natural health care and wellness through plant medicine. As an advocate of global cultural herbal traditions, Shereel is passionate about preserving the history, knowledge and expansion of the current practice of Black North American Herbalism.
Paula Grainger
Clinical Herbalist
Paula Grainger is a clinical herbalist, author and herbal educator with over 20 years in practice. She graduated with a first-class honors degree in Herbal Medicine from the University of Westminster in London in 2004 and went on to establish a busy clinical practice and herbal apothecary in London.
Now based in Santa Cruz, California, Paula combines clinical practice with teaching and writing. She has taught herbal medicine to students of all ages and levels of experience, sharing practical knowledge of medicinal plants, herbal preparations and the traditional and contemporary uses of herbs. Her teaching is grounded in both formal clinical training and many years of hands-on experience growing, harvesting and preparing herbs.
Paula has authored three books on herbal medicine which have been translated into multiple languages and is a member of National Institute of Medical Herbalists the American Herbalists Guild. She is passionate about making herbal medicine accessible, practical and relevant to everyday life, and particularly enjoys helping students develop a deeper relationship with plants through hands-on learning and direct experience.
Francine Milagros Madrid
Partera, Yerbera y Sobadora
Francine (she/her) has called Ohlone Lands home for the last 30 years, but originally hails from the borderlands of San Diego with deep family ties to New Mexico, the Sonoran Desert and Central Mexico. She is a Licensed Midwife practicing full spectrum sexual and reproductive care and is a highly experienced bodyworker integrating plant medicine into all her work.
Her Grandmothers Mary and Adelaida were her first herbal teachers, and she has studied clinical herbalism at the Ohlone Herbal Center & California School for Herbal Studies. She was a core teacher at Ancestral Apothecary School and medicine maker for the Botanical Bus bilingual mobile herb clinic. She identifies strongly as a folk and spiritual herbalist in the tradition of her ancestors of Native American, African and European lineages. When not teaching, she can be found in her art studio, dancing, day dreaming or snuggling dogs.
Helena del Pesco
Instructor
Helena del Pesco weaves together her love of plants with her background as a chef specializing in bioregional cooking and fermentation. Her first taste of wild food as a kid strengthened the sense of belonging she feels when surrounded by nature. In her clinical practice she seeks to walk alongside and support clients as they build relationships with plants.
She is especially interested in guiding clients who are seeking gastrointestinal and nervous system support (the gut-brain connection) and topical remedies. As a teacher, she strives to make the plant knowledge that has been shared by her teachers accessible to beginners and seasoned herbalists alike.
In addition to her studies at the Berkeley Herbal Center, the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism and Wild Ginger Community Herbal Center, her plant medicine education comes from lived-experience of what our plant kin can teach us about the physiological, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of being human.
She lives with her partner Joseph and cat Piquin and a diverse community of plants on Patwin, Ohlone and Coast Miwok land in Vallejo, CA.
In Addition to our core faculty and staff, we have a number of visiting herbalists who teach classes on a seasonal basis, and/or have contributed to our online course library.
- Francisca Santibanez
- Batul True Heart
- Gualikuya Mariposa
- Chelsea Rutherford
- Terri Jensen
- Tanya Stiller
- Rose Birdsong Stuart
- Laura Ash
A Special Thank You to Our Founder
Pam Fischer, RH (AHG)
Founder
Pamela Fischer is the founder of the Berkeley Herbal Center in Berkeley, CA. Berkeley Herbal Center is a non-profit organization serving the community through its Western Herbal medicine school, community clinic, and robust dispensary. It is one of the few schools in the country that operates a year-round community clinic on site.
For more than 30 years Pamela has been studying plants and herbal medicine. After receiving her degree in eco-psychology, Pam became attracted to the herbal healing path and immersed herself into a well-rounded education provided by the insights and wisdom of Western scientists, Western herbalists, native healers, wise women, and witches. Her basket of tools includes Western herbal theory, Traditional Chinese pulse diagnosis, Ayurveda, and Tibetan medicine. She has spent countless hours and days camping and hiking in our local woods, working with local plant medicine, and teaching about their use and conservation.
Pam is known as a visionary leader and grass-roots organizer. She has inspired generations of herbalists to be a stand for change in our healthcare system. Many of her graduates have and are currently creating similar establishments to provide services locally. In this vein, Pam endeavors to free her community from a broken system and move them toward an era of healthcare based on prevention, compassion, and care.