Will Raap is an environmental entrepreneur and founder and Chair of Gardener’s Supply, the first national company to offer the best horticultural solutions from small-scale organic farms and master gardeners from around the world to North American home gardeners. Will and Gardener’s Supply also incubated and helped to launch the Intervale Center, Seventh Generation, Living Technologies, The Earth Partners, and Restoring Our Watershed.
Since 1987 the Intervale Center, a non-profit organization located in Burlington, Vermont, has been developing farm- and land-based enterprises that generate economic and social opportunity while protecting natural resources including the largest composting project in VT, Intervale Conservation Nursery, Intervale Agricultural Consulting Services (serving 100’s of VT farms and dozens of communities nationally) and the Intervale Food Hub, plus dozens of small, privately owned farms that participate in the Center’s nationally acclaimed farm incubator program.
Will has also been involved in helping to transform economic systems to become more regenerative, as co-founder and past Chair of New Economy Coalition, co-chair of a project that laid the groundwork for VT Farm to Plate and member of the founding board of VT Energy Action Network. More recently, Will has been developing businesses and associations in Vermont and Costa Rica to ‘re-localize medicine’ with botanical plant production and processing just as Gardener’s Supply and the Intervale Center led the re-localization of food for the past 4 decades.