Story

Katie’s story is heavily influenced by place and the matriarch of her family (her mom, Linda Maloney). In the late 1980s when Katie was just a wee toddler, her mother pushed to transplant the family from Anaheim/Orange County in the smoggy Los Angeles Basin to the Napa/Sonoma region of Northern California (ancestral territory of Wappo and Pomo Tribes) in search of cleaner air for her baby. (Katie was born with asthma, which was both inherited from her matrilineal great grandmother and exacerbated by environmental context of time and place.)

This coincidental move aligned with what would become a world renowned viticulture boom in the North Bay Area, (enormous cash cropping and globalization of California wines) that would further mire the social landscape in economic disparity along race and class lines. Thus, proprietor Katie Koscielak’s world view was uniquely shaped from the agricultural and socio-political roots of her youth. Today, she translates the cultural fabric of this history to the contemporary maritime milieu of her current life on the Humboldt Bay, where she lives in the unceded and ancestral territory of Wiyot people and devotes herself to a career in public service at the local University. In addition to feeding a love for community in most of her pursuits, Katie enjoys gardening, painting, fixing up her house, shootin’ the shit / telling stories, and crafting handmade, artisan products.

The Good Hearth is therefore a business vehicle by which Katie shares her dream of building a comprehensive brand that offers designer ​home goods via salvaged materials, delivers exceptional farm-to-table foods, and offers learning opportunities for anyone interested in doing these things too! She hopes to some day purchase a farm (and perhaps build it into an artist cooperative or a homestead governed in common with partners) where she can provide small-scale resort-style accommodations for events, host creative retreats, offer hands-on teaching/learning opportunities, and deliver a place-based foundation for a community of rest, critical problem solving, and creative visioning. (#goals)

Overall, Katie’s work seeks to connect and elevate issues of sustainability, liberation, and justice. During the more than a decade she spent in public service, Katie narrowed her goals to moving our culture away from notions of extraction, exploitation, and overconsumption and toward notions of reciprocity, community good, and shared prosperity. She believes in #landback, reparations, and Indigenous sovereignty and while not always getting it right all the time, she hopes to honor these values consistently and in a robust way. In summary, Katie seeks to contribute to networks of mutual aid, direct action, cooperative partnership, restorative justice, participatory governance, and localized trade and gift economies. Therefore, while The Good Hearth does operate as a business within a capitalist economy, profit is far from the primary tenet guiding it.

By trade, Katie is a sustainability expert and consultant, having earned a Bachelor of Arts in geography from UC Berkeley and Master of Arts in Social Science with emphasis in Environment and Community from Cal Poly Humboldt (formerly known as Humboldt State). She has worked for and with the following organizations: Cal Poly Humboldt, the Redwood Coast Energy Authority, Napa Valley Film Festival, Pacific Coast Fruit, Turner and Martinez Agricultural Services (with experience in the gardens at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone), Portland Farmers Market, Zero Waste Humboldt, Making Waves Education Program, and The Collective Sound, among others. Her professional specialties are mobilizing large groups of people or institutions toward cohesive, data driven goals through research, data analysis and visualization, cartography, graphic design, and Native American and Latinx studies with specific emphasis on environmental projects and climate justice work.