By: Francesca Mundrick, Founder & Executive Director
In January 2020, I was feeling very hopeful. I had just graduated with my Master’s Degree and I was starting my first teaching position at a four-year University.
I have always been bright and happy- blessed with good spirits and positive energy. Confident, ambitious, and motivated, I moved through the world looking to grow, change, and add good.
Suddenly, my personal life came crashing down that year, with major familial struggles emerging. I experienced death and loss. My youngest sister would make decisions that put her into situations that still haunt me to this day. My family disbanded to deal with the crises at hand. I spent much of 2020 alone in my childhood home- a type of alone that I have never, ever felt before. This, along with the societal ramifications of COVID, destroyed my mind in ways that were completely foreign to me- sadly a story shared by most people.
I suffered greatly from mental health disorders for most of that year and the next. It felt like failure. I felt frustrated at my inability to continue working and living at the level that I am accustomed to. I had no idea how to deal with how I felt or how to cope. I could not accept this degradation of my mind and I certainly could not understand it. The more I fought it, the worse it was. Eventually, I was required to submit and learn the lessons that were necessary. In what felt like a blur of daily irrationality, or maybe insanity, I searched for my inner spirit and the memories of joy and clarity that I knew she would bring.
My search brought me to a place that I frequented many times over my childhood, a Morris County Park within the borders of my hometown, Mahlon Dickerson Reservation. I had only been back to this place a handful of times as an adult. I started to visit the reservation consistently, walking miles and miles in a day. Walking to run, walking to hide, walking to find something that I knew was there. I felt called to this place and so I went.
As the days, weeks, and months passed, things changed. I continued to go back to Mahlon Dickerson, walking around and sitting in specific special places by the water’s edge and among the trees. I slowed in this place and, without knowing it, I began to heal, observe, and know. I started to see the woods as a place of comfort and, ultimately, as a friend. I visited my woods on cold winter mornings and hot summer nights. In the sun, in the fog, in the rain, in the snow. At sunrise and sunset.
I spent many hours in those woods. In this place, I began to realize my passions once more. My mind was completely cleared here, leaving only my most authentic, creative visions. Ideas flowed without effort and without asking. This place is the place where I first envisioned Rewild New Jersey.
Going back to nature gave me back purpose that represented the deepest parts of my inner spirit. It was this place that I evolved. Rewilding is at heart about hope. Trusting nature and trusting ourselves. In nature, we are coming out of the everyday and going into the essential- finding transformational awareness and reflection in our humanity.
In September of 2025, I attended a Women and Their Woods Retreat hosted by Ridge & Valley Conservancy. We were asked to discuss the connections we have to “our woods” or the “woods that we steward”. I shared my story of Mahlon Dickerson in brief. I said that the woods “guided me to build Rewild NJ”. I concluded by stating “the woods gave me back what I needed.” Our host, Susi Tilley, Executive Director of RVC, stated back to me “perhaps the Voice of the Woods told you what they needed too.”
To learn more about Fran, visit About the Founder.
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Rewild New Jersey Community Cooperative (RNJCC) 