RIP: Shelley Arrowsmith,  1951–2025

Shelley Arrowsmith, longtime Sonoma resident and community activist, passed away at home on her farm in Sonoma on April 20 after a two-year battle with cancer. She left quietly, but her absence is already loud in the lives she touched.

Many who lived in Sonoma during the last three decades knew Shelley as the heart behind Arrowsmith Farms at the local farmers markets where she sold her line of Beezolio products and the honey, greens, flowers and veggies she grew with such care. Later, while a regular vendor at the Marin Civic Center markets, she served on the Board of the Agricultural Institute of Marin for many years – and, with impeccable timing, retired one week before the COVID shutdown. Growing beautiful and edible plants was Shelley’s joy, as well as her art. In much the same way, she rooted herself into the community—quietly, beautifully, and with deep purpose.

In recent years, Shelley became a passionate advocate for protecting the land and buildings at the Sonoma Developmental Center (SDC) from massive redevelopment. She wasn’t one for shouting, but she could move mountains with a clipboard, her way with people, and a sharp mind. She served on the Board of Sonoma Valley Next 100, and helped organize a successful petition drive aimed at forming a new district to give the local community more control over its future. She made many friends along the way, rallied many neighbors, and turned concern into action. That was Shelley.

But many who knew her in Sonoma never knew that her life before Sonoma was just as full—sometimes even a bit wild.

Born and brought up in Indio, California, she earned a degree in environmental design from the California College for the Arts and Crafts in San Francisco and, later in life, a Master of Arts in Business from the California Institute of Integral Studies, also in San Francisco.

Her international adventures started early. Though she had never left the country prior to the mid-1970s, she taught herself Italian in 8 months to direct a summer arts and architecture program in a northern Italian village. The gig lasted four summers, and included design workshops with some of Europe’s leading architects and designers, fresco classes at the Accademia Carrara di Bella Arti in Bergamo, and side trips to Milan, Venice, Florence and Rome. Her team called her “Peaches”—a nickname that stuck, much to her amusement.

After that, her career as a facilitator for The Institute for the Human Environment, an international NGO based in San Francisco and later in Sausalito, took her around the world to facilitate communication and problem solving between policymakers in California and abroad. In the ‘70s, she introduced our brand-new coastal managers in California to their more seasoned European counterparts – and later facilitated programs that took California’s approaches back to Europe, where many were adopted into their hundred-year-old programs.  In Venice, where she lived for some time, she famously stepped in to rescue an international coastal conference organized by the Institute at the University of Venice. The “Rettore Magnificus”, the senior academic official scheduled to make the opening presentations, had a political panic over the potential presence of the Red Brigade on the speaker schedule, and left for the seclusion of his country estate. Virtually overnight, Shelley restructured the whole conference in his absence, sorting out the politics from the necessities – and made it a huge success.

In Alaska, she worked with a delegation of high-ranking Swedish governmental and industry officials who studied the successes, and the failures, of the Trans-Alaska pipeline as a learning model for their proposed 1400-mile long natural gas pipeline planned to run the length of Sweden. The resulting report, presented in Stockholm, helped to change Swedish energy policy. Following the presentation, Shelley got to watch it happen in real time as local planners from cities all over Sweden lined up at lobby phones (the old days!), there to solicit new marching orders from their mayors based on what they had just learned. That was Shelley’s kind of moment: quiet behind the scenes, yet utterly transformative.  She even managed to shepherd a village plan as far away as the Tafuna area in American Samoa, first building a huge 3D site model in four sections in Sausalito, then flying with it to Pago Pago. There, she watched community elders gather around to point, nod, debate – and then to agree, together, on decisions on which they had been divided for years.

By the time she and her partner, architect Norman Gilroy, settled in Sonoma in 1992, they were ready to grow roots. Shelley traded the jet travel and wanderlust for compost and greenhouses – but she never stopped working to make things better, more just, more beautiful.  She was a beekeeper, an activist, a gardener, an organizer, a persuader, a mentor, and a deeply grounded force of nature. She had the rare ability to see both the whole landscape and the smallest blossom—and to care about both equally. 

The world feels smaller without her in it. But this spring, the blossoms and the berries on her farm are there in profusion for us to remember her by. She made her mark. She was deeply loved. And she will be missed. A celebration of her life is planned for later in the year.