Our Team

 

---

 

Anim Steel is the founder of the Real Food Generation and is instrumental in developing its initiatives (including the Real Food Challenge). He is also the former Director of National Programs at The Food Project in Boston, MA. Anim holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a B.A. in Astrophysics and History from Williams College. Although his dreams of becoming an astronaut never came to fruition, he is more than happy spending countless hours working on building and bettering a just and sustainable food system.  He is also a fool for soccer and enjoys traveling back to Ghana, where he was born. Email Anim

 

 

 

 

 

Tim is a past Roots of Change Fellow who works as an education and research program specialist on social issues for the Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS) focusing on farm to institution, higher education, and regional food movements.  In addition to enjoying the delightful year-round bounty from the 25 acre CASFS farm, he finds solace in the company of committed colleagues and staff working to transform the food system!  Through CASFS Tim also coordinates the Sustainable Agrifood System Fellowship which works toward enhancing agrifood literacy and farm to institution efforts in California.  He also serves as UC Santa Cruz's campus Food Systems Working Group coordinator and advisor to campus farm to college efforts for the California Student Sustainability Coalition. From community food policy involvement to elevating the potential for farm to institution within higher education, Tim is a passionate advocate and resource for food based transformation. Email Tim

 

 

 

 

David graduated from Brown University in December 2009, where he spent more time organizing with the Real Food Challenge than he did in class.  Coming from a Jewish household where issues of economic and racial justice were common dinner table discussions, David came to the world of food justice and sustainable agriculture in high school and hasn’t looked back.  On campus he helped start a student garden, a local distribution scheme for local produce, and a campaign to redirect over $1 million of school food dollars to “real food.”  Other things David feels passionately about: playing dress up, cheap Chinese food, participatory education, immigrants’ rights, and the color blue (sometimes orange). Email David

 

 

 

 

Nina grew up in Brooklyn, NY, where she spent a lot of time exploring neighborhood parks and gardens all over the city. She has been organizing for social justice and environmental protection since then, and she found a home in the food justice movement, where she can work on both issues at once! Nina holds a B.A. in philosophy from Carleton College and an M.S. degree in conservation biology and sustainable development from the University of Wisconsin, where she wrote her master's thesis on urban agriculture. Before coming to Real Food Challenge, she worked for Boston Mobilization, training teenagers in community organizing and supporting them to run campaigns. In addition to organizing for food justice, Nina loves listening to live music and discussing philosophy-- preferably over a good Indian meal. Email Nina

 

 

---

Learn about the 2011-2012 RFOs here!

 

Learn about the 2010-2011 RFOs here!

 

Learn about the 2009-2010 RFOs here!

 

 

Originally from the tiny, close-knit town of Lyme, NH, Emma has worked her way westward to Seattle via Cornell University where she studied Development Sociology, Inequality, and Communications and Marketing – an unlikely combination.  Emma came to the Real Food Challenge through a similarly interdisciplinary interest in the intersection of cuisine and food culture; community development; international trade policy, and public health.  Because of its necessity and centrality, Emma believes that food and the food system – though challenging – offer unparalleled opportunity to positively impact communities by strengthening relationships, and improving human and environmental health. When she’s not musing about the food system, Emma enjoys doddling in junk stores, stompin’ to bluegrass music, willing tomatoes to grow in Seattle’s climate, and sampling the house specials at rural roadside eateries. Email Emma

 

 

 

Breland Draper is a born and raised Idahoan. He spent his youth the agricultural rich Snake River plain in the southern part of the state. He moved to the Boise area to attend the College of Idaho, where he received a BA in Environmental Studies. Breland’s interest in food began with his two-year involvement as an AmeriCorps VISTA with the Idaho Hunger Relief Task Force. As a VISTA, Breland worked to organize farmers markets across the state, performed focus groups with food stamp participants, helped organize events to highlight food security, and organized communities to perform community food system assessments. Breland’s interest in food mostly centers on food security and food justice, but he has a passion to connect local food producers with consumers. Today, Breland works as a contractor for several food security studies and projects. He is also working on finishing his Masters in Community and Regional Planning from Boise State University. Breland lives in an extremely small cottage in Boise’s North End with his wife Cassandra and their two dogs Layla and Lakota. Email Breland

 

 

---

 

 

Alex was raised in a rural part of San Diego, where she was surrounded by farming and agriculture but never had a particular interest for either in her adolescent years. After pursuing a degree in Fine Arts her freshman year of college at the University of San Francisco, she had an epiphany at the start of her sophomore year while visiting the Slow Food Nation open-air market. At this marketplace she was exposed to the farm-to-table concept, and after tasting a basket of fresh ruby-red strawberries straight from a local farm she was hooked. She moved home during the school year to take a new direction in her academic career and began attending a community college. During this transitional time, she was very involved in volunteering with San Diego Roots Sustainable Food Project, a non-profit that focused on community engagement and education in the food system. From this experience she learned about the power that communities have in working together towards a common goal. From her experiences working with San Diego Roots, she wanted to learn more about how people connect with one another, which brought her to change her major from Fine Arts to Cultural Anthropology. She decided to complete her degree at UC Santa Cruz, where she could be immersed in a climate that encouraged the discussions of sustainable food systems and social justice. Now as a recent graduate of UCSC, Alex is interested in further exploring how people connect and interact at various levels within local, regional, and global food systems, and is energized to be part of the Real Food Challenge to work with a team of young adults interested in this same work. In her spare time, Alex enjoys eating figs, running, gardening, all things goats, riding her bike, photography, and hiking adventures with her friends. Email Alex

 

 

Chloe is a frugivore, a fashion designer, and future fruit farmer who, having lived all over the U.S., has always found the answer to the common question, “So, where ya from?” to be a little complicated. With deep roots in America’s high-five (Michigan), she’s called both suburban Grand Rapids and inner city Detroit home, as well as rural Douglasville, Georgia, but no matter where her family bounced around they always came back to California, where she was born. Having spent half of her life in urban Oakland and the other half up in the rural Sierra Nevada foothill town of Cool (Google it, it’s real!), she witnessed and experienced the all too common food desert and the poor health that they produce in both settings. In overcoming illness, food allergies, and obesity with a raw plant-based diet, she grew into an advocate for equal and ample access to REAL, healthful, just food and for the rights of animals, farm-workers, and the environment alike. When she’s not studying, eating, or talking about food, she’s probably out running on a mountain trail with her husky Dingo, talking to her tiny succulents, or drawing up a pattern for her next unitard. She’s currently finishing up at Cosumnes River College, from which she’ll be transferring in pursuit of a doctoral degree in Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems next fall. She eagerly awaits the challenges and adventures lying ahead in working with fellow energized and empowered California students to build lasting partnerships between California Community Colleges (the world’s largest higher education system in the world), universities, and the ever-growing number of sustainable farms here in the golden state. Email Chloe

 

---

 

 

Cara recently graduated from Colorado College in Colorado Springs with a major in Philosophy and a minor in Psychoanalysis. She grew up in an entirely vegetarian household in a suburb of New York City, where she attended a Quaker school for 14 years. In college, she lived part-time at Colorado College’s environmental sustainability house, where she learned about composting, retrofitting, ranching, Colorado ecology, and how to cook. In 2011, she founded and chaired the Good Food club, where she organized events and forums focused on topics like local farming, the industrial food system, the anthropology of food, and food ethics. Other than advocating for an overhaul of the “American diet” as it’s currently formulated, Cara sings in an experimental rock band, she loves philosophical discussions, the outdoors, and live music. Email Cara

 

 

 

Heather Frambach is a native of San Jose, California. She is currently finishing up her Master of Science in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin, where she has been grateful for the opportunity to get plugged in to Austin's burgeoning food systems renaissance as a grad student, on-campus activist and dining hall worker and a researcher for the city-county Sustainable Food Policy Board, where she's found her calling at the nerdy nexus between policy/planning and healthy food systems. As the daughter of a white Republican and a Mexican-American Democrat, Heather feels she is in a unique position to critically examine the discourses of race, power, purity, and health on the political left and right with regard to the rhetoric of food. In addition to food scholarship in this vein, Heather has also been active in organizing on the US-Mexico border in solidarity with women workers in struggle within US-owned factories, and her research on the subject was recently published in the Journal of Workplace Rights. Her recent research on the political establishment and rhetoric of the community garden movement will be presented at the 2nd annual Food Studies Conference in October 2012, and her thesis research on how universities can be change agents in regional food systems aligns perfectly with RFC's mission! Email Heather

 

---

 

Katie Blanchard graduated 2010 from Carleton College, out on the prairie-of-yore of Northfield, Minnesota. At Carleton, she studied Human Ecology and spent the bulk of her time re-establishing the Carleton Student Organic Farm as a vital part of the non-chemical-industrial agricultural landscape of the area. She currently spends half her time supporting Midwestern students' amazing efforts for real food purchasing on their campuses, and the other half supporting new immigrant farmers who are producing more & more of that food. Katie loves most things about the Midwest and especially long bike rides through all its cornfields. Email Katie

 

 

Growing up in rural Iowa, food and farming were basic parts of life, and Carmen learned a lot about corn, pigs, and what to cook for potlucks in churches. As her curiosity about the world outside of Solon, Iowa grew, so did her interest in social justice and peace. This lead her to Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana where she majored in Peace and Global Studies and Spanish. While living at the Earlham student-operated Miller Farm, she was able to see the connection between her interest in peace studies and her passion for food and farming. She now feels passionately about spreading the Real Food Challenge all over the Midwest, where so much food is grown. She also loves, goats, dancing, Indonesian Gamelan music, and making pie. Sometime this fall or winter she will be moving to the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, and is looking forward to bringing RFC to Appalachia as well! Email Carmen

 

 

As a 90’s child on the north shore of Chicago, Alex developed tastes for specific brands of processed foods and vehemently rejected other versions of the same dishes—beginning her life as a notoriously picky eater. Mac N Cheese was not Mac N Cheese unless the cheese came as powder in a packet. She preferred tomatoes from the grocery store to those from the garden and loved frozen green beans straight from the package. She ate fast food at least one a week. Although she spent a lot of time rejecting and accepting certain foods, she never thought about what she was REALLY eating, what factors affected her access to the food, who produced the food, or what it meant not to consider all the dynamic ways food functions in one’s life and connects one’s life with others. She needed to GET REAL! Her life was changed by a bit of reading, a switch to a vegan lifestyle, and a new perspective on the place of food in society. As a sociology major at Villanova University concentrating in Peace and Justice, she discovered that many of the issues she had studied—disenfranchised communities, health deterioration, environmental degradation, abuse of animals, immigration policies, dynamics of power and privilege—could connect under the umbrella of food justice and food policy. After working for the past year as a NW RFO, Alex is excited to bring her learnings about transformative organizing and the power of student action back to the heartland as a 2nd year RFO based in Chicago! Email Alex

 

 

Siri graduated summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota with a degree in Environmental Sciences, Policy and Management. Anxious to address environmental issues rather than just learn about them, Siri launched and led a successful Beyond Coal campaign to move her campus off of coal in 2009, later traveling to wild and scenic Alaska for a similar effort. Inspired by her fellow students-turned-leaders and activists, she was enchanted by community organizing, the power of persistence, and social movement theory, but hungry to tackle a more universal issue. Siri's interests in community and leadership development, social justice, and sustainability converged during her role advocating for Frogtown Gardens, an urban farm in one of St. Paul, Minnesota's lowest-income, minority-rich neighborhoods. Other than calling for the Real Food Revolution, Siri spends time exploring the Midwest via bike, boat, and foot, experimenting with sweet potato pizza crust, and learning Spanish. Email Siri

 

---

 

Alicia grew up in Port Orange on the east coast of Florida, before moving to Florida's west coast at USF in Tampa. She now lives in a small central-Florida town in between, where she will be serving as a 2nd-year RFO for the Southeast. Before graduating in 2010, she studied Anthropology and Dance and spent semesters in D.C. and Greece. By her senior year, she had gotten involved in RFC and local community garden groups, and became really passionate about food-based change—from real food’s power to create wholistic health, to our power to affect the amount of real food. Her enthusiasm also gets going from working within a local social justice committee, exploring her neighborhood's history, and enjoying good books, good music, garlicky smells, piano sounds, and eggplant. Email Alicia

 

 

 

 

Bonnie Maye May grew up in Jackson, Mississippi and was raised in both poor public schools and a rich private Baptist school, where she noticed early on the social segregation and uncomfortable racial hostility of the South. She was also a die-hard Captain Planet fan and spent all of her best times playing outdoors as a child, but she never realized that she herself could actually have a voice in environmental or social justice issues -- or that there were people out there making real solutions for these problems! Once she was introduced to sociology and student activist groups in college, there was no turning back. For the first time in her life she felt empowered and able to make a change. Food became important to her because it combined so many issues that she cared about -- sustainability, social-justice, and health. Formerly a picky-eater and fast food enthusiast, Bonnie started to change her eating habits and soon developed a greater appreciation for eating food that was both real and culturally important, as well as a celebration. She studied environmental sociology and earned a master's degree in Applied Sociology with her focus on food justice at Southeastern Louisiana University. While in graduate school, she worked with other students to bring awareness about real food to their campus, where they organized their school's first farmers markets. Now she is spending some time calling New Orleans her home. Besides Real Food Challenge, Bonnie adores old faerie lore, chocolate, belly-dancing American Tribal style with other supportive women, thunderstorms, playing dressing up, and snuggling with her awesome cat and partner in crime, Clyde. Email Bonnie

 

 

Raised in a suburb northwest of Atlanta, Kate spent her childhood summers picking blackberries from the hill covered in bushes behind her house. Little did she know that her mother’s insistence on finishing her plate of fruit before school and her father’s staunch anti-butter stance would ultimately influence her decision to study public health at the University of Georgia. In her early years in college, she became quickly overwhelmed with the numerous narratives of environmental degradation. However, when she happened upon a Real Food Challenge training in 2010, her worlds collided, and she found solace in a fierce solution to the nexus of health, justice, and environmental issues. In her cherished free time, Kate can be found working at the student farm, petting her cat Basil, and exploring the beloved anomaly that is Athens, Georgia. Email Kate

 

 

 

---

 

Growing up in Maryland, just outside of the nation's capital, Jon got involved in student anti-war activism early in high school, and then branched out into campus politics around issues of budget cuts and access to higher education. After years of planning protests of all sorts, some more successful than others, he got tired of channeling all that anger and started looking for ways to incorporate growth and healing into his organizing work. Luckily, he found the Real Food Challenge just at the right time. He graduated from the University of Maryland – College Park this past May with a worthless liberal arts degree, but really enjoyed the rooftop gardening opportunities the school provided. Jon loves kale, roasted root vegetables, polenta, campaign strategy, mountains, and dignified outrage. If you're in the Mid-Atlantic and need some support in encouraging your campus to Get Real, don't hesitate to get in touch. Email Jon

 

 

 

 

After earning a degree in anthropology from the University of North Texas, Jacqueline moved to Baltimore to explore the diverse geography of the Mid-Atlantic in hopes of finding a place to settle down and commit to. While growing up she was uprooted frequently but has lived most of her life somewhere in the Southern United States. Jacqueline became interested in food activism through her struggle to find inexpensive, healthy, and delicious food to cook for her family while living below the poverty line. Early on she realized that our current food system is grounded in social injustice and has had a hard time (up until the Real Food Challenge!) finding activist groups that make the right connections between environmental issues and oppression. Jacqueline enjoys reading queer theory, Latin American history, and soft science fiction. When she's not talking with people about how to best change our food system, she can be found indulging in spicy food, punk music and reality TV shows. Email Jacqueline

 

---

Estefania graduated in December 2010 from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, which she mobilized to become one of the first Fair Trade Universities in the country.Being born and raised in Ecuador nurtured her lifelong concern for justice. She is an organizer and activist passionate about making real changes to build sustainable food systems, alleviate poverty and hunger, and to let our world breathe some clean air. After a long time of shifting from one home to another, she is now settled in Boston supporting student food justice initiatives in the Northeast. When she is not organizing she is dancing salsa, eating Ecuadorean food and riding her bike in the sun. Email Stefy

 

 

Drew graduated from Boston University with a BA in Philosophy in 2007. He promptly had no idea what to do with that, and spent time working with international students, teaching yoga, and reading voraciously about sustainability and social justice issues. Changing the food system seemed like the perfect place to combine both interests, which led to a volunteer and intern experience with The Real Food Challenge. Afterwards, he worked on a variety of projects ranging from increasing food stamp redemption at farmers markets to webinars about health insurance for farm workers. He is thrilled to be back with the Real Food Challenge, and when not doing food work, is busy trimming his beard, reading, running, and eating ice cream. Email Drew

 

 

 

Leila grew up in New York City loving the tucked-away green spaces of parks and gardens. She left the bustle behind to get a BA in environmental studies, with a concentration in conservation, and a minor in gender studies from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts (class of 2012). She discovered her passion for food, education, and social justice through organizing with New England Climate Summer and Students for a Just and Stable Future, volunteering at Gardening the Community (Springfield, MA), and working at Heifer International's Overlook Farm. She continued to work in urban youth education and agriculture dedicated to eradicating food deserts on a floating farm at Groundwork Hudson Valley's Science Barge. Now located in Boston, she works as a program associate for Generation Citizen, organizing college students to teach an action-based civics course in local middle and high schools.  She loves traveling internationally (Kenya, Tanzania, Canada, Russia, Mongolia are most recent adventures), sending homemade postcards and letters through snail mail, and playing Ultimate Frisbee, and biking. Email Leila

 

 

---

Michael Pollan, professor and best-selling author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food.

  

Vandana Shiva, physicist, feminist, activist, Director of The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy.

 

Anna Lappé, advocate, co-founder of the Small Planet Institute, best-selling author of Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet.

 

Daveda Russell, educator, consultant, Senior Project Manager at Pyramid Communications.

 

John Turenne, former Executive Chef at Yale University, co-designer of the Yale Sustainable Food Project, President of Sustainable Food Systems, LLC.

 

Tom Kelly, founding member of the Northeast Campus Sustainability Consortium, Director of the University Office of Sustainability at the University of New Hampshire.

 

Greg Gale, former Director of Programs (and founding staff member) of The Food Project; now with VISIONS Inc., a multicultural consulting firm.

 

---

These organizations, coalitions, unions, and campaigns have partnered with the RFC to collaborate, share resources and support, and strengthen the connections within the growing real food movement.

 

 

---