Alison has worked as an organizer and advocate alongside grassroots-led organizations and social movements in rural and urban communities for nearly 30 years in the struggle to build people- and ecologically-centered food and farming systems in the United States and throughout the world. Alison believes that grassroots-led social movements are the most effective means for dismantling inequitable systems and erecting new socially just ones. She is a co-founder of the National Right to Food CoP.

Noel Didla is an immigrant from Guntur, South India, making Jackson, Mississippi home. Noel currently serves as the co-chair of the MS Food Policy Council and co-leads strategy, resource generation, design, community engagement and research for the MS Food Systems Fellowship. As someone hailing from the Global South living in the Deep South, Noel is committed to human rights, racial equity, economic equity and environmental justice centered transformative change as informed by the truths and legacies of peoples and places.

Luke Elzinga is the policy and advocacy manager at the Des Moines Area Religious Council (DMARC) Food Pantry Network, which last year assisted over 75,000 people facing food insecurity in Greater Des Moines. Luke is the current board chair of the Iowa Hunger Coalition and a co-chair of the Iowa Food System Coalition’s Local Food Policy Network priority team. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Iowa State University and Master of Public Policy from the University of Northern Iowa.

Amy Jo is an organizer for economic justice who campaigns against poverty and hunger in West Virginia where she is a lifelong resident. Her lived experience is centered around poverty and raising her two children alone. In February 2020, Amy Jo spoke to the United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform regarding the poverty level. Her testimony went viral and spurred her to found a grassroots movement called Rattle the Windows, where poor and marginalized folks are the experts and the leaders who come together to work toward economic justice and equity in their local communities, in West VA and throughout the nation. She is a co-founder and member of Voices of Hunger WV and serves as the WV Campaign Director for MomsRising.

Named one of TIME’s “eco” Who’s-Who, Anna is the founder or co-founder of three national organizations, including Real Food Media, a communications strategy non-profit, and the Small Planet Fund, which supports democratic social movements worldwide. In 2016, she launched the Food Sovereignty Fund of the Panta Rhea Foundation. In this role, Anna worked closely with philanthropic partners around the world, including the Global Alliance of the Future of Food, the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders, and the Agroecology Fund. She is an active board member of the Rainforest Action Network and serves on the Steering Committees of the Food and Farm Communications Fund and the Castanea Fellowship. A recipient of the James Beard Leadership Award, Anna is the co-author or author of three books on food, farming, and sustainability and the contributing author to, or featured in, nineteen more. Anna’s work has been translated internationally and featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Gourmet, and Oprah Magazine, among many other outlets. A frequent public speaker, her popular TEDx talks and Food MythBuster videos have been viewed nearly 2 million times.

Anna is based in the San Francisco Bay Area where she lives with her husband and daughters.

Jane, Director of the From Now On Fund, taught public health at Occidental College from 2011-2019. She is active locally within her own community and nationally to promote nutrition security for children and families. Jane serves on the Board of Center for Science in the Public Interest. She has a doctoral degree in public health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Moses Viveros (they/them/theirs) is a community advocate that has connections to different Food Access work and movements in their hometown of Chicago, Minneapolis, and now Seattle where they currently live. Moses has worn many hats which include supporting these works and movements as a researcher, board member, staff member, and as an organizer. In their current role as Executive Director of Food Access at the YMCA of Greater Seattle, Moses oversees a suite of Food Access programs that support the needs of communities across the entirety of King County. Previously, Moses worked with the City of Minneapolis to support the development of an equitable and sustainable food system in the Twin Cities region. Moses also currently supports different community-led projects which include organizing with Beet Street Zine and supporting food redistribution efforts through the Chicagoland Food Sovereignty Coalition (CFSC).