Meet the Crew
As the National Organizing Director for Real Food Challenge, Jesse (they/them) brings a passion for connection, a trust in the power of youth, and belief in a viable, vibrant future for all! Before joining RFC, they spent over a decade working for small organic farms and producers in the Ohlone territory of the Monterey Bay in California. They know the joy and nourishment of sharing food grown locally with care, as well as some of the complicated dynamics of growing, promoting, and selling. They also have decades of experience organizing in different communities, including facilitating teen summer camps, convening unsettling settler colonialism groups, hosting queer community events, and much more. They are a happy parent of two little humans, love gardening, games, and biking. Jesse brings creativity, curiosity, and a passion for change to their work!
Amanda (she/they) is driven to create a liberatory food system that confronts the industrialized, extractive structures upheld by Big Food. As Procurement Director at Real Food Challenge, Amanda brings over 15 years of experience driving food systems transformation. Drawing on a diverse background as a farmer, food hub cooperative president, local elected official, food policy council founder, and value chain practitioner, Amanda navigates complex institutional systems with a deep understanding of multiple stakeholder perspectives. At RFC, they lead efforts to shift college and university purchasing toward Real Food by supporting campus food spend assessments and strengthening farm-to-college connections for local, values-aligned producers.
As the Development Director for Real Food Challenge, Sam (she/her) brings over 10 years of community and student organizing and a lifetime of farming experience to her role. Before joining RFC, Sam advised national and state-based nonprofits, community organizations, and campus activists across the country in campaign development, research tactics, and media strategy with a focus on undermining political and academic corruption. She loves that she gets to merge her passion for youth-led activism and experience of growing up on a small farm while raising funds for Real Food Challenge. Sam brings passions for storytelling, relationship building, and leadership development to her work with RFC.
Real Food Challenge operates as a Worker Self-Directed project, a horizontal decision-making model in which both leadership and responsibility are distributed throughout the organization. Our structure enables each staff member to propose ideas and nurture the direction of the organization, optimizing individual autonomy and collective responsibility. As we engage and navigate the fields of consolidated corporate and university power with their totalizing and homogenizing forces, we choose to cultivate an organization that is adaptable to the needs of its constituents, rooted in relationality and co-creation and capable of generating creative and subversive counterlogics which make room for a world in which many worlds fit.