Katie is a passionate educator with over ten years of experience working on health equity through the lens of food access and garden education. For the past 5 years she has been a part of a team developing culturally specific, healing-centered programming for youth and families in AICHO’s (American Indian Community Housing Organization) permanent supportive housing program. As a member of AICHO’s food sovereignty team, she took the lead on their Giinawiind Giginitaawigi’gomin program, an outreach program providing skill-building activities that expose urban Indigenous youth to Indigenous cultural food practices, gardening, cooking, and entrepreneurial skills with the opportunity to earn profits from their youth farmers market stand. For program details and a full report on their first season click here: Giinawiind Program Report 2021

Katie has twenty years of experience working in different sectors of the food industry. She’s worked in restaurant kitchens, institutional kitchens, produce departments, and on organic veggie farms. She has fostered the development of community garden sites, school gardens, and garden outreach and education programs. She has cultivated and nurtured a relationship with her own plot of land that she gardens, and the plants and animals that inhabit that land with her, for going on 15 years.