Jaz has a rich history in food systems and equity work. As the Team Support Co-Executive Director, Jaz will collaborate closely with Sarah Weber-Ogden, the Co-Executive Director of Community Food Justice. This new organization model follows Partners for a Hunger-Free Oregon’s values of transparency and collective power.
Jaz is an Afro-Caribbean, queer, non- binary – heart-centered – educator, activist, farmer, forager and herbalist. They have a rich history in food systems work and have deep reverence for land and the communities who have acted as life-giving stewards since time immemorial.
Jaz is coming into their role as the Team Support Co-Executive Director with almost a decade of immersive food access, food justice, education, and land sovereignty experience. Alongside many years of working as a farm and garden educator, an equity consultant, a community organizer, a food systems program coordinator and manager, and a farmer; Jaz currently runs an Herbal Medicine Shop and platform called Heart Space Healing – which centers accessible and affordable herbal grief medicines. Our free medicine shop provides free herbal medicine to folx that hold marginalized identities across the country. They also co-steward a homestead and sanctuary called Ground Down Homestead that centers access to land, education, rest, community connection and food for Black, Brown, Trans and Queer folx. Jaz sees great promise that the practices of ancestral reclamation, somatic integration, and community care will create a fulfilling foundation to support in our liberation and the liberation of the generations to come.
When not at work you can find Jaz under a canopy of old growth trees, by a river, with their berry- stained hands in the soil, and their nose in a book (that’s probably about plants).
Help us welcome Jaz to the team!
