daily Co-op’s board election 2020

Why would you like to serve on the Daily Groceries Co-op Board? 

I currently serve on the board of Daily Groceries in order to help Daily Groceries grow and be able to provide for a broader spectrum of the community. I aspire to support Athens in maintaining a unique and people-centered community by helping Daily persevere. Being on the board allows me to put into practice my belief in community engagement as a means to create the spaces you want to exist.

How can you and your life experiences bring value to the Daily Groceries Co-op board? 

I currently serve on the board of Daily as well as Bike Athens. Bike Athens is a transportation equity focused group that provides bikes to those in need of bikes for critical transportation, advocates for safe streets infrastructure, and provides educational opportunities. I recently became certified as a League Cycling Instructor so I may teach classes on cycling safety. I see Daily and Bike Athens as complementary organizations in the sense that they both contribute to bettering community and environmental health. I have formerly taken leadership roles in DIY and Arts communities as an organizer, in which I co-created a womyn/trans/femme/non-binary skill-share group that provided education and community building to Denver, CO folks. I also volunteered to help start a Bike Co-op in Mobile, AL. As a professional, I recently completed a graduate degree in Landscape Architecture with studies in community planning. I also worked for the Carl Vinson Institute of Government as a designer for downtown revitalization projects in smaller Georgia communities. I am currently employed as a Landscape Architect and Cultural Landscape Specialist at WLA Studio in Athens.  I am dedicated in my personal, academic, and professional pursuits in working to democratize public space and help communities pull together for collective benefit.

Describe your experiences working collaboratively in a group setting. 

I work collaboratively on a daily basis as a designer in a collaborative studio. Landscape Architecture is a discipline that relies on successful working relationships across a broad range of disciplines. We must be able as practitioners to understand the needs of the communities we work with, as well as the language and work styles of disciplines ranging from engineers to ecologists to historians.

I have found working in a group setting to always have challenges, such as one semester, when half of the studio class had just joined the program from China. Differing educational styles, language barriers, and task delegation were significant challenges. But through patience and the taking on of leadership roles by some students, the projects we created ended up utilizing the skill sets of everyone involved. 

The Daily Groceries Co-op Board does not deal with operational matters. It does deal with overall policies that identify and guide the mission of the organization. How do you see the board maintaining and expanding on the broader vision for the Co-op? 

I am used to working at the large scale in my professional environment. We work to take the concerns of daily issues and draw out the greater themes and meaning behind these concerns, and help create the structural framework to address the day to day issues.

How can Board members better represent the opinions of the membership and the larger Athens community? 

Daily Groceries Co-Op often serves the members of the adjacent neighborhoods, but I would say that this tends to be a bit of a higher income group. This could be due to outside perception, location, price-point, selection, or a combination of all of these factors. I would love to see Daily Groceries be able to grow enough to reach a broader audience, and help address the perception that healthy foods are not accessible to all.