Community Food Systems Mentor Profile: Karen Lehman
The Community Food Systems Mentorship Program offers Network members the opportunity to work directly with a food systems expert to support their growth, learn best practices, and connect with seasoned food movement leaders.
Karen Lehman, Principal, Adaptive Leadership, LLC., Former director of Fresh Taste, Strategic advisor to Potlikker Capital
About Karen:
Karen is both a practitioner and an experienced coach. She has worked in the food system from the local to global level for over 40 years, doing everything from starting an urban youth farming organization (still going after 26 years) to developing a proposal for a Global Food Security Convention with collaborators in Latin America, Europe, and Africa. Most of her food system work is centered on racial equity and climate. She has lived in Mexico and later collaborated with campesino organizations to shape trade policy.
During the pandemic, she catalyzed the development of the Chicago Region Food System Fund (CRFSF) which has allocated over $14,000,000 to organizations in the Chicago region since 2020, 75% of which were BIPOC-led. She then worked with Fresh Taste members to oversee the transition of CRFSF to a community-majority steering committee to carry the fund into the future with grassroots leadership. For the past 20 years, she has also maintained a leadership consulting practice focused on nonprofit, university, and foundation leaders. Her approach is strengths-based – people do their best and are happiest when they work from their strengths!
Areas of Expertise
Seeking to Mentor
Leading change is hard! Since I have worked in so many aspects of the food system (nonprofit, university, business, and philanthropy), I am comfortable working with anyone in any sector. I am bilingual in Spanish and would enjoy working with a Spanish speaker.
Whether you’re a warrior, weaver or builder in the food system, you are working with diverse stakeholders, internally and externally. I want to help you reflect on and navigate the work you do in a systemic way. My goal is to help you open up new ways of seeing the difficult issues you face, to discern paths to growth and remove barriers to change.
Responses