Featured Leader: Suparna Kudesia

Who are you? (Beyond the job title!)
Suparna is a decolonial educator and immigrant mother. She brings with her over 15 years of experience imagining and breathing life into educational programs and leading organizational development. Suparna believes in the power of unraveled unlearning to shift narratives, heal trauma, and transform systems. She is guided by ancestral re-visioning, abolitionist and decolonial praxis, and manifesting collective dreams. Suparna responds to the call to return stolen wealth as the Choreographer of Collective Change by moving money where it can have a critical impact on building a beautiful regenerative food system – into the hands of young cooperators of color. Suparna lives on unceded Kumeyaay land with her partner, two kids, and numerous bunches of mint. 

What inspired you to get involved in food systems work?
To me, food justice is deeply interconnected with the entire justice ecosystem. When I joined CoFED, I had found a place that recognized that food justice is equal to racial justice, land justice, gender justice, and environmental justice. Food ways and the food we eat are a universal experience and they are universally impacted by a larger white supremacist colonial-capitalist system. I am committed to dismantling these manifestations of oppression and co-building a transformative cooperative food system. 

Can you name a person who has had a tremendous impact on you as a leader?
In my life before CoFED, I was an elementary school teacher. Each of my students I have learned with and their families have been the people who have had an impact on my leadership. Doing justice work is an honor and it is what gets me up every day; the communities I have worked with and continue to are those who remind me and teach me of why I do this work. I am here for the kind of deep healing that my ancestors hoped for and that I wish for our future ancestors/children.

What does food systems leadership mean to you?
It means a recognition of the systemic factors at play in the food system and that our food system functions within a colonial capitalist white supremacist system. And that it doesn’t have to be this way. Leadership in the food system means stepping out of the way of those who have been carrying the wisdom and labor of building and holding up our food systems. It means continually disrupting the current system. And it means dreaming and birthing a whole new transformative, regenerative, and just food system with those most deeply impacted by the current food system in the forefront. 

What’s your greatest leadership challenge now, and what are you looking for support for?
Something fellow members could help with. Because we live in a dangerous and precarious colonial-capitalist system, we continually note the harms that Black and Brown farmers, land stewards, food growers, producers, distributors, and composters experience. These harms are at every level in the food chain – funding, procuring seeds, land acquisition and stewardship, marketing, and so on. We need more white folks to join us on this journey towards collective liberation.

What are you most excited about in your work?
The constant inspiration that working with young QTBIPOC (queer trans black indigenous and/or people of color) brings!

What’s something about you (a fun fact!) that not many of your colleagues know or that we wouldn’t expect from you?
I love writing and reading poetry.

Similarly, how are you most misunderstood?
Mostly racial and gendered stereotypes that hurt, unsurprisingly.