We are dedicated to creating an alternative food system that places the wellbeing of Black farmers and Black communities at its center
Alsie Parks
(Co-Director and Director of Field Organizing)
alsie parks is an atlanta-native, that advocates and activates the use of food as an organizing tool for healing and liberation. as a child of the south, she is the granddaughter of educators, sharecroppers, and black land owners with ancestral land in Lincolnton, GA. as a farmer organizer, agrarian cultural worker, food systems practitioner, land steward and nurturer she serves by cultivating intimate and responsive relationships with and for the land and our people that activate remembrance, honor sacred traditions and shares in the practice of Black land-based lifeways and foodways. she currently serves as the Director of Field Organizing for SAAFON and is the former Southern Regional Organizer for the National Black Food & Justice Alliance. in addition to her work with SAAFON alsie is a founding core member of Fort Negrita Cooperative, Black Mycelium Project, and the Black Agrarian Workers of the South Collective (BAWS). she values the love, labor and intelligence of farmers, black cultural geographies, storytelling, truth telling, kitchen magic, hospitality, porch talks, sisterhood, big mama energy, being queer and being expansive.
Maya Jordan
(Co-Director and Director of Operations & Special Projects)
Maya Jordan is a community organizer, activist, volunteer and a creative. Her family hails from rural Mississippi (where her Mother and several generations before her were born) and Canada where her family had a farm. Maya is active in her community, supporting school farms and green space movements in urban communities.
Maya’s career and work experience are at the intersection of the non-profit sector, the creative arts, and the healing arts. Maya has over 15 years of experience with non-profit and grassroots organizations of all shapes and sizes across the country in leadership strategy and consulting for program management, staff engagement, organization strategy and development.
With a focus on team building, infrastructure building, leadership coaching, work culture, capacity frameworks, employee care and retention, creative direction, operations frameworks and design, organization identity cohesion, external engagement, marketing and communications strategy, Maya helps organizations reach their full potential.
Maya is also a lifecycle Doula and non-denominational minister. In Maya’s spare time she is a filmmaker, composer, artistic director, a singer & actor and has worked professionally in all those capacities and co-runs her film production company Library Card Productions with her husband. Maya uses her skills and vast experience from the three branches of her career to inform each other: Her expertise in leadership, consulting and operational management allows her to assist everyone she works with in applying practical strategy and organizational structure to their goals. Her knowledge in the spiritual and healing arts allow her to create work environments that are supportive and nurturing. Her training and background in the creative arts allow her to approach all of her work with a unique and fun perspective. Maya has manifested a career that is rooted in Being of Service to Others, Creating Efficient Processes and Creating Safe Space for All. She combines her wealth of experience, training, and knowledge to support organizations in their endeavors by applying her detail-oriented approach to her work and is honored and grateful to do so with SAAFON.
Whitney Jaye
(Co-Director and Director of Strategic & Programmatic Development)
Whitney Jaye (she/they) is a farmer-organizer, land steward, and mother whose love for the land and sea stem back deep into her life and lineage.
As a native of Wilmington, North Carolina, Whitney Jaye sees her work through the lens of Black Southern lifeways that (re)center agrarianism, and through the ancestral memories and practices of coastal Carolinian culture. She has done a variety of food systems work and organizing, from farming and youth agricultural education, to farmers market management, and cooperative development. She has designed and implemented a variety of projects and programs with diverse partners, including with The Conservation Fund, City of Atlanta Parks and Recreation, Atlanta Botanical Garden, Morehouse School of Medicine, Ashoka Changemakers, and West Atlanta Watershed Alliance.
Whitney Jaye currently serves as the Director of Strategic and Programmatic Development at the Southeastern African American Farmers Organic Network (SAAFON), where she anchors the development of our programs and projects, and works to ensure that the organization’s strategies, offerings, and partnerships reflect the needs of its members, and aligns with the organization’s mission.
In addition to her work with SAAFON, Whitney Jaye is the farmer/steward of Sunbird Flowers in Lithonia, Georgia, a founding member of the Black Agrarian Workers of the South Collective (BAWS), has served on the Leadership Team of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance (NBFJA), and the Steering Committee of the Southwest Atlanta Growers Cooperative (SWAG). She deeply values the brilliance, spirit, and abundance of Black Southern agrarian magic, and has been a witness to its power to transform and heal.
Jason Lindsay
(Farm Practices & Resource Coordinator)
Jason is the first generation in his family born off the farm. He found a part of himself he didn’t know was missing through working the land. After graduating from college, Jason was on fire and driven to be an agent of change with a particular focus on youth development. He returned home to Pitt County with a vision of teaching in the public schools. For the next two years he taught Language Arts at his former middle school. When his first child was on the way, Jason reached back to his ancestral agrarian roots and started a garden and found that in harmony and communion with the natural elements hours passed unnoticed and uncounted. Connecting with the land birthed a vision to restore the connection of people and land. In 2013, Jason stepped out of the public school system to work on advancing his vision full-time. Jason began managing an existing community garden within a larger community garden network in Greenville, NC. Through the garden achievements and his community engagement Jason was quickly promoted to manager all eight community gardens in the network. He also registered the first urban farm in his town, selling organic vegetables to local CSA’ s, juicing companies, and a mobile food market. After years of cultivating community through the community garden network. Jason developed a youth agricultural training program – Cultivating Youth Entrepreneurs (CYE) and an urban farm school curriculum. CYE graduates have gone on to establish their own production farms and enroll in university seeking agriculture-related degrees. Jason continues to be an educator, taking the practical and theoretical knowledge he has gained through his journey to reclaiming his agrarian identity and serves as a consultant to local farms and organization on best practices, certification, and operation management. With a clear calling for this work, Jason continues farming and building farmer – to – farmer relationships as a means to establish self – sustainable food systems throughout our communities.
Kayla Walker
(Operations Coordinator)
Kayla is a native of Southwest Atlanta whose special power is opening the lines of communication between communities and organizations to get things done. She currently serves as an Organizer of The Free Black Women’s Library Atlanta and Founder of BlkGrl Bookshop, both spaces center the works and lives of Black writers and work to deconstruct barriers to literary access.
Kayla is an obsessive book lover, reader, and servant of Black women storytellers. True to form, Kayla is a Cancer to the core with three main veins as her world continues to evolve; love, protect, and build.
Shelby Johnson
(Membership Coordinator)
Shelby Johnson is a farmer and forager with a passion for deeply collaborative models of community engagement based around our shared love of the land. With deep family roots in Atlanta, Georgia and Asheville, North Carolina, Shelby is dedicated to uplifting and preserving the unique culture of the South. Following completing her degree at Georgia State University, Shelby dove headfirst into learning and working in various settings related to sustainable agriculture, beginning her journey on a permaculture farm. Shelby’s experiences in agriculture lead her on a journey through many different styles of land engagement, ranging from mid-scale organic production, to a 350 member CSA farm, small scale culinary production, and non-profit educational based agriculture. Each of her working experiences provided a deepening of her understanding of working with the land in a specific context, and broadened her farming expertise. Ultimately, Shelby’s experiences as a farmer have imparted to her an understanding and honor of the intimate webs that hold all of us – whether we be human, fungi, plant, insect, animal, or otherwise – together. Believing that the only future we can guarantee is the one we mutually create, Shelby is dedicated to supporting her community in meaningful ways through the lens of regenerative agriculture.
Noah McDonald
(Research and Land Work Coordinator)
Noah McDonald is a land steward, researcher, and culture keeper coming from seven generations of rural folk from the upper reaches of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. Noah’s upbringing in rural central Ohio fostered an abiding love of rural people, culture, and landscapes.
Noah holds a B.S. in Biology and Religious Studies from Guilford College in Greensboro, NC. From 2018 to 2019, Noah served as the Cynthia Hayes – Fannie Lou Hamer Fellow at SAAFON, identifying a collective landholding model for the prevention of land loss within SAAFON’s farmer network. In 2019, Noah worked a season as a farm apprentice at Soul Fire Farm in Petersburgh, NY. In 2020, Noah returned to SAAFON to continue articulating and redefining its land work.
Noah is passionate about learning and exploring Black agrarian legacies through raising animals and heritage grain, legume, and vegetable varieties and doing deep dives into archival materials. For Noah, intimate and loving relationship with the land, air, and water is the foundation for a good, healthy life. Noah currently lives and farms in Wampanoag and Nipmuc territories, supporting the food sovereignty work of Eastern Woodlands Rematriation Collective.
Tamara “Tammy” Harris
(Agroecology & Education Resource Coordinator)
Tamara comes to us from the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension Service, where her duties included assisting local farmers to access all of the services and resources available through Agricultural Natural Resources (ANR), Family and Consumer Sciences(FACS) and 4-H programs. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Tammy moved to Georgia as a preteen. She spent most of her teenage years traveling weekly between metro Atlanta and the rural Georgia family farm. In 1994, Tammy attended the University of West Georgia and later Georgia Perimeter College where she studied Business Management. Tammy has been a long-time advocate for environmental conservation, traditional homesteading practices, and cultural heritage projects. In 2001, Tammy left an accounting career to travel across North America visiting various North American sub – cultures including the Amish, Gullah – Geechee, and Native Americans. She developed friendships with many of the residents in these communities and eventually opened a retail store that highlighted many of their arts and crafts contributions. In 2004, she published the first of three books celebrating the local history and contributions of small towns in America. In 2015, she co – founded a nonprofit historical cultural heritage museum called This Old Farmhouse, GA located in Heard County. The museum also serves as an agritourism attraction exploring the daily lives of small – scale West GA farming families during the early – mid 20th century.
Zel Taylor
(Youth Network Coordinator)
Zel Taylor ( they/ them ) is a Black queer non binary farmer in the deep South. Their people are from Atlanta, Waynesboro, Calhoun and Augusta Georgia area. As the descendant of sharecroppers, enslaved landworkers, farmers and herbalists, they are deeply committed to a relationship with the land through growing food, foraging, and spending time with community on the land. Zel has spent time as a farm and nutrition educator , operated a small plant-based business, built two tiny living spaces to sustain needs around farming, and traveled , worked on and co managed small production farms across the country. Their land practice includes growing vegetables, flowers, and herbs at their farm Down by the River Farm and Art Collective. They are an artist of many sorts, builder, crochet/ basket weaving enthusiast, painter, seamstress in training , and enjoy cooking all the wonderful produce grown. Zel is inspired by the work and words of Fannie Lou Hammer and by their ancestors that tended to this land. They deeply believe that liberation is rooted in the ability to access land to feed oneself and community and with a relationship that honors the land as kin. As a dreamer these seeds are deeply woven into their vision.
Regional Farming and Field Events Fellows –
Cluster Pilot Program.
Yvette Browne – USVI, Anchor and SAAFON Board Chair
Frank Robinson VI – USVI, Fellow
Loretta Adderson – GA, Anchor
Tianna Neal – GA, Fellow
James Franklin – MS, Anchor
Tracy Galloway – MS, Fellow
Bernard Obie -NC, Anchor
Tahz, Walker – NC, Fellow
Keisha Cameron – Virtual, Anchor
Sariyah Benoit – Virtual, Fellow
