Name
Alsie Parks
Title
Co-Executive Director
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. Alongside her matriarch’s she is reviving Motherline Farm where her ancestors loved and lived on the land they belong deeply to. 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 learned from her grandmothers to always use your skills in service to your people.
Alsie feels blessed and purposed to serve as the Co-Executive Director and institutional steward for SAAFON in the legacy of Cynthia Hayes, anchoring field organizing within our landscape and the development of base building strategies. She is also an active institutional steward of the historic Black land base, Boggs Rural Life Center in Keysville, GA. Nationally and regionally, she has served on the leadership team and is the former Southern Regional Organizer for the National Black Food & Justice Alliance (NBFJA), is one of the current Co-Chairs for the Southern Black Farmer Community Led Fund (SBFCLF), and is a proud card carrying member of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. In addition to her work across the South, Alsie is a HABESHA Works Alumni and founding core member of Fort Negrita Cooperative, Black Mycelium Project and GoldenSEED Childcare Collective, as well as serving on the steering committees for the Southwest Atlanta Growers Cooperative (SWAG) and the Mississippi Food Systems Fellowship.
She values the love, labor and intelligence of farmers, black cultural geographies, storytelling, truth telling, kitchen magic, #intimacywithfood, radical hospitality, porch talks, sisterhood, big mama energy, being queer and being expansive.