Western Washington Counties of Focus Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

Born to parents hailing from Tianjin, China, Nancy grew up in Elk Grove, California. She attended Stanford University studying Earth Systems with a focus on sustainable food and agriculture. During her time in college, she developed a passion for food justice through food recovery efforts and environmental justice organizing. Nancy brought together on-campus academic, activist, and environmental groups for an event on food sovereignty and land liberation, delivered by a collective of pan-indigenous young farmers called Black Earth Farms. She organized farm work days and breakfast cook days to bring students off campus to farm, cook, and volunteer with Bay Area food justice groups and community leaders. Passionate about childhood nutrition, she co-designed and co-taught a culturally appropriate nutrition curriculum for elementary schoolers in East Palo Alto. Last summer, Nancy performed field research through the Rural Education Action Program that informed a nutrition program for babies in rural China.

Food Lifeline (FL) is on a mission to end hunger in Western Washington. FL believes that access to food is a human right and that nobody deserves to be hungry. Food Lifeline provides nutritious food to hundreds of thousands of people facing hunger every year by sourcing nutritious food from a variety of food industry partners. FL distributes this food through a partnership with 300 food banks, shelters, and meal programs, enabling them to provide the equivalent of 134,000 meals every single day. At the same time they are working to end hunger for the future by addressing its root causes, including systemic inequity and social injustice. FL does this through advocacy efforts to shape local, state, and federal policy, by partnering with organizations that are addressing other causes of poverty, and through community engagement and mobilization efforts.