Mentorship Program

Sarah became the Advocacy Coordinator for The Community Kitchen in 2021 after serving as their Gleaning Coordinator for eight seasons. During her tenure as Gleaning Coordinator, she mentored seven seasonal assistants and interns, including her replacement Gleaning Coordinator. Sarah’s background includes graduate work in environmental advocacy and volunteer experience in the Transition Town movement and congregation-based community organizing. She brings a systems lens to her food work. She has spent her tenure at The Community Kitchen analyzing the challenges of our current food system in search of community-based solutions for building an equitable and sustainable system for all. This has led her to focus on advocacy while also exploring business opportunities in local food systems including how to lightly process local produce for both charitable and commercial markets.

Katie Nelson is the Executive Director of The Green Urban Lunch Box. She is an urban veggie and flower farmer and is a passionate advocate for food and health equity. She has been involved with The Green Urban Lunch Box for 9 years and has played an integral role in the development and execution of their FruitShare, Back-Farms, and Small Farm Initiative Programs. She brings extensive experience in program development, administration, communication, and systems management. When she isn't farming or working on GULB projects, she is spending time with her 3-year-old daughter and husband exploring Salt Lake City and the surrounding mountains.

In her role co-leading the Downeast Gleaning Initiative with Healthy Acadia, Rachel Emus (she/her) connects volunteers with gleaning opportunities at farms, orchards, farmers’ markets, home gardens, and community gardens. Rachel helps to manage the redistribution of high quality gleaned produce to more than 40 food security organizations across the region, including food pantries, free meal sites, recovery programs, school backpack programs, health centers, and other community spaces. Since 2013, the Gleaning Initiative has collected and distributed 335,000 pounds of local produce from nearly 50 farms across rural Downeast Maine. Prior to joining Healthy Acadia in 2017, Rachel worked for several farms and non-profits throughout the Northeast. She brings experience in program management (coordination, fundraising, and communications), volunteer management, community organizing, and network building.

Heather Keisler Fornes (she/her) is the Executive Director of the Portland Fruit Tree Project, a 14-year-old urban fruit tree gleaning program in Portland, OR. She has been there since April, so new to PFTP, but not to gleaning or nonprofit management! In addition to her work with PFTP, she also co-run an all-volunteer farmers market gleaning program through a local senior center. Prior to her all-food-all-the-time life, she was the Operations Manager/Deputy Director of the Rose City Rollers, the internationally top-ranked roller derby league where she managed about 1000 volunteers, was the HR manager/IT manager/Development manager/ and a variety of other hats (but never skates). She loves to find ways to make systems and processes better and more efficient so that we can focus on our missions and the people in our communities. A great fit would be someone who was open to looking deeply at the ecosystem of their work and organization to look for ways to add or adapt tools.

Dan graduated from UW Eau Claire in 1970 with a degree in English and History. After 9 years in Bahia, Brazil with the Peace Corps and owning an orange plantation, he returned to the USA to get a soil science degree from UW River Falls. Dan worked for 25 years with the UW Madison Department of Agronomy, Plant Breeding and Genetics. Since retirement 12 years ago he has been actively involved in food pantry gardens (Madison Area Food Pantry Gardens) and gleaning with his self-styled GEEZR GLEANERS.

Stephanie Wooten joined Glean Kentucky in 2014 as the organization's first full-time staff member and Executive Director. For the last 6 years, Stephanie has led the effort to scale the organization's service area from a single city to multiple regions of work across Central and South Central Kentucky. Glean Kentucky now employs 5 staff members and gleans year-round from farms, orchards, gardens, and farmers markets, as well as rescues produce from grocery stores. To date, Glean Kentucky has redistributed over 2 million pounds of produce from 143 sources to 235 feeding agencies. Prior to working with Glean Kentucky, Stephanie did food systems work through farmers' market management and leading higher-education sustainability initiatives.

Craig Diserens is a co-founder and the Executive Director of Village Harvest, a suburban gleaning and education organization in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since the founding in 2001 volunteers have harvested more than 3 million pounds of fruit from homes and small orchards to assist hundreds of thousands of people in need. Craig has served full time as the Executive Director since 2011. Prior to Village Harvest, he earned degrees in Electrical Engineering and has 25 years’ experience in senior management and engineering roles in the computer industry at Hewlett-Packard, startups, and a management strategy consulting firm. In addition to his Silicon Valley background Craig plays trumpet for jazz and musical theater groups, and among many lessons learned in the nonprofit world discovered that guiding a large volunteer-powered organization requires similar improvisation and teamwork.

Lisa DeSantis (she/her) is cofounder and program manager of Kōkua Harvest on Hawaiʻi Island. Lisa was a member of the first mentee cohort and decided to give back by acting as mentor this time! In addition to her food rescue efforts, Lisa has diverse experience with marketing, community networking, and local food production and distribution. Lisa has an educational background in film and video production which she leverages to assist her in outreach and promotion, focusing on environmental, public health, and food systems topics. A good mentee fit would be someone looking to center equity and establish processes and protocols. Lisa doesn’t have all the answers, but loves to generate ideas and explore possibilities, and can’t wait to do so with you!

Allison founded Community Harvest of Central Vermont in 2014. Fueled by her passion and strong community support, CHCV has grown into a year-round gleaning and food recovery organization. She learned about the realities of farming operations growing up on her parent’s organic farm. As a teenager, she managed harvesting crews and day-to-day farm operations, and gained expansive knowledge about the harvesting and storage of most crops grown in Vermont. This upbringing instilled in her a deep commitment to ensuring that everyone has access to nutritious, locally produced food. Allison has extensive experience in network building, development diversification, program logistics, volunteer relationship building, and more. When Allison is not gleaning, she spends time with her husband and two sons in Berlin, VT in their 212-year-old farmhouse surrounded by flower, vegetable, and fruit gardens.

Keith Cutshall has been the Gleaning Program Director at CROS Ministries since December of 2012. The program has been in existence since 2004. The program has grown from 64,781 pounds to 636,129 pounds in the last season. Keith’s experience is in working with mid to large level farmers primarily recovering in the field. He also has worked to develop recovery efforts at grower’s processing plants. Keith lives and works in Palm Beach County, Florida.