As Executive Director of Mandela MarketPlace, an innovative food retail-based nonprofit business incubator, I lead a concerted campaign resulting in the June 2009 opening of the for-profit, worker-owned Mandela Foods Cooperative grocery retail and nutrition education center to address Oakland’s longtime status as a food desert while empowering local residents to earn and learn. In partnership with a coalition of actively engaged community residents, farmers, government agencies and funders, my journey in establishing a locally owned, healthy food enterprise network as a critical piece of a major urban redevelopment project is on the forefront of local and national efforts to address food security and economic development in urban centers and that address the needs of family farmers. My contributions at Mandela MarketPlace reach beyond Mandela Foods to include development of a food-enterprise network model that catalyzes a local food economy, owned and operated by the local entrepreneurs and businesses, and can be scaled to greater impact within West Oakland as well as other urban centers both nationally and internationally.With community at the center, the model builds upon the natural linkages between grocery retail, value added product development, wholesale opportunities for small farmers, and youth leadership. The Mandela food network includes the cooperative grocery retail, Mandela Foods, as well as a culturally-relevant wholesale food distribution system that supports independent farmers, truckers and warehousemen, a produce service program that meets the needs of neighborhood corner stores, and youth leadership.Specialties: community engagement, community development through local food enterprise, food retail business development, networking, local economic development, strategic systems change, sustainable agriculture, partnerships, food security, development of cooperative business - esp. worker-owned cooperative