Where Faith Meets Public Health Strategy
Building health equity infrastructure that lasts
My faith is not a footnote to this work. It is the foundation of it. I believe God is a God of systems. Long before strategic plans or logic models, He laid out, in precise detail, how a community should care for itself: how to feed the hungry, protect the vulnerable, include the stranger, leave no one behind. Not as charity. As covenant. Everything I build for the organizations I serve, whatever their own beliefs, comes from that conviction.
I saw what happens when systems aren't built that way years before the world called it a crisis. In a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that had been neglected for decades, I watched the same patterns repeat across more than a decade of community health work: families navigating food deserts, unstable housing, and health systems that were never built for their flourishing. These conditions were not new. They were just easier to ignore, until COVID-19 swept through and compounded everything at once.
The scale of what I was already witnessing is documented. Life expectancy gaps of 10 to 20 years exist between neighborhoods in the same city, shaped by where infrastructure was built and where it never reached (NYU School of Medicine and City Health Dashboard, 2019). Diabetes and other chronic conditions are diagnosed at significantly higher rates in many of these same communities. Food insecurity affected 47.9 million Americans in 2024, with rates two to three times higher in low-income households than the national average (USDA Economic Research Service, 2024; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). These were not statistics about distant problems. They were the neighbors I had already been working alongside for years.
Then I spent the pandemic as frontline clinical staff in a dialysis center, and watched it all collide. Catastrophic outcomes from diseases that could have been prevented years earlier. Patients living with kidneys failing from untreated diabetes and hypertension, the same patterns I had already seen for years, now arriving all at once, with nowhere left to absorb the impact. Most didn't have to be there.
At some point, I realized I couldn't stay downstream anymore.
For over 15 years, I’ve worked at the intersection of food systems, healthcare, economic development, grant funding, and community power-building. My journey has included:
- Supporting low-income families through Virginia WIC, helping to connect nutrition guidance to real-world access.
- Managing Parsley’s Kitchen, a community teaching kitchen serving 5,000+ residents annually through Bon Secours, where food, education, and dignity meet in one space.
- Coordinating $8 million in federal grants, aligning funder requirements with on-the-ground realities in underserved communities.
- Building national partnerships and translating policy and public health guidance for organizations ranging from local churches to Fortune 500 retailers.
Across all of this work, one thing has become clear:
It’s not about programs. It’s about infrastructure.
Programs start and stop. Infrastructure remains.
When we build systems, spaces, policies, and partnerships that center equity from the beginning, health stops being an add-on and becomes part of how a community actually lives.
My Philosophy: Prevention Through Exposure
My core philosophy is simple: Prevention Through Exposure.
People don’t change because you tell them to.
They change when they experience what is possible.
A cooking class becomes exposure to a community kitchen.
A community kitchen becomes exposure to urban farming.
Urban farming becomes exposure to entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship becomes exposure to economic development.
Economic development becomes neighborhood transformation.
That’s not a program. That’s a pathway.
This is how I think about health equity strategy: not as a single intervention, but as a chain of experiences that slowly, steadily, and sustainably shift what is normal in a community.
How I Work
I don’t just “do nutrition.”
I coordinate stakeholders who have never sat at the same table: pastors, hospital leaders, city agencies, small business owners, funders, and community organizers. I listen for what each cares about most and then design structures that respect those realities.
My work includes:
- Designing health ministry strategies for churches that treat wellness as discipleship, not just a side project.
- Helping nonprofits align their programming, staffing, and partnerships with long-term health equity goals.
- Turning federal policy and grant language into practical steps that a corner store owner, a kitchen manager, or a ministry leader can actually use.
- Building kitchen, food system, and program infrastructures that can be sustained beyond a single grant cycle or charismatic leader.
Registered Dietitian? Yes. But that’s the credential, not the work.
The work is building what lasts.
Credentials
Professional Credentials
- Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN)
Licensed Dietitian Nutritionist (LDN)
Culinary Arts Training, Johnson & Wales University
CDC National Diabetes Prevention Program, Lifestyle Coach and Program Coordinator
Professional Memberships
- Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
Actively pursuing membership in the Grant Professionals Association and Health Ministries Association.
Ready to Talk?
If you're a community-based organization, church, faith-based organization, or mission-driven nonprofit ready to build lasting health equity infrastructure, I'd love to talk.