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Where did your relationship to this place begin? I originally moved to Allston back in 2021 so I kind of.. I’ve been, I’ve been in Boston, including undergrad, since 2015 but that was in Waltham, and then moved to Brookline for about a year, and then the pandemic hit, and so I kind of took a break from Boston and went back home to Texas for about a year, and so when I was making the move and transitioned back, Allston kind of stood out to me as a vibrant community that I feel like I saw myself actually settling down or creating roots here.

As a community and city, we’re in a very interesting place to like be connected to other parts of Boston, even though we’re not Downtown, and sometimes I feel like we get a little bit forgotten, but yeah, I think the food, the culture, the general vibe of Allston, I think really spoke to me.

I think now it’s really exciting to be living in the community that I’m working in, and I think that has been a really pivotal shift for me, and it feels like another motivation to continue to live in this community and grow the community of people that I know in this area.

Prior, you did food and climate justice work in Chelsea and East Boston. Where might you see parallels between Allston and the neighborhoods? I think community is a really central part of what I look for and what I seek, and I really saw that and found that in Chelsea, not only just personal connections, but the collaboration that takes place and how organizations and different stakeholders come together to really serve and improve the health and wellbeing of Chelsea and East Boston and so I really see that very deeply in Allston, which I think is really exciting to come into this space, and I wouldn’t say, ‘I am the, like, Allston queen,’ but I guess it is interesting to see and learn from people who have been here for decades and have been doing the work to improve this community for decades, and so that sense of community is really clear and really vibrant here in Allston-Brighton, and I think I feel really lucky to be able to join this really vibrant space that have been has been growing and play a role in that as well.

When did you start realizing how place and wellbeing are intersected? Was that something that you were thinking about in college? This actually dates back for me to high school. I think there’s two pieces. I was at the same location all throughout my schooling, and the new Cowboys stadium was being built near our school, and there were hundreds and hundreds of apartments that were basically torn down to support this new stadium being built, and I didn’t have the language or education at the time to really understand this was gentrification, this was human displacement, but I remember being really curious and concerned about, ‘Where did all these people go?’ This huge sports arena stadium is now on top of where their homes used to be, and so that was always something that stood out to me, and then I think I think that was a touchpoint for seeing all these bigger systemic inequities at play. 

In high school, I also had the opportunity to take a college course at Johns Hopkins over the summer, and the course that I took was around public health and food deserts and food access, and I think that really opened my eyes to also thinking about place and how systems are actively being built to prevent people from accessing such an essential resource to survive.

How did you decide that you wanted to invest your career into food systems? I’ve always had a really deep passion for food, and that shows up in a lot of ways. I’m a big cook, love brand new restaurants, love cooking, love posting dinner parties, all the things. Then there’s this other health and food access, food justice space that I also just deeply passionate in, and so when I was making that decision, food was a great experience in just doing some deep connection, and getting folks basic access, and not even folks — kids — young people touching soil for the first time — growing a vegetable for the first time. There’s something about a child’s eyes, they light up when they see that.

At Food Corps, I think we weren’t necessarily doing bigger systems-level work, but I think just that little piece of getting kids and young people access to foods and talking about their relationship to food, and why there aren’t gardens or growing spaces or green space in the communities that they live in. And how can we break down those barriers? I do think Food Corp hit all my interests — intersections of cooking and teaching and food access. I was also working with an organization called Healthy Chelsea through my Food Corps experience, and they were connected to MGH, and so that’s kind of where the bigger food access systems-level work came into play, which is really exciting to see how Healthy Chelsea was working to address some of the food access issues in Chelsea.

Where did your zest for cooking come from? It stems back to my childhood, and probably, and definitely comes from my mom and my grandmother, who are both amazing cooks, and I feel like for me, culturally, food is really embedded into our holidays and how we come together. I’m half-North Indian and half-South Indian. Food is a really great way to just know and be introduced to other cultures.

Tell us more about your dinner parties. They’re not as frequent as I would love in my one-bedroom apartment, but you know, in my very small kitchen, but I manage, and, for me, all the work and effort that goes into hosting a dinner party is made worth it when I see my friends being like, ‘Oh my god, this is amazing,’ or tasting something new for the first time, or trying a new flavor, there’s something really beautiful or something that I get a lot of joy out of sharing that with people.

We don’t necessarily think about how Allston-Brighton has a food access issue, but from conversations with folks intimately connected with the food equity space in the area, it does have an issue. Can you talk more about how that looks for you, and what are the dreams you have for what ABHC can do with addressing food access in Allston-Brighton? One of the biggest things that is so important is really getting folks connected to locally-grown nutritious and culturally-relevant foods, and I think that is something that ABHC, especially through the Brighton Farmers Market, is really trying to work on and to bridge that gap, because of inaccessible grocery stores, the dominance of fast-casual, fast food restaurants and issues of transportation — all these things play a role in people’s ability to access food in Allston-Brighton.

For ABHC, it really is important to reduce that gap and dismantle some of those barriers that we’re seeing, and then also go to the people. We don’t want to add another barrier, and we want to increase people’s ability to access some of these critical resources, and so I think the Farmers Market is a really beautiful way that we’re doing that, and it not only is connecting people directly to foods or culturally relevant foods that they may not see at a grocery store, but is also building this sense of community and celebration, and I think that is also such an amazing time and space.

What are the challenges that the organization is facing, and what are your dreams for the organization? We’re at a really interesting point in time with ABHC. We’re a small but mighty team, and I think we do hold a lot, and so we’re trying to think about ways to bring people into the organization more actively.

We really want to push our work forward based on what the community wants and needs, so I think we’re working to do more organizing and do more base building and really expand the like reach of ABHC, while also thinking about expanding some of our program areas — the air quality project that we’re working on right now, I think, has been a really cool, pivotal moment for us to continue to branch out to do environmental justice or climate resiliency work, and I think I feel really excited about that, like my time at GreenRoots in Chelsea, tackling environmental justice (EJ) was the core of what GreenRoots was doing, and it is interesting to see that there is an opportunity to do that work, and but there isn’t an organization fully doing EJ work in Allston-Brighton, and so it would be really exciting to kind of do some of that air quality mitigation, heat extreme heat mitigation, and touch on some of our food access. At the same time I think it’s all connected, and so I do see there’s a lot of opportunity, and the challenges come up with being a small team and capacity and funding, but I think we’re all working to be aligned and pushing the work forward.