Meet Our 2021 Facilitator Cohort
Our volunteer facilitator cohort is selected each year from an exceptional pool of applicants who have completed our Facilitating Stories for Impact training, as well as an Advanced Training with Real Food Real Stories’ leadership.
Cohort members are essential collaborators and partners in our live storytelling events. Using the skills gained through their RFRS facilitation trainings, cohort members leads storytellers through the RFRS Storytelling Guide and help them to polish their story for an audience. Each cohort member is paired with 1-2 storytellers and offered the opportunity to deepen their craft while developing relationships with visionary leaders in our food community.
We are exceptionally grateful to our cohort for the gift of their time, energy, and abundant skills.
Zeenab Aneez (she/her) Zeenab believes that everyone has a story to tell, and that listening to each others' stories shape who we are. She first experienced the magic of stories in her grandparents' kitchen in Kerala, India and continues to seek out that magic halfway across the world. Through her work with HEAL Food Alliance, she's had the honor of uplifting the voices of incredible Black, Indigenous and People of Color who are organizing for better food and farm systems across the country. Because of them, she believes that fairer, more sustainable food systems are within our reach.
Memory food: Steaming appams (hoppers) and malayali chicken stew"
ZEENAB ANEEZ
Conor Cusack (he/his)
After leaving home and his mother’s bustling, pastry filled kitchen for college, Conor rediscovered the power of food and story first through food studies and then by starting a brunch pop-up to serve classmates and eventually complete strangers. After working in restaurants for several years following school, Conor transitioned into cooking for the Minnesota Central Kitchen project, a hunger relief effort started in response to the pandemic. Real Food Real Stories has reignited his passion for uniting story and cooking and continues to challenge and reshape his perspective on how the two intersect. He believes cooking is a powerful starting point for sparking an intimacy with our food and loved ones that can quickly extend to the land around us, its history, and the growers on which we depend. Conor is passionate about reconnecting people to land through reconnecting them with other actors in our food systems. He considers cooking and sharing food as a way to say “I see you. You are not forgotten. I am here for you,” and believes just food networks keep this value at the center of their work.
Conor believes story can be found in the practice of butchery or foraging just as much as in the practice of gathering around a table or trying a new recipe with a friend. You can find him cracking open jars and sniffing his bubbling ferments, searching for obscure cookbooks in thrift stores, or maybe just waking up before the sun rises to bake his mother’s scones. As much as he dreams about those scones, the food memory that replays in his head often these days is tasting fresh, wild sumac for the first time after moving to Minnesota.
CONOR CUSACK
Amanda El-Dakhakhni
Amanda comes to Real Food Real Stories with a background in law, public policy, and social impact entrepreneurship. She has spent her career facilitating meaningful conversations across aisles, from advising emerging technology startups on how they can grow responsibly and partner with policymakers to advance common social goals, to her time in the U.S. Senate and Obama-Biden White House bridging gaps between America and the Middle East through public diplomacy. She is also the co-founder of an Egyptian street food popup serving Egypt’s national dish, koshary: a hearty, vegetarian grain bowl which has somehow escaped both the Mediterranean and grain bowl food trends. Born and raised in Hawaii, Amanda currently lives on Ohlone land in Oakland, CA with her husband and toddler daughter, whose curiosity inspires her every day.
Memory food: My grandmother’s rice and “fasolia beda”, a white bean tomato stew, which she always has waiting for me—no matter what time my flight to Egypt arrives!
AMANDA EL-DAKHAKHNI
Yana Gilbuena
Yana Gilbuena, a Philippine-born, critically acclaimed ancestrally-taught chef, started SALO Series to share with the world the vibrant food culture of the Philippines. The Salo Series hosts Filipino Kamayan dinners, wherein food is served on communal tables decked with banana leaves, and guests are encouraged to eat with their hands, in pre-colonial tradition. In her American tour, Yana hosted pop-up dinners in 50 states in 50 weeks, as well as across Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Australia, Europe and her home country, Philippines. She is a 2017 Stone Barns Exchange Fellow and has also been featured in major publications such as The New York Times, SF Chronicle and National Geographic. She's been published in The Cherry Bombe Cookbook, Feed the Resistance and has self-published her own: No Forks Given of March 2019. This global culinary nomad aims to further her mission and aims to host a Salo on every continent (and resume this quest once we've found a vaccine for COVID 19).
Fave food memory: Slurping a bushel of blanched oysters and chasing it with spiced vinegar at a roadside eatery near the sea in her hometown, Iloilo.
YANA GILBUENA
Stephanie Lew
Stephanie has discovering warmth and community through food. Growing up, she felt her environment was cold and lacking connection. In college, she came across a community centered around food and in that community she found that connection she was looking for. She now feels in deep connection with people, the land, and herself and is passionate about sharing this connection with others. Her involvement in the food system has included farming on a 400-acre organic vegetable and animal farm, co-founding a start-up to address food waste and food insecurity through the sale of ‘ugly produce’, writing soil science material for youth, and cooking, all of which have strengthened her connection to food.
For Stephanie, food is the easiest and most human way to understand and build connection with the world around her. Recently, she has been exploring her identity and past experiences as a Chinese-American through food. Real Food Real Stories has helped her unearth her own personal food stories, a stepping stone to accessing more vulnerable parts of herself and being able to share that with others to build a regenerative and just food system.
STEPHANIE LEW
Lindsey Lunsford
Dr. Lindsey Lunsford is harnessing the power of storytelling to reclaim the narrative and fight the anti-Blackness embedded in perceptions of African American food systems. Inspired by her alma mater, Tuskegee University, Dr. Lunsford’s research focuses on the restoring of African American food systems and foodways for the pursuit of cultural justice and food sovereignty.
LINDSEY LUNSFORD
Stefani Renee
Stefani inherited a love of cooking, throwing parties, telling stories, and creating from her Granny Octavia. This fuels her passion for good food, creating a beautiful lifestyle, and building community through sharing food with others. By day, Stefani focuses on systems transformation and reducing racial disparities in the criminal legal and education fields and the impact on youth. By night, Stefani can be found in her kitchen developing recipes, honing her photography skills, and interviewing tastemakers in the food community and beyond for her food and lifestyle blog Savor and Sage.
STEFANI RENEE MEDLEY