Contact Alisa
Helming Grow Food Northampton allows Alisa to bring her extensive background in program management, policy analysis and advocacy, and fundraising to work that is near and dear to her heart – food justice and environmental sustainability. Prior to joining the organization, Alisa served as the Director of NEARI Press, a specialty publishing house and training center, and was the principal in her own consulting firm specializing in organizational development, public health prevention of interpersonal violence, international conflict resolution, and social justice advocacy. Her clients included the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the International Women’s Peace Service, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, and several other local, national, and international organizations. Alisa also served as the Officer for Partnerships at Proteus Fund, as the Director of Public Policy for a national organization working to end child sexual abuse, as the Jerusalem-based editor of an online journal of alternative analysis of the Palestine-Israel conflict, and as the Director of Education and Prevention for an AIDS service organization.
Alisa is a long-time activist and community organizer working on issues as diverse, yet interconnected, as the climate emergency, peace and justice in Palestine and Israel, and abolition of the carceral continuum. She has been deeply involved in bringing restorative and transformative justice models to addressing harm in communities. Between 2014 and 2020, Alisa served as a Northampton, MA city councilor where she established a Select Committee on Pesticide Reduction and wrote and sponsored legislation to prohibit the use of pesticides in municipal spaces. She has a bachelor’s degree from Smith College and a Master’s in International Policy from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
