About the Founder
LaShauna Austria is the owner and principal operator of Seeds of Change Consulting and Kindred Seedlings Farm. She possesses a demonstrated record of collaborating with rural communities, both faith-based and secular, to address race, food justice, land ownership, and equity issues. Building on her substantial experience in leadership, management, and administrative roles with for-profit and nonprofit organizations, she has devoted her current professional life to promoting racial equity and building better food systems locally and beyond.
LaShauna is the co-founder of the Saxapahaw Social Justice Exchange, a community group formed to offer deep conversations about race and equity. She is also a founding member of Alamance Racial Equity Alliance, with whom she helps organize local workshops delivered by the Racial Equity Institute. She has also served as a team member focused on bringing racial equity issues to the table with Community Food Strategies, which works to support local food councils and networks for equitable policy change at the local, state, and national level.
As the founder and principal of Seeds of Change Consulting, LaShauna provides racial equity consulting with a focus on the food system, strategies for supporting the growth of farmers of color, organizational and leadership development, research, evaluation, feasibility studies, facilitation, and a range of services to individuals and organizations seeking to deepen and apply a racial equity analysis to their work and missions. Born and raised in rural Alamance County, LaShauna is passionate about rural life, preserving farmland and natural resources, and Southern foodways.
Founder of Seeds of Change Consulting
Collective Partners
Crystal is the co-founder of Seven Directions of Service with her husband. She is a citizen of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation in Burlington, NC. Crystal is also an expert in her field of Strategic Intelligence, Political Campaigns, and Public Administration. She has conducted training along and around the East Coast on Coordinated Tribal/Community Response for emergency management, through natural, cyber, or man-made disasters. Crystal is an alumnus of the 2020 Fall cohort of the Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA) Accelerator for Grassroots Women Environmental Leaders. Crystal currently consults on political and tribal campaigns, from election to protecting sacred places. Crystal is currently working on her Doctorate at the University of Dayton and dissertation on Social Justice of Missing Murdered Indigenous Women and Gas/Oil Pipelines in frontline communities.
Beverly has a BS degree in Public Health Education with a concentration in Community Health and a dual Master’s degree in Business Administration / Health Administration. She is a Program Manager in the Department of Equity and Inclusion with UNC Health on the Community Team. Beverly has over five years of racial equity work in varying sectors including early childhood development, public health, and community organizing. She has undergone extensive training through the Racial Equity Institute and various other organizations. She is on the board of the Alamance Racial Equity Alliance (AREA) and facilitates the Alamance County Community Remembrance Coalition in partnership with the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. In her previous work with the NC Orange County Health Department, she led many equity initiatives including the internal Racial Equity Commission that developed the department’s first Racial Equity Strategic Plan; the Health Equity Council that worked directly with community partners to raise awareness and develop strategies to address equity in the community. Beverly enjoys spending time with her family, working with other anti-racist community members and organizations, and traveling and enjoying life whenever she can.
Kim is an experienced life strategist, an engaging keynote speaker, and a skilled workshop facilitator. Her workshops are experiential and transformational. She specializes in identifying the issues that keep us stuck and addresses them by developing a personalized toolbox to help us hurdle over them. Her favorite work is done in circles. Her favorite topics include Emotional intelligence, Gifts of Conflict, Impacts of Historical Trauma, Cultural Healing, Innocuous Nature of Fear, most of which she includes in Race, Equity, and Inclusion work. Born and educated in Baltimore, MD she currently lives in Robeson County, NC where her roots run deep as a member of the Lumbee Tribe. Kim serves on many local, state, and national boards that support community activism and local economy through arts, food, culture, and tourism. She recently served as Chair of the Board of Alternate Roots. In 2015 she founded Artist Market-Pembroke, providing retail opportunities for local and regional artists in southeast North Carolina. Her love of community and films is expressed as the curator of the annual Lumbee Film Festival (along with Cucalorus) and the quarterly CommUnity Cinema (in partnership with Working Films). She expresses her creativity as a writer and workshop/training facilitator.
Beza (she/they) is a queer, Ethiopian-American poet with a passion for unnecessary hyphens and decadent imagery. They recently graduated with a degree in creative writing and women’s studies from Florida State University where they still reside in lovely Tallahassee. Through their time at FSU, they pursued writing as a study with the long term goal of earning their Masters and eventually their Doctorate. They are a fervent supporter of the Oxford comma. The three books on their nightstand are bell hooks’ All About Love, Sharon Olds’ The Father, and Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother. In their off time, they enjoy browsing Zillow for their dream home, rearranging their apartment, and watching reruns of Cheers.
Lexy has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Health Studies and minors in African and African American Studies and Public Policy. Based in Durham, North Carolina, she works for Alamance Achieves, a localized education equity initiative that seeks to use data-driven practices, a racial equity lens, and community co-development to ensure Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students succeed across education pathways and as a trainer with the Racial Equity Institute (REI). She is also a member of the Health Equity Collective in Alamance County (a Community Based Participatory Research partnership) and the Health Equity and Racism (HER) Lab with Elon University. She brings understanding from her Public Health background by studying and researching the Black Woman’s psychosocial experience and learned behaviors of Black daughters, which led to advocating for Black maternal health and healing within health equity work. Lexy enjoys her time cultivating a community centered on anti-racism principles and focusing on building opportunities for young professionals to grow their anti-racism work. You will find Lexy enjoying a good book or podcast in her downtime.
Min Jae is a pastor and a member of the Seeds of Change Consulting team. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Master of Divinity from Duke University and is working on a Certificate in Spiritual Direction and Social Transformation from the Center for Prophetic Imagination and the Minnesota Institute of Contemplation and Healing.
As a 1st-generation Corean immigrant-settler, her presence on Turtle Island, specifically on the ancestral and current home of the Occaneechi band of the Saponi Nation, is a result of voluntary family migration that continues the ongoing colonial violence to the land’s original tenders and wisdom holders. Thus, she seeks life-long paths that lead toward disentanglement from the multifaceted powers of cishetwhitecolonial dominance. She works from the belief that the return, healing, and restoration of the self, collective, and Earth are only possible through returning and participating with the land to indigenous hands, care, and spirit.
Her work in faith and spiritual leadership has made her sensitive to the ways dominant Western cultures eagerly appropriate Eastern philosophies and cultures—cutting off their identity and roots—to consume as medicine from dominant toxins. Thus, she is devoted to challenging the rising prominence of Anti-Asian violence within spiritual spaces and building just, anti-racist, decolonized, indigenizing ways that foster spiritual depth for individuals and communities.
Jean is a trainer with the Racial Equity Institute and a consultant with Seeds of Change Consulting. She draws on over fifteen years of experience in public health, food and agriculture, economic development, and the arts. Throughout her career, Jean has helped design and direct programs, develop feasibility studies, produce successful documentaries and campaigns, and establish new organizations. Alongside an experienced team, she trains and advises leaders and organizations in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion. She has worked with organizations large and small, including Fortune 100 companies, nonprofits, cooperatives, land trusts, and farms.
Jean’s writings on race, climate, and the food system appear in YES! Magazine, Pressenza, and elsewhere. She is the author of Nature’s Remedies: An Illustrated Guide to Healing Herbs (Chronicle Books). Jean holds a Bachelor’s in Sociology from Wesleyan University and studied Biology at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. A long-time student of nutrition and health sciences, she also trained at the Herbal Academy and is an Associate Member of the American Herbalists Guild.
Jenn is the founder of Justice for All Education. She holds a Master’s Degree in Peace & Conflict Studies, with research focusing on the correlation between lived experiences and identity formation. Her background includes years of program design for teams and groups looking to advance skills and knowledge in areas of diversity, inclusion, leadership, and cultural intelligence. Jenn’s commitment to moving us all towards the goal of an equitable lived experience has guided her approach to community engagement, in providing direct support to folks seeking that resource, as well as challenging systems and philosophies perpetuating the status quo. Program focus for Justice for All includes integrating aspects of education, experiences, and opportunities to get involved in community action to create, and sustain, authentic relationships.
Linden co-founded Food Insight Group (FIG) as a way to continue her passion for community-led, food-as-social-justice work. She holds a PhD in Nutrition Intervention and Policy from UNC-Chapel Hill, and she relishes the opportunity to work across disciplines, social agendas, and geographies to build programs, policies, research, and connections that promote the health and wellbeing of communities. As a former “Lunch Lady,” she has a particular passion for supporting schools’, students’, and families’ efforts to grow thriving school food systems. Other skills include research and evaluation, visioning, and project implementation. She believes all projects must center race and climate crisis, or there’s no point in doing food systems work.
Tanya is a social worker and community organizer in Alamance County. After 10 years in Corporate America, Tanya turned to a career in social work with a focus on community and school social work, eventually working for 5 years as a middle school social worker in ABSS. Attending the Racial Equity Institute’s Phase 1 workshop led her to start a life-long journey of understanding systemic racism and how it is the root cause of society’s ills, harming us all. She now works to fight systemic racism through education and policy change through several local organizations including the Alamance Racial Equity Alliance and Alamance Whites Against White Supremacy. She is passionate about equity in education and meeting white people where they are to discuss racism. She holds an MBA from Mississippi State University and an MSW from UNC-Charlotte.
Abbey is based at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS) where her focus is increasingly on supporting coalitions to become effective multi-racial teams. Abbey takes a particular interest in the work of white women to address power and whiteness so that a culture of interconnection is possible. Abbey has facilitated nonprofit and for-profit projects in strategic planning and internal systems design over the last 10 years. Abbey is certified in Visual Coaching, a practice that draws on right brain wisdom [creativity and art] as an important tool in dismantling systems of oppression and building liberatory structures. She brings these skills and her belief in holistic approaches and the importance of art in our collective journey into her work as a designer, racial justice advocate, and human being. A native of Eastern NC (Coree and Croatan Land), Abbey hails from a long line of fishermen, boat builders, and educators. Her work over the last decade at the intersection of food and community builds on her training in public health and community-engaged design. Abbey is passionate about designing systems and spaces that center humanity and liberation, and believes that this is necessarily both individual and collective work.
Meagan is an experienced educator and community organizer, skilled in communications and civic engagement campaigns. While pursuing degrees in Psychology and History at Florida State University, she supervised a youth mentoring program in the highly segregated Tallahassee public school system, an experience that would draw her into a life of teaching and community involvement fighting harmful, racist educational policy. Meagan has successfully created three advocacy groups and countless issue based campaigns focused on immigration rights, educational equity, COVID safety and access to healthcare. Her campaigns have been featured in major news outlets, podcasts, the HBO documentary “Q: Into the Storm” and even the Journal of Hospital Medicine. Leveraging her experience as an organizer, Meagan creates relevant and sticky communications to promote events and facilitate understanding of complex issues. She uses skills honed as a teacher to build inclusive, forward thinking partnerships with diverse groups, grounded in mutual respect and focused on confronting systems and institutions that protect white advantage.