Linda Nageotte

As President & CEO, I lead Food Lifeline's efforts to end hunger in Western Washington. Food Lifeline is a food justice organization that believes every person deserves access to enough nutritious, culturally relevant food not just to live, but to thrive. We understand that hunger and food insecurity are symptoms of poverty, and we know that systemic and structural inequity and injustice are leading drivers of poverty. Food Lifeline helps fill the immediate needs of people facing hunger today by procuring and distributing 55 million meals worth of nutritious, culturally relevant food every year to a network of 415 neighborhood food banks, meal programs, shelters, and food access sites. We work to reduce food insecurity by developing long-term, community-led programs and partnerships, focused on the root causes of hunger and poverty. At Food Lifeline, we look to people with lived and living experience of food insecurity as experts in solving hunger, and we invest in the strategies and opportunities they identify as most critical to address. Food Lifeline believes in the power of public policy advocacy, and we work to engage our entire community in order to mobilize the social and political will to end hunger. We believe these approaches improve our systemic effectiveness, expand capacity to equitably serve all people experiencing food insecurity, create positive change at the root cause level, and ultimately help build a more just food system.