Jillian Jason

President

[email protected] 

Jillian brings a background in startup food businesses, having brought product lines to national distribution as well as crossed the first $1M sales mark with several NYC-based consumer packaged goods brands. Additionally, she ran a farm and in-house distributor in upstate NYC for the Foragers restaurant and grocery group. She now works in corporate information change, overseeing the process by which accurate product information is maintained online for a portfolio of 1.3M+ products. In her spare time, she hosts a weekly podcast and serves on her Condo Association Board as Treasurer. She lives in Rogers Park with her two cats.

Mary Meyer

Vic President

Finance/Fair Trade

[email protected]

Mary has a wealth of experience centered in community organizing in the Financial and International Fair Trade sectors. She is the founder of RPFC and has served on the Board for the past 3 years.

She wants to provide continuity of leadership by serving another term. Her passion for the Co-op has been expressed through her leadership, on the board and with the Community Engagement Team.

Mary is looking forward to the opening of a co-operative, international fresh market which will build bridges in our community and celebrate food from all corners of the world. During this upcoming term she plans to apply her networking and organizing skills to make deeper connections in the community and reach out all of our neighbors from many parts of the world.

Mary plans to apply her financial planning and strategic skills to the development of a business plan for the Co-op. She has a wealth of experience centered in community organizing in the Financial and International Fair Trade sectors. Her expertise is in building personal and financial relationships with individuals, business and organizations. Having been a designated Certified Financial Planner (CFP) and independent financial services consultant for 25 years, Mary has provided employee benefit consulting as well as retirement planning services to business and organizations.

Prior to Founding the RPFC, Mary served for three years as a start-up stage Board Member of Chicago Fair Trade. In this capacity, Mary raised funds for the organization in addition to educating the community about Fair Trade policies.

With an M.A. in International Studies, Mary has taken her expertise global - to Guatemala and Peru to market the products of Mayan artisans through MayaWorks and providing nutritional food to malnourished children in the Sacred Valley near Machu Picchu with Living Heart Peru. Mary wrote grant proposals, prepared newsletters, held fundraisers and built relationships between Living Heart and the communities it serves. Mary’s international leadership keenly serves the RPFC in its vision to build connections across cultures and communities.

David Mark

Treasurer

[email protected]

Rachel Rosner

Board Member

[email protected]

Rachel brings a green/equity lens to the Co-op board. She became involved because of her strong belief that food systems are an essential part of the conversation about reversing climate change. By sourcing food locally and organically as much as possible, we can make a great impact. Bulk foods also help to reduce plastic waste.

Rachel also values deeply the incredible diversity of this community. It provides the unique promise of being the first co-op of its kind with respect to integration and inclusion. Rachel sees this as an integral part of the co-op's mission.

Rachel is an extremely engaged community member and organizer. She has been a classroom teacher and an Environmental Education Consultant with a focus on connecting kids with nature, in Chicago, Evanston and Skokie for decades. She is a Climate Reality Leader, trained by Al Gore. She served as a Regional Director for Get Out the Vote for Hillary in 2016. She serves on the Board of Citizens Greener Evanston. She was a long-time Roger’s Parker now living in Evanston and sees great opportunity in the partnership between these great communities.

Kristin Alexander

Board Member

[email protected]

Kristin is passionate about healthy eating and bringing quality, ethically grown food to our community. She is excited about having a Co-op in the neighborhood which will unite Rogers Park and Evanston and create a community of people who share similar values. She believes strongly that being part of a community provides a sense of belonging and social connectedness, which then leads to improved mental health and well-being.

In her professional life, she works as a social worker at Heartland Health Center in Rogers Park, which serves predominately low-income people from various ethnic backgrounds. She also has a degree in economics and previously worked in the corporate world and co-owned a real estate company. Kristin lives in south Evanston with her husband, 3 children, dog and a few chickens who are “renting” space in her backyard coop.

Michelle Parker-Katz

Board Member

[email protected]

Michelle joined the Rogers Park Food Coop with a keen interest in building and sustaining spaces for inclusive, inviting and collaborative activities amongst diverse communities. Access to quality healthy food is a right for all people, and our food coop could be a space for exploring ways to bring that right into being. Community choices and engagement are paramount in her mind given that the coop is “ours”. As a teacher and teacher educator, Michelle sees opportunities in our coop for us to learn in holistic ways about things like cooking, arts, advocacy for kids and families, and building community empowerment toward social justice and equity that is at times sorely missing in our world. She hopes the coop could be a place for community meetings, classes, and exploration.

Since growing up in Philadelphia where she began volunteering early in social service work (with children and in health care), she has built a career of commitment to urban youth and families through exploring teaching and learning in urban schools. She taught in Philadelphia, Houston, TX, Kansas City, KS and Lansing, MI. As a teacher educator now, she has developed and sustained partnerships with numerous Chicago public schools where she collaborates with extraordinary youth, teachers and families. She is passionate about youth with disabilities gaining increased quality experiences in inclusive settings. In our coop, Michelle hopes to collaborate with multiple stakeholders to build opportunities for community learning and support. To do that, she plans to build on experiences with participating in and teaching about World Café conversations, engagement with Indivisible and political advocacy for candidates - and most importantly, supporting the clear ringing of multiple community voices in our coop.

Brooke Langton

Board Member

[email protected]

Brooke has been working with the Co- Op on the Community Engagement and Social Media Team as well as volunteering for about 2 years. She loves our mission and thinks that she would be able to bring a lot of what she has learned from these experiences as well as her grocery background to the Board.

Brooke’s passion is the Natural Product Community. she worked in Natural Grocers for nearly a decade, she held many positions from Apothecary Buyer to Florist. She has supported store openings in both Michigan and Illinois. She was able to make many lasting relationships with colleagues and suppliers that she can now call friends in this process.

Brooke is constantly trying new products, researching new trends and keeping up with what is going on in the local community. She is specifically interested in the Social Justice stance that is largely taken within the industry, which she thinks is supported in the work that the RPFC does.

Largely, Brooke’s volunteer work has been through the Rogers Park Food Co- Op with Community Engagement and Social Media Teams. In her professional life, she has been involved with Corporate Social Responsibility and Employee Advocacy Teams. She has assisted in curating an empowerment Instagram called Lady Pit Hair. She worked briefly with Food Not Bombs in Pilsen. She has also been involved with Girl Scouts USA and a Therapeutic Riding Stable called Pretty Pony Pastures. Brooke credits a lot of her work ethic to Girl Scouts, preparing her for leadership roles within the volunteer sector from an early age.

When assisting in opening the Detroit Grocer, Brooke was a part of another suburban location. She attended Town Halls with Residents, participated in Community Outreach and trained folks that were 85% within the community with limited Natural Food knowledge to prepare for opening. She worked overtime for about 6 months while the store grew faster than anyone had anticipated. She held training on products; ethics, practices and procedures within the Natural Food Industry. Her role was largely receiving new- hires to train due to need, while operating an over performing store.

Brooke’s involvement with Corporate Social Responsibility has challenged her to come up with more conscious solutions for operating a business with social responsibilities in mind. Her engagement with a diverse group of colleagues on social impacts made as an organization, her relationship building skills in addition to her volunteer work with the RPFC has ultimately prepared her for her role on the Rogers Park Board of Directors.

Matt Wechsler

Board Member

[email protected]

Matt believes that the co-op is entering a unique phase where maintaining focus on the mission statement is critical. The areas of ethical food production and social justice are particularly important to Matt and have been the topics of his last two films as a documentarian. His first film, Sustainable, explored the dichotomy between small sustainable farms and the industrialized food system. His most recent film, Right to Harm, exposes the public health impact of factory farming on rural communities. Matt believes that this social justice issue is completely disregarded at the grocery store level, but that doesn’t have to be the case.

Aside from Matt’s passion to expose issues related to our food system, he is an avid gardener. His family’s tiny 25x150 lot in Evanston includes a 500 square foot garden where Matt and his wife grow over 75 varieties of edible plants.

Through his work making films, Matt has worked closely with numerous non-profits: Slow Foods, Socially Responsible Agricultural Project, ASPCA, Grace Communications, Resource Media, One Earth Film Festival, Food and Water Watch, Spence Farm Foundation, Family Farmed and Frontera Farmers Foundation. He also participated in Key Club in high school and Alpha Phi Omega in college- community service organizations. There is alignment and crossover between the groups Matt has worked with and the work he will do on the Board of the Rogers Park Food Co-op.

Matt has a wealth of experience working collaboratively and working in team environments. He brings leadership, creativity, solution-based thinking and expert communication skills to his work on the Board of the Rogers Park Food Co-op.