Lena is originally from the Boston area, and graduated from Macalester College with a major in Latin American Studies and minors in Economics, Political Science and Portuguese. After five years working with immigrant rights organizations, she began her studies interested in the root causes of undocumented migration to the United States, and quickly learned how interlinked these issues are with the shortcomings of global agricultural and food systems. To learn more about these agrifood systems and their impact on vulnerable populations, she researched agricultural practices in Cuba and Puerto Rico, interned along the US/Mexico border, completed a semester of agricultural economics at a Brazilian university, and worked with the ecological branch of Argentina’s National Agricultural Technology Institute (INTA). For the past four years, Lena worked at a Minnesota-based food bank, running several projects including connecting immigrant families with food benefits, piloting child hunger intervention programming, and providing capacity-building support to hunger relief agencies in the Twin Cities. 

Lena is interested in Participatory Action Research and community-driven efforts to promote land sovereignty, sustainable agriculture and food access, particularly in Latin America. She hopes to further explore the intersection between migration and agriculture, along with how to integrate data tools like GIS. In her free time, Lena enjoys biking, hiking, working on music projects and learning new languages. 

Lena's LinkedIn