Laurie Wayne

Laurie is a former bike messenger, technologist, farmer, permaculture designer, and language teacher. Immediately prior to joining UC ANR as a Community Nutrition, Health, and Food Systems Advisor, she was the US director of a global community of nonprofits known as the Open Food Network which is made up of techies, farmers, foodies, and good-hearted people who take care of an open source commons of code, knowledge, and connections made to support local food systems anywhere. Her position at ANR gives her the opportunity to use skills she has developed in every former job, and more, as she supports regional food systems and communities throughout the Northeast California Foodshed. 

Laurie has practiced Community Based Participatory Research in Oregon as part of her Master's thesis and beyond. She worked with a group of immigrants and refugees in East Portland to revive a defunct school garden and created an international,  intergenerational, intercultural, hands-on language learning lab and community garden. As a member of a project team at Oregon State University Extension, she researched the influence of access to healthy food and physical activity on health outcomes for children and their families. Her current research is focused on the attitudes and perceptions of food security and community prosperity as they are influenced by environmental factors like climate extremes and distance from larger population centers and markets as well as distances between communities in the rural intermountain high desert.

She operated a farm in eastern Modoc County and now makes her home in Alturas, traveling south and east to join with communities in Lassen and Siskiyou counties as they develop ways to support healthy, stable, well-fed communities.