Staff Spotlight: Julia
Choosing Abundance, Building Community
For Julia, community is something you can feel the moment you walk through the kitchen doors at The Nashville Food Project.
It is the volunteer carefully chopping vegetables beside someone they just met. The farmer arriving with freshly harvested produce. The partner organization picking up meals to share with neighbors across the city. The regular rhythm of people coming together, each carrying a different story, skill, or offering.
“Community in my role looks like never knowing who is going to walk through our doors on a daily basis,” Julia shared. “The patchwork of people I come into contact with doing this work is vast, and that diversity is beautiful.”
As Director of Culinary Operations, Julia helps oversee the preparation and sharing of thousands of nourishing meals each week. But for her, the work has always been about more than food alone. It is about the relationships built around it.
Over time, she has watched the culture inside the kitchen ripple outward into the broader community.
“The community we have cultivated internally through our kitchen team and regular volunteers projects impact outward,” she said, “to the people and places where collaborative care is needed most.”
That idea of collaborative care has deeply shaped the way Julia sees both food and community. Through the daily work of preparing meals, recovering ingredients, and creating pathways for access, she has come to believe even more strongly in the power of collective action.
“Cultivating community around creative ways to increase access to food across the city has shown me how many small actions add up to create change,” she reflected.
Working inside our kitchens has also challenged the scarcity mindset that so often shapes conversations around food and resources.
“The knowledge that there is enough to go around is such a strong motivator in everything I do,” Julia said. “I know there is enough because I see how much food comes through our doors every day.”
For Julia, witnessing that abundance firsthand has transformed the way she moves through the world. Instead of focusing on limitation, she sees possibility. Instead of competition, she sees care.
Grounding her in that work is the memory of our founder Tallu Quinn, whose vision and advocacy continue to shape the organization years later.
“The memory of our founder Tallu, and the fierce advocate she was for the work we do, keeps me grounded in moving this mission forward,” Julia said.
That legacy lives on not only in the meals shared each day, but also in the community that continues to gather around the table: volunteers, staff, farmers, partners, and neighbors choosing, together, to care for one another.
In Julia’s eyes, community is not something abstract. It is built day by day through shared labor, shared meals, and the belief that there is enough when we work together.
