Jennifer Karaca

Background

About Jennifer Karaca

Jennifer Karaca is the Founding Executive Director of Common Ground Collective (CGC), a dynamic non-profit organization committed to increasing food security, economic and educational opportunities for residents. While also fostering sustainable farming practices, and building resilient communities. With a profound passion for social impact, Jennifer also co-wrote the legislation and led community grassroots efforts to create the Maui County Department of Agriculture. Which is the first County level Department of Agriculture in the State of Hawaii. Most recently through her work with CGC, she had helped develop the systems and provided support for fire relief efforts which has resulted in hundreds of thousands hot meals and hundreds of thousand of pounds of local produce, proteins and other food items distributed through community hubs and food boxes in order to feed those in need while also supporting the local farmer and producers who lost many market connections in order to prevent a local food economy collapse. She has played a crucial role in nurturing partnerships with local communities, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and businesses in order to highlight our community strengths and also the need for collective action, in order to identify patterns that negatively affect our community to engineer change and build a more resilient food system.