Resume
Autumn Alaniz-Wiggins

Fractional Program & Development Lead · Food, Youth & Equity · Oakland, CA

I own the work
that falls between roles.

Not everyone farms. Not everyone cooks. But everyone eats. I build the programs that teach all three, fund them, and leave them running. The work that sits between program and development is the work I own.

I take ownership of the programs and the funding that mission-driven teams cannot staff on their own. Hand me the gap, a garden or youth program to build, a grant to win, a stretched team to train, and I scope it, run it, and hand it back working. One person, accountable for the whole thing.

See my services My teaching method
Available within two weeks for contract and temp roles
Autumn cooking with two teens in the camp outdoor kitchen

What brings you here

You have a program to build, run, or fund, and not enough hands to do it.

The problem

You have a garden, kitchen, youth, or food-justice program that needs to get built, get better, or get funded, and no single person who can own all of it. Your team is stretched, the work keeps slipping between roles, and a full-time hire is not where you are right now.

The questions you're asking

Can someone step in on contract and own this without being managed? Can the same person design the curriculum, teach it, train our staff and volunteers, and help fund it? Will they get equity right with our youth and our community, and can they start soon?

What's missing on your team

The rare person who lives in both worlds, program and development. Most curriculum people cannot fundraise, and most fundraisers have never run a garden or taught a class. You are missing the bridge between the work and the money, someone who has done both and can hold them at once.

What I own

I take the project off your desk and run it end to end: scope, build, deliver, hand off. I design the program with human-centered design and teach it, train your people, run point on the grant, set up the data that proves it worked, and carry it to your donors and community. You get one accountable owner for the gap, not another role to manage.

About

Food is where land, health, and power meet, and that is where I operate.

I have been part of the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco Camp Mendocino for over ten years, five of them on staff running the garden and food program and, most recently, the dining hall. Along the way I have farmed five operations across three countries, cooked in four kitchens, and worked at a regional food bank serving hundreds of thousands of neighbors.

I also raise the money that keeps these programs alive. I have evaluated nearly $3M in grant requests, won foundation grants, cultivated donors at events that raised six figures for youth, and built the funding case for new programs from scratch. I ground all of it in cultural relevance, nutrition science, food justice, and human-centered design, the IDEO and Stanford d.school practice of building programs with the people they are for, not just for them. For me, equity is not an add-on to food education. It is the point of it.

10+
years with Camp Mendocino
34%
rise in garden program satisfaction
~$3M
grant requests evaluated
$160K+
raised for youth scholarships
17,000+
supporters and volunteers managed
Autumn Alaniz-Wiggins smiling with arms outstretched

Experience in food, garden & development

A career built around growing, cooking, sharing, and funding good food.

Boys & Girls Club of SF: Camp Mendocino

Garden & Food Program Coordinator → Dining Hall Manager · Seasonal, 2018–2025
  • Turned a historically disliked program into a culturally responsive, youth-led platform across five tracks: gardening, food justice, cooking and nutrition, Indigenous stewardship, and mind-and-body wellness.
  • Drove a 34% increase in garden programming satisfaction, comparing youth surveys from 2018 and 2024, with a challenge-by-choice model that let young people choose how they engaged.
  • Built the impact case that won board funding for the camp's first outdoor kitchen, with running water, a grill, a bike-powered smoothie machine, and a clay-fired pizza oven, growing the program budget, the team, and the teen staff in the process.
  • Spoke at the Guardsmen Silent Wine Auction, a donor cultivation event that raised over $160,000 in scholarships for summer programs, and mentored two consecutive garden specialists, including a young person who grew up in the program and now leads the garden himself.

Regenerative & Organic Farming

WWOOF & Workaway · US, Egypt & Turkey, 2020–2025
  • Farmed two seasons at Peace and Plenty Saffron Farm in California, a USDA-certified farm in Oregon, and an organic farm in Florida: harvesting, weeding, bed preparation, propagation, composting, and farmers market stalls.
  • Worked farms in Egypt and Turkey, teaching hosts about cover crops for reversing desertification and holistic poultry wellness, and developed a regenerative agriculture guide for South Sinai.
  • Consistently rated an excellent volunteer by hosts for hard work, teamwork, and bringing real research to the field.

Alameda County Community Food Bank

Volunteer Engagement Coordinator · Contract, 2025–2026
  • Led a Giving Day videography campaign that won the top Bay Area regional vote and secured a $25,000 Clorox Foundation grant, plus additional employee donations.
  • Led volunteer orientations and trainings at the warehouse, teaching the reality that one in four Alameda County neighbors faces food insecurity, compared with one in ten Californians, and ran specialized orientations and tours for visiting youth groups.
  • Managed records of 17,000+ volunteers and supporters in Salesforce, evaluated roughly $1.75M in grant requests as an award committee member, and applied human-centered design, the practice popularized by IDEO and the Stanford d.school, to help move programming from food charity to food justice.

Development & Donor Engagement

Across food banks, camps & campuses
  • Evaluated nearly $3M in grant requests across two award committees, advising funding decisions including ready-made meals through Measure W.
  • Cultivated alumni and individual donors as a Presidential Ambassador to the Student Philanthropy Council, providing white-glove engagement at banquets, board dinners, and cultivation events.
  • Stewarded a $24M organizational budget with a 17-member team as Student Body President and Chair of the Board, and managed a $16,000 program budget across 20+ events with zero overruns.
  • Built an AI-assisted donor outreach and sponsorship-pitch tool through prompt design to drive corporate giving for summer camp, and am completing the UC Davis Fundraising and Development Foundations certificate in 2026.

Kitchens, Nutrition & Research

Dining, food service & food science
  • Cooked and managed food service in summer camps, a retirement home, and university on-campus dining, maintaining equipment and following food safety and sanitation standards.
  • Worked as a student research assistant on a peer-reviewed nutrition study (Klobodu et al., 2022) in the CSU Chico Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences.
  • Completed four-plus semesters of nutrition coursework, including Food Safety and Sanitation, Nutrition Counseling and Education, Nutrition Throughout the Life Cycle, and Socioeconomic Class and Food Injustice.

Signature method

Challenge by choice: let youth pick their own path.

When I took over the garden program at Camp Mendocino, it was one of the least popular activities at camp. Youth were assigned to it, and assigned youth resist. I rebuilt it around a principle from experiential education called challenge by choice: young people choose which activity to join from several running at the same time, and they choose how far to push themselves once they are in it. Instead of one mandatory block, a young person walks into a menu, gardening, food justice, cooking and nutrition, Indigenous stewardship, or mind and body wellness, and picks. By 2024, satisfaction with garden programming had risen 34% over 2018.

Why offering choices works

Running several activities at once and letting youth self-select is not just a scheduling convenience. It is grounded in how motivation actually works. Self-determination theory holds that autonomy is a basic human need, and that people engage more deeply, persist longer, and remember more when they have chosen the task themselves. Challenge by choice, drawn from adventure and experiential education, adds a second layer: participation is voluntary and self-paced, so a young person can step in at the level that feels safe and stretch from there. The result is buy-in you cannot get by assignment. A young person who chose the honey-tasting table is already leaning in before the first sample.

Choice as behavior management

Most camp behavior problems are power struggles in disguise. A child told to do something they did not pick pushes back, and a counselor spends the block managing resistance instead of teaching. A choice-based model defuses that before it starts. When a young person opts in, compliance stops being the battle. If an activity is not landing for a particular young person, the menu gives them somewhere productive to move rather than acting out to escape it. Predictable structure paired with real autonomy means fewer incidents, more self-regulation, and staff who redirect instead of coerce. I trained my teen staff and counselors to run it this way: set the station, name the challenge, and let the choice do the work.

The research framing draws on established frameworks, challenge by choice from experiential education and self-determination theory on autonomy and motivation, rather than any single study.

Two example self-select stations

Self-select station

Honey Tasting

A fun, hands-on station that teaches taste, place, and pollinator health all at once. Here is how it runs.

Materials

  • Samples of different types of honey (local honey is a great option)
    • Generic honey
    • Local honey, for example NorCal honey
    • Exotic honey, for example Manuka
    • Hyper-local honey (ask about it)
  • Toothpicks
  • Honeycomb

Instructions

  • Set up a tasting station with the different honey samples.
  • Guide youth through a tasting, discussing the color, aroma, and flavor of each type.
  • Discard each toothpick after a single use.

The bigger lesson

Talk about honeybee habitat loss and the decline of native bee species, then show youth how to build a bee hotel from scrap materials and how planting native flowers gives bees a place to feed. The tasting is the hook; pollinator stewardship is the takeaway.

Self-select station

Cardboard Flower Vases

A fun and creative way to upcycle cardboard into something beautiful, and a reason to get youth walking the garden looking closely at flowers.

Materials

  • Cardboard square cut-outs
  • Scissors
  • Markers

Instructions

  • Cut cardboard into squares.
  • Draw a vase with a face onto the cardboard.
  • Poke holes above the vase.
  • Have youth walk around and put flowers (with stems attached) into the vase.
  • Hang up any that youth do not want to keep.

Why it works

The craft is the draw, but the real activity is observation. Looking for flowers worth picking gets youth moving slowly through the garden, noticing what is blooming, what has stems long enough to hold, and what the pollinators are visiting. The leftover vases become a display that makes the whole group's work visible.

What I take off your desk

Where the work falls between roles, I own the project to done.

Scoped, fractional, and project-based. I diagnose the bottleneck, take ownership of the work, and leave you with something that runs without me. Each engagement maps to a place teams reliably get stuck.

🌱

Program Build & Turnaround

You have a garden, kitchen, youth, or food-justice program that needs to get built, fixed, or relaunched. I scope it, design it, run it, and hand back a program that holds up after I leave.

Scope · Build · Hand off
🤝

Fundraising & Revenue

I run point on the money: grant strategy and narratives, donor cultivation, sponsorship, and the case for the unrestricted dollars that actually keep programs alive. Nearly $3M in requests evaluated, foundation grants won.

Grants · Donors · Revenue
🧑‍🌾

Team Capacity & Training

When your team is stretched thin, I build the capacity: onboarding, scenario-based training, and systems your staff and volunteers can run once I am gone, so the work does not leave when a person does.

Onboarding · Systems
📚

Curriculum & Lesson Design

I own the curriculum end to end: scope and sequence, lesson plans, visual resources, and youth-led, challenge-by-choice models. I have built a 40-page program from scratch.

Design · Scope & sequence
📊

Measurement & Data

I make your impact legible to funders: Salesforce, evaluation design, and reporting that captures what actually changed instead of what is easy to count. Records managed for 17,000+ supporters.

Salesforce · Evaluation
✊🏽

Equity-Centered Design

I run human-centered design the way IDEO and the Stanford d.school teach it, then push past it with liberatory and Afro-Indigenous practice, so I design with the community, not for it. The program earns trust, lands with the people it is for, and lasts past the grant cycle.

Community-led
🎤

Public Speaking & Facilitation

I represent the program to the people who fund and shape it: keynotes, donor talks, and board and community facilitation. I have spoken at donor events that raised six figures.

Talks · Facilitation
🌍

Regenerative Ag Consulting

Hands-on guidance and setup for cover crops, composting, soil fertility, crop rotation, and small-scale poultry wellness, drawn from working farms in the US, Egypt, and Turkey.

Soil · Cover crops
🥗

Nutrition Education

Research-grounded nutrition and food-systems teaching and content, built from a peer-reviewed study and four-plus semesters of nutrition coursework.

Teaching · Content

Not sure where to start?

Find your starting point.

Answer three quick questions about what your team is missing, and I will point you to where I would begin. No email required to see the result.

Take the three-question quiz to find your starting point.

First call is free$40/hour after that, scoped per project
Book a free 30-minute call

In the field & the kitchen

A few moments from the work.

Autumn and youth making tortillas at camp
Youth chopping vegetables in a camp cooking class
Saffron harvest, buckets of crocus flowers
Autumn harvesting carrots in the field
Farm crew on a regenerative farm
Autumn holding jars of preserved food at a farm
Watermelon and cooking-science books at a nutrition session
Fresh-baked rosemary focaccia
A street-corn taco made in a youth cooking class
\1\n
Carrot harvest in the field rows

What hosts & partners say

Trusted in the field.

★★★★★

Autumn brings a powerful and intentional focus on food justice into the program, grounding our volunteer experience more deeply in mission and purpose. She leads orientations and hands-on trainings with clarity, confidence, and authenticity, consistently creating spaces where volunteers feel both informed and inspired.

Beyond her strong facilitation skills, Autumn is a driving force behind innovation and growth within the program. She approaches her work with a rare combination of vision and precision, equally committed to the small, detail-oriented tasks that keep things running smoothly and the larger initiatives that push the program forward. She is punctual, the ultimate teammate, and deeply reliable. Her work ethic sets a high bar for those around her. Autumn is also an exceptional communicator, able to connect across audiences through public speaking, team collaboration, and thoughtful written communication.

The program is undeniably stronger because of Autumn's contributions. She leaves behind not just improvements in process and structure, but a meaningful shift in culture and direction. We are deeply grateful for the mark she has made, and I have no doubt she will continue to bring this same level of excellence and purpose to everything she does.

LinkedIn recommendation · Alameda County Community Food Bank
★★★★★

Autumn was a wonderful volunteer. She worked hard preparing the land for planting and brought valuable insight with her research on cover crops, which will benefit our planting strategy going forward.

Workaway Host · South Sinai, Egypt
★★★★★

Such a diligent, enthusiastic WWOOFer. She joined us for the saffron harvest, a demanding time on the farm, and we always knew we could depend on her. We highly recommend Autumn.

Melinda · Saffron Farm, California

Autumn was positive and energetic. She was kind to the animals and did her share in our household.

Greg · WWOOF Host, United States

Autumn is a positive person and a hard worker.

Nick · WWOOF Host, United States

Work with me

Let's scope the work.

Available within two weeks for fractional and project-based engagements: program build, fundraising, training, measurement, and the gaps in between.

Email alanizautumn@gmail.com \1\n Call Book a free 30-minute call (first one is free, $40/hour after) Linktree linktr.ee/AutumnAWiggins Substack Read my Substack

Completing the UC Davis Fundraising and Development Foundations certificate in 2026.