On a mission to nourish a new crop of food sheroes

What if the future of food systems looked like WANDA?

When we empower women and girls, we nourish the world.

Women Advancing Nutrition Dietetics and Agriculture (WANDA) is on a mission to address the systemic barriers impacting the health and nutrition in our communities by transforming women and girls into food sheroes with a supportive, safe sisterhood of self-care, scholarship, and service. Launched on International Women’s Day in 2016, WANDA is a women-led nonprofit organization based in the District of Columbia.

Why WANDA Exists

Black women have long served as our first food educators, caregivers, growers, healers, and cultural knowledge keepers. Yet they remain too often absent from the farms, laboratories, clinics, classrooms, boardrooms, media platforms, and policy tables where decisions about food and health are made.

Our communities face a stark disparity: high rates of diet-related illness alongside a severe shortage of Black nutrition and agriculture professionals. Only 2% of respondents in a 2024 survey of credentialed nutrition and dietetics practitioners identified as Black or African American. Black producers represented only 1.4% of all U.S. agricultural producers in the 2022 Census of Agriculture.

These numbers reveal more than a workforce gap. They show who is missing from the places where solutions are funded, studied, designed, and implemented. The people most affected by inequity deserve more than programs created for them. They deserve the opportunity and power to lead.

Why We Invest in women & Girls

We invest in women and girls because they can become nutrition researchers, dietitians, food scientists, farmers, physicians, educators, entrepreneurs, technologists, communicators, and policymakers.

Some may become parents or caregivers who introduce children to their first foods. Others will influence entire communities through research, farming, business, education, media, technology, or policy.

All deserve the opportunity to discover their gifts, develop their leadership, and bloom where they belong. WANDA is cultivating a soul sisterhood of the soil—women rooted in culture, connected across generations, and prepared to help communities thrive.

                                                                WANDA Founder, Tambra Raye Stevenson, MPH, MA, PhD Candidate

Food Is Our Superpower

WANDA begins with a different question:
What wisdom, power, and possibility already exist within our communities, and what could grow if we invested in them?

We help women and girls:

• reclaim foodways that have nourished generations;

• strengthen their relationships with food, culture, land, and health;

• recognize lived experience as a source of knowledge;

• build the skills, confidence, and relationships needed to lead;

• use food to heal, teach, organize, innovate, and create change.

We connect nutrition, agriculture, maternal health, education, media, technology, entrepreneurship, and policy—breaking through silos to build stronger pathways from community knowledge to systems leadership.

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