Rumbidzai Masawi is a teacher, supervisor, trade unionist, marketing executive, trainer, manager, sustainable development professional, researcher, consultant, farmer, and urban gardener respectively. These diverse responsibilities and capabilities span over twenty-three years of government, private, and not-for-profit work. 

Rumbidzai’s multidisciplinary gifts have found a home at Land Access Alliance, where she will reconnect with her innate compass - a legacy of Matriarchs who were rural community healers, midwives, and family providers. Having orbited the world of modern work, she nests on ancient wisdom guiding grassroot innovation and initiatives.

At Land Access Alliance, she will provide leadership in developing workable models of collective action that reflect the culture and diversity of communities. Focus will be on creating a community-based arrangement to provide access to farmland and foraging to those traditionally marginalized. This role is a natural progression from Rumbidzai’s efforts towards building a web of urban gardening communities, as well as active participation within the University of Minnesota Extension Regional Sustainable Partnerships, where she serves as Board Member, Vice Chair, member of the Agriculture and Food Systems Work Group, as well as the Northeast Representative and Chair of the Statewide Coordinating Committee. 

Rumbidzai is gathering and partnering a diverse team of land and community stewards, to reinterpret land ownership and build relationships that support sustainable local food and farm systems that endeavor for markets, ecologies, and cultures that esteem land and cherish the people who work on it. In the process, she will build and maintain alliances with other organizations and related state and local agencies to identify and tackle conventional practices and structures that are barriers to a community’s ability to control land use, avail housing, grow the local economy, and create wealth. She will work with the board, legal team, funders, and volunteers to acquire land and case study bottom-up initiatives that prioritize meeting people’s needs through  community stewardship and  non-traditional models.