MPH community leader, public health advocate, and founding executive director of Our Kitchen Table
The Dominican Sisters celebrate Black History Month by honoring and learning more about leaders in our community. We are reaching out to Black leaders in business, healthcare, education, and more. Thank you to the campus Inclusion Team.
Since 2003, Lisa Oliver-King has led Our Kitchen Table, a grassroots Grand Rapids organization that empowers women in building healthier neighborhoods through sustainable, local food systems.
Under Lisa’s leadership, Our Kitchen Table addresses diet-related and environmental health disparities that disproportionately impact vulnerable families, equipping communities with the tools to achieve food security, foster systemic change, and build neighborhood-based sustainability.
Lisa also represents Kent County’s 15th District as County Commissioner, where she advocates for policies that promote equity, wellness, and sustainability. Lisa and husband Anthony King are proud residents of Grand Rapids and raised their two daughters in the city.
We asked Lisa to share one person from Black History whose story we should know about.
More people should know about Lila Cabbil
(1944-2019)
Born in Durham, North Carolina and raised in Detroit, Lila worked with Rosa Parks as the program director and later, president emeritus at the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute.
As an activist in Detroit, she dedicated her life to racial justice, environmental justice, the right to clean drinking water and food justice, and was a water-warrior fighting shut-off. Lila also co-edited the book Accountability and White Anti-racist Organizing: Stories from Our Work.
From 2011 through 2016, we at Our Kitchen Table in Grand Rapids, Michigan were enormously honored and blessed to have Lila help us launch our work. She helped us refine our mission by addressing the realities of racism that impacted our work and relationships with each other, even though our work was led by and done predominantly by women of color. Launching a women-of-color led organization is no easy task, but Lila helped us lay out our plan for, in her words, “formin’, stormin’, and normin’.”
When Our Kitchen Table took over management of the Southeast Area Farmers Market in 2013, Lila helped us develop protocols, job descriptions, and community events through the lens of food justice, public health, and empowering women of color. Lila facilitated our Women of Color Convenings on the topics of “What Does Access to Food Look Like in Grand Rapids”, “The Role of White Allies in Fighting Racism”, and “The Health Status of Grand Rapids Southeast Neighborhoods” and “What Is Food Justice”, as well as a daylong Anti-racism Summit.
Our organizations was truly blessed to have such a giant as our mentor, our guide, and our inspiration. Black History Month too often centers on a handful of past Black leaders when there are hands-down hundreds and thousands of Black Americans whose rightful place in not only Black history but American history goes unnoticed in the mainstream. Lila is one of them.
Learn More
