Meet Nichole Fields-Kyle, Concrete Jungle’s Director of Program and Operations. Nichole is responsible for supporting our staff on the ground as well as overseeing all the behind-the-scenes operations that provide fresh food for our community.
Like many other CJ staff, Nichole got her start with Concrete Jungle as a volunteer. Nichole is a transplant by way of California and New York. When she arrived in Atlanta, she immediately looked for a way to get her hands dirty.
As she puts it, “I came that first day to volunteer and was fresh off the plane, maybe 4 days into living in Atlanta. And I actually met one of our other coworkers there, who was also a volunteer at the time. He asked me such great questions about myself. Not like, ‘So, what do you do for fun? ‘or ‘What do you do for work?’, but really wanting to get to know me. After that, I took the MARTA train for an hour to get to the farm every other Saturday during my first year living here. Just because of that sense of community. I didn’t know anyone here, but all of these people were coming together to sweat for two hours, to do this volunteer work, and they really cared whether I showed up or not.”
When the pandemic hit, Nichole joined as staff to oversee our COVID Grocery Delivery Program. Today, she’s co-leading Concrete Jungle forward through the next phase of our growth. In her role as Director of Programs and Operations, Nichole uses our fruit tree map every single day. She and Adam, CJ’s Field Manager, use the map to plan fruit-scouting routes and volunteer pick events. The map is critical for sourcing the freshest produce for Atlanta’s food-insecure residents.
Nichole explains, “The map is the easiest way to see what we’ve got growing in the city in a specific area. But it’s also really helpful if, say, we get an email from a homeowner about a new pomegranate tree. So if I’m going to go check on the pomegranate today, I can look and see what else is in that neighborhood that we can scout. We’re using it to plan our days and our pick program, because it is such an amazing visual tool. Just pulling up coordinates on Google maps doesn’t really let us move as efficiently as we’d like.”
As we round out another fruitful year, we need your help. You – our community – are critical to CJ’s success. We rely on you to help us harvest the fruits of local trees. And we rely on you to donate the fruits of your own labor, so that we can get more produce to people who need it.
Your donation at the end of the year will support CJ as we draw the map to the future. With your help, we will increase our capacity to meet the nutrition needs of communities experiencing food insecurity.
Will you help us map the way to a fruitier future by making a gift to Concrete Jungle before the year is up? Please make a gift so that we can keep getting delicious, nutritious food to folks who need it: donorbox.org/mapthefruit