Ask LaToya Drake what she does, and she’ll give you a few answers. Community member. Community health educator. Food systems strategist. But spend a few minutes talking with her, and it becomes clear those titles only scratch the surface.
LaToya has spent years working at the intersection of food, people, and place across Kentucky — helping connect communities to healthy food, yes, but also to the knowledge, relationships, and policy conversations that make those connections last. “What good is food if you don’t know how to use it?” she says. That question has quietly guided almost everything she’s done.
LaToya has spent years working at the intersection of food, people, and place across Kentucky — helping connect communities to healthy food, yes, but also to the knowledge, relationships, and policy conversations that make those connections last. “What good is food if you don’t know how to use it?” she says. That question has quietly guided almost everything she’s done.
Her path to CFA’s board wasn’t a straight line. It started in Glasgow, Kentucky, where she helped launch a community garden. The garden itself didn’t last, but something else did. “What sustained from that work are the friendships and relationships,” she reflects. Those relationships — including early connections with CFA members — pulled her deeper into food systems work and eventually onto the board, where she also got involved with programs like Kentucky Double Dollars.
LaToya is quick to name the hard parts. Funding cuts have hit food access and agricultural programs across the state in waves, and she’s seen the ripple effects up close — through her work with CFA, through partnerships with organizations like Feeding America Kentucky’s Heartland, through conversations with farmers and families who feel the squeeze. “So much funding is being cut at all different levels,” she says. “The question becomes: how are we creative? How do we still meet people’s needs?”
She doesn’t frame those moments as failures. She frames them as invitations to figure out something better. One thing CFA helped her see more clearly was the role of policy in all of this. “I learned it’s not only about access and education — it’s also about policy change.” That shift in perspective has deepened her appreciation for what CFA does beyond its programs: helping everyday Kentuckians understand the systems that shape their lives, and giving them a way into those conversations.
She also points to CFA’s ability to tell the story of Kentucky’s small farmers as something genuinely rare. “I think CFA has done a great job pulling together community and telling that story.” In a landscape where small farms often feel invisible in policy discussions, that kind of visibility matters.
If you ask LaToya where things stand right now, she won’t tell you the hard part is behind us. “We’re still in that turning point,” she says. But she sees that not as a warning sign — she sees it as proof that the work is real, and that CFA is showing up for it.
“There’s lots of success in that. We’re still going as an organization.”
There’s a phrase she comes back to, one that captures how she thinks about all of it: “Inconvenience is the cost of community.” Building something real — a food system, a neighborhood, an organization — takes people who are willing to stay in the room even when it’s uncomfortable. Even when things don’t go smoothly. Even when you don’t all agree.
She described a recent CFA Sunday Supper, a room full of people from different walks of life, sharing soup beans and conversation. That image stayed with her. “That’s the kind of effort we have to make to build community.”
For LaToya, that’s not idealism. That’s the job.
