Leah Kabran Eden is the Executive Director of Equity Advocates. Leah uses her decade of experience as an organizer and policy analyst in New York to advance policy and systems change within the food system as a key mechanism to address the underlying causes of poverty and inequality.

Prior to co-founding Equity Advocates in 2019 she served as Policy Specialist at the United Way of New York City, leading a strategic planning process to build policy efforts around food security, asset building, and educational equity. Leah also led UWNYC’s 2018 Self-Sufficiency Standard for New York City research project, documenting what it takes to make ends meet in NYC using a more accurate alternative to the official poverty measure, including convening 32 key stakeholders to develop a citywide policy agenda. 

As the Director of Food Policy for New York City Council Member Ben Kallos, Leah developed and advanced a progressive food policy agenda including increased access to healthy food, school meals, and obesity prevention policies. Under her management, they successfully fought for free universal school lunch for all public school students, launched a new GrowNYC Fresh Food Box in district, as well introduced legislation setting nutritional standards for children’s restaurant meals and requiring the Department of Education to provide data on school meal participation rates. Leah was also responsible for cultivating relationships with local and national food advocates.

Leah also produced original food policy radio programming, and fostered relationships with food system thought leaders, members and sponsors as Heritage Radio Network’s Director of Research and Communication. She was the newly established nonprofit’s first intern and then first employee. While completing her master’s, Leah worked as a policy intern at Wholesome Wave, a national food access nonprofit, where she educated and mobilized 60+ partners on food policy issues and helped to secure a $3.77 million Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive grant from the USDA. She also designed and implemented a quantitative research study among farmers market organizations on barriers and opportunities for SNAP Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) at farmers markets and wrote a memo for the USDA including policy recommendations.

Early in her career, Leah spent eight years conducting ethnographic market research for Fortune 500 companies to uncover how consumers think about health, wellness and food.

In 2016, Leah was recognized as one of NYC Food Policy Center at Hunter College’s 40 Under 40: The Rising Stars in New York City Food Policy. She holds a MA in Food Systems with an emphasis on food and agriculture policy from New York University and BA in Cultural Anthropology from Boston University.