Meet our Leadership Team!

Laura Horne is a seasoned nonprofit professional with 15 years of experience leading food access and anti-hunger initiatives. A pioneer in the development of the YMCA of Chattanooga’s food program, she formerly served as Senior Program Director overseeing the James A. Henry Community YMCA’s Food Program operations and helping expand meal access across the region. She also served nationally as a Y-USA Food Program SDP Facilitator, advising YMCAs across the country on developing, expanding, and strengthening their food programs. Laura is proud of the impact she helped create through the Y’s anti-hunger efforts and looks forward to continuing to collaborate with community partners and advocates to close gaps in food access.

Holly Martin is a Chattanooga native and career-long healthy food advocate. She has served as a nutritionist in a hospital setting, as a food bank associate in various anti-hunger programmatic roles, as a farmers market manager, and most recently as the founder of the Chattanooga Food Center and Gaining Ground Grocery. Holly believes Chattanooga is uniquely positioned to be a truly transformative food city, one where the vision of the Chattanooga Food Center can be fully realized: a vibrant, well-nourished community for every citizen. 

Alysse Parris

Helen J. Pinkerton, MPH, is a community advocate whose mission is to make a difference in the lives of vulnerable communities, families, and individuals by connecting them to services and resources that enable, equip, and lead to sustainability and living their best lives.

Maggie Sparks is the Community Investments Manager at the United Way of Greater Chattanooga. With a B.S. in Sociology from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, people and relationship building have driven all professional paths she’s taken. From being a yoga teacher, to working in sales, to then landing at the United Way, meeting each and every person exactly where they are has been at the core.  Her work at the United Way of Greater Chattanooga connecting regional nonprofits to resources and funding opportunities supports cross-county efforts to create generational impacts for families struggling to make ends meet. She is honored to serve as the Chair for the Chattanooga Food Coalition and believes in a whole community approach to tackling Food Systems change.

Justin Tirsun is an AICP planner and Director of Operations at CNE. His job includes managing community engagement, leadership building, policy initiatives, localized
investment strategy, outcome measuring, and day-to-day operations management. Justin is a certified city planner with experience working in both the public and private realm. He started in architecture and worked for a nonprofit architecture firm along the Texas/Mexico border. He moved to Chattanooga for a job with the City of Chattanooga as a senior planner. He has run a private planning firm that has worked with cities as big as 1 million people and as small as 10,000 or less. He was raised in Texas and went to Texas A&M for a Bachelor’s in Environmental Design. He left Texas to work and study in New Jersey, where he received his Master’s in City and Regional Planning. Justin is driven by a sense of duty. That duty shows through in his desire to help neighborhoods through investment, stronger policies and community building.