Alexandra Payne is a food systems and development strategist helping foundations, public agencies, and mission-driven organizations design and implement equity-centered strategies for climate resilience, public health, and regional economic development. Most recently, she served as a Program Officer with The Rockefeller Foundation’s Global Food Initiative, where she led cross-cutting portfolios spanning Good Food Procurement, Regenerative School Meals, Food is Medicine, Regenerative Agriculture Transition. In this role, she worked to align institutional procurement, healthcare systems, and public policy with regenerative agriculture transition and community power-building and capacity development.

Alexandra brings more than 15 years of cross-sector experience across philanthropy, urban planning, NPO/NGOs management and social enterprise. Her work focuses on leveraging institutional systems— such as public procurement and healthcare financing—to improve food and nutritional security, expand farmer livelihoods and regional market access, bolster climate resilience, strengthen local governance and urban rural linkages, and advance participatory, justice-driven development. She has partnered with city governments, the private sector, public institutions, universities, and frontline community-based and indigenous organizations to design place-based strategies that connect local leadership with broader policy and funding frameworks, and to ensure better linkages between data, policy and implementation.

Earlier in her career, Alexandra co-founded TuckrBox, a children’s meal startup committed to providing, nutritious, delicious and sustainably sourced meals, grounding her systems approach in the operational realities of food businesses, market development, supply chains and market based solutions to health and environmental issues. She holds a MSc in Regional and Urban Planning from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in Sociology and German from Tulane University.