Meet Our Team

 Lucy Spence

Lucy Spence brings a multidisciplinary background spanning tropical agriculture, cooperative farmer support, youth agriculture education, and workforce development to Food Works Group. Her career has been defined by a commitment to wrap-around farmer and producer support and youth empowerment through agriculture, which she now applies to FWG's advisory work across the food system.

In addition to her work with Food Works Group, Lucy serves as the Farmer Educator at a public high school campus in the Bronx comprising four co-located schools. She manages a student-run hydroponic farm that produces 7,500 pounds of vegetables annually, distributed to students, staff, and the surrounding community. She teaches daily classes in food justice, STEM, and agriculture, and oversees three workforce development programs that help students build employability skills and explore careers in urban agriculture.

Lucy discovered her passion for agriculture through the Peace Corps, where she lived alongside and provided technical assistance to indigenous subsistence farmers in rural Panamá, facilitating community-wide trainings, capacity building with organized groups, and networking with local government. She returned to the United States to serve as Program Director for a refugee services nonprofit in upstate New York, where she grew a farm incubator program supporting farmers in launching their own agribusinesses and stood up a self-slaughter meat goat farm workforce development program supported through federally funded grant programs.

Lucy then brought her agricultural expertise into winemaking, working three harvests across Oregon's Willamette Valley and New Zealand's Marlborough region. She participated in the full production cycle from grape selection through bottling and spearheaded a new biodynamic composting method in New Zealand to improve the breakdown of grape marc before it was returned to the vineyard. Lucy holds a bachelor's degree in Zoology. She lives in New York City.