Staff
Gailmarie Kimmel joined CFMA as Director in November, 2015. Based in Fort Collins, she brings a decade of experience working with local food and farms. In 2006, she published the first Eat Local Food Map and co-founded the Winter Farmers Market, which turned out to be the first in Colorado and has become a community institution. She worked with LoCo Food Distribution, an ambitious start-up tackling the challenges of moving locally-grown and -produced foods to wholesale customers along the Front Range. Simultaneously, she worked for Local Food Shift and started Living Soil Investments, a microloan group for local farmers and food entrepreneurs, adapting the “focus money on soil fertility” mantra of Slow Money. In 2015, she co-founded Poudre Valley Community Farms, A Farmland Cooperative, an innovative model for securing land access for young farmers.
Board of Directors
Martha Sullins, CFMA Board President, is an Ag Business Management Specialist with Colorado State University Extension, where she has worked to support farmers markets around the state since 2006, and has been on CFMA’s board of directors since 2013. She has helps to manage the Fort Collins Winter Market and works with specialty livestock and crop production businesses, agritourism, local foods, farm transition, on-farm food safety and risk management. She develops and teaches small business management classes, evaluates classroom and field-based educational programs targeted at beginning farmers and ranchers, and develops tools for ag and food producers navigating food safety and business regulations, as well as those starting value-added agricultural enterprises. Martha loves getting away from her desk-type job to work and play outside!
Kate Dill is CFMA Treasurer and chairs our Resource Development Committee. She is a Program Evaluator with Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, and joined the CFMA board in 2014 because she is a passionate consumer of locally-produced food and goods sold at farmers markets in the Denver area. As the chair of the Resource Development Committee, Kate works with her fellow board members to identify funding opportunities that can help CFMA advance its mission. Kate spends her days evaluating programs at the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, eating and drinking as much local food and beer as her wallet will allow, and sitting in traffic on I-70 to go camping or skiing.
Karen Miller is CFMA Secretary, a role which she really enjoys. She is a Colorado native, born and raised in Denver, and moved to South Fork in 2007. In 2013, she started the South Fork Farmers Market and currently serves as its Director and also the Director of the Village Farmers Market in Creede, CO. Last summer, the South Fork Market started with 5 vendors and a massive hail storm (!) and is now up to 37 vendors at the end of the summer including the same 5 vendors that made it through the hail!! In 2015, she started a South Fork Winter Market, and this year she launches the first Creede market!
Beth Coop began working with CFMA in 2010 and chairs CFMA’s Membership Committee and has been involved with the Gunnison Farmers Market (co-president and market manager) for the past seven years. She has her masters in Agriculture Education from CSU and enjoys teaching classes about food preservation and fermentation. She also enjoys working with the Spanish-speaking community teaching English language learners and works part-time as a translator. She keeps busy raising her two young boys, and loves to garden, travel, float rivers, and trail run with her dog.
Juliana Trujillo Escobar joined CFMA in 2016. She was born in Medellin, Colombia, and raised between the city and her family ranches. She has a deep passion for the country life and the connection between us and our food. She’s been blessed with a life of traveling and adventure (since 22 moving between Mexico, USA and Colombia) and in 2015 decided to move to Colorful Colorado. She had a restaurant in Playa del Carmen for 3 years, worked as an Executive Chef in Riviera Maya for almost 6 years, and together with her husband, built a catering company in the last 3 years called Juli Y Juan. What moves them is healing through food – its nutrition, art and the intention behind everything we do with love and consciousness.