Project Description

Founder, SageD Collective

Sagdrina Jalal is the Founder of SageD Collective. Sagdrina’s work thrives at the intersection of community and innovation. 

Born in Augusta, Georgia at Fort Gordon military base and raised in Savannah on Burnside Island, Sagdrina is a graduate of the University of Georgia. In 2013, she became the founding executive director of the Georgia Farmers Market Association (GFMA). In this role, she worked with large and small communities across our state, throughout the country and around the world. The Just Food program she initiated in partnership with UGA’s Department of Agribusiness and the USDA-AMS offers a community led sliding scale farmers market/CSA hybrid to places with limited access to fresh, local produce. 

As someone who consistently brings diverse communities together to solve shared problems, she understands that authentic engagement requires commitment, consistency and reverence. She knows the immense long-term benefits obtained when one leads with intention and patience. She has served as a board member for the national Farmers Market Coalition, a 2018 Well-Being Impact Area Advisor for the Community Foundation of Atlanta, and an advisor for Tuskegee University’s Organic Farming Project. She was also chosen to participate in CARE USA’s first Growing Solidarity fellowship. This offered her the opportunity to travel to Côte d’Ivoire to share and learn with both international representatives from CARE’s global health initiatives and indigenous leadership in a local village.  

In 2021, she helped design Georgia’s first leadership fund specifically designed to honor black womxn social enterprise leaders in our state. She also served on Mailchimp’s Forward Project: an innovative approach to funding creative solutions. 

In her former role as Senior Director of Community Innovation at the Center for Civic Innovation,  she cultivated a network of community leaders including subject matter experts, activists,  academics and other key stakeholders around the issue of inequity in Atlanta’s philanthropic ecosystem.

Sagdrina has maintained a strong partnership  with Farmers Market Coalition, partnering with them to implement nationwide communities of practice for the Anti-Racist Farmers Market Toolkit, providing technical assistance in implementing their FMPP grant objectives as well as providing guidance as they update other resources including their highly respected Legal Toolkit. 

Her commitment to equitable local communities started at birth. She is the daughter of the late civil rights attorney Sage Brown; a decorated Vietnam veteran who was hand-picked by civil rights leaders to desegregate Chatham County Public Schools. Her father was a fixture in the Savannah community and started one of the first black law firms in the city. He played a key role in the establishment of the Ralph McGill Civil Rights Museum in Savannah where he is also featured. Sagdrina’s mother was committed to educating youth; serving as both an administrator (most recently at Bloomingdale Elementary School) and a lead Sunday school teacher at Mount Olive Holiness Church. Both of her parents graduated from Savannah State College. 

As a mother of 3, the foundation of expanding impact by quilting family into the community continues through her. Sagdrina raised her family in Atlanta and is a proud empty nester. Sagdrina is an avid cook, a hobbyist floral arranger and a tinker of tinctures. She loves to share her home with friends and neighbors who frolic through her garden and sample the Gullah Geechee dishes of her childhood. As she always says, “you’d be surprised how effectively folk can work together when a delicious, homemade meal is shared. Healing happens.”