Genna Tesdall
Genna Tesdall (she/her) is an agriculture systems thinker taking on projects to sustain the environment and people, now as the director of YPARD. She strives to be a servant-leader in order to foster equality between generations (and all delimiters of privilege). She hails from the agricultural state of Iowa in the United States, where she gained an interest in agriculture and agroecology from experiences spending summers on her grandparents' 80 acre Iowa farm, foraging for mushrooming with her parents, and later studying biology and global resource systems at Iowa State University. Before joining YPARD, she was the federal agricultural policy officer at the German Rural Youth Association (Bund der Deutschen Landjugend) (2020). As a Fulbright Researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2018-19), she focused on youth involvement in agricultural policy, and was the former president (2013-14) of the International Association of Agriculture and Related Sciences Students (IAAS). She is a graduate of the global oriented Iowa State (2015) and Penn State Universities (2018) with a M.Sc. in Plant Pathology and International Agriculture and Devel-opment. She currently resides in Berlin, Germany.