Chef Shanita

Executive Director & Founder

Chef Shanita is a Kansas City native and a civic-minded chef eager to transform the lives of community members on the Eastside neighborhoods through food-based solutions: nutrition education, kitchen culinary training and culinary entrepreneurship.

She fell in love with cooking as a teen and went on to receive her professional culinary training at Johnson County Community College. She created and owned a restaurant and competed on The Food Network’s “Cutthroat Kitchen.”

 In 2019, Shanita founded The Prospect KC, a social enterprise designed to address systemic inequities, caused by food apartheid, including food insecurity, unemployment and housing instability by providing workforce development, including case management, skill management, financial and nutrition education, childcare and job training. 

Shanita is a board member with Harvesters, the Greater KC Food Policy Coalition and Lazarus Ministries KC. She has attended a James Beard Foundation’s Chef Bootcamp for Policy and Change and the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, the first such gathering in more than half a century, at the invitation of U.S. Representative Emanuel Cleaver.