Get to Know Lucas McKinnon

As Managing Director of the Hawaiʻi Good Food Alliance, and a first year DrPH Bloomberg Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Lucas McKinnon works to strengthen local agriculture while expanding access to healthy, culturally relevant food across the islands. 

The Hawaiʻi Good Food Alliance brings together farmers, food banks, health centers, and community organizations to address one of the structural drivers of health: how food is grown, distributed, and accessed. McKinnon’s role focuses on coordinating these partners and building programs that connect agriculture, health care, and community development.  

“My job is about helping many different stakeholders move in the same direction toward a healthier and more resilient food system,” he says. 

McKinnon’s path to food systems work began on farms. Early in his career, he worked on farms in Washington, California, and New York while studying agroecology, a field that combines science, farming, and social movements to create more sustainable food systems, at the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology. Those experiences shifted his career interests from clinical medicine toward the broader systems that shape health. 

“My first experiences working on a farm were deeply formative and ultimately changed the trajectory of my career from traditional medicine to food systems,” McKinnon says. 

He later worked internationally with the United Nations Disaster Management Team and earned a Master of Public Health from New York University. Over time, his focus expanded to policies and programs that influence access to healthy food, including agricultural policy, federal nutrition programs, and “Food is Medicine” initiatives. 

Before joining the Alliance, McKinnon served as the first Food Access and Equity Specialist for the City and County of Honolulu, helping direct federal investments into food security programs and local agriculture. 

Today, his work addresses a major challenge in Hawaiʻi: the state imports around 85% of its food. Strengthening local agriculture is closely tied to improving food access, building economic resilience, and supporting environmentally sustainable farming practices. 

Through the Alliance, McKinnon helps expand programs that support local farmers while improving access to fresh food. These include grant opportunities and technical assistance for farms and food hubs, programs that allow farmers markets to accept SNAP and WIC benefits, and partnerships with health providers that connect patients with locally grown produce. 

“In Hawaiʻi, rebuilding local food systems is closely tied to issues of economic resilience, cultural revitalization, and environmental stewardship,” McKinnon says. 

To strengthen his ability to scale these efforts, McKinnon is pursuing a Doctor of Public Health in Implementation Science at the Bloomberg School through the Bloomberg American Health Initiative. 

“In food systems work, we often see promising programs emerge, but scaling them effectively requires strong implementation science and systems thinking, he says. “The Bloomberg Fellowship offered a unique opportunity to deepen my understanding of how large-scale public health initiatives are designed, implemented, and evaluated.”  

For McKinnon, that training will help translate community-based food systems work into policies and programs that can improve health outcomes across Hawaiʻi.