Maurice Cousin serves as Director of Food Access and Partner Capacity Building at the Greater Chicago Food Depository (Food Depository). Specializing in solutions rooted in diversity, equity and inclusion principles, Cousin brings more than twenty years of experience in minority community engagement and small business development. Cousin maintains a recognized reputation for providing strategic solutions to urban development and community relations thorniest challenges. Cousin understands the value of diverse teams required to successfully develop and implement justice focused solutions to systemic racial inequity issues too often plaguing minority and BIPOC communities.
At the Food Depository, Cousin leads the Food Access, Partner Services, Partner Capacity Building and newly formed Food Rescue/Agency Enabled teams. These teams comprise the community and partner facing group; responsible for providing food allocations, relationship management, trainings, and capacity building resources to the Food Depository network of over 400 traditional pantry, soup kitchens and shelters across Cook County. Since, joining the Food Depository in January 2021, Cousin has become a thought leader advancing the organizations, community impact goal of Transforming the Emergency Food System both internally and externally as co-chair of the executive leadership team workshops curated by the Vocati Group focused on Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) learnings and as a co-lead of the Food Depository initiative providing $10M in capacity building grants to partners operating in the black and brown communities most disproportionally affected by the pandemic.
Prior to joining the Food Depository, Cousin served as President of Polk Street Group (PSG), a Chicago based, minority owned, boutique consulting firm specializing in community development and relationship management; providing urban market consulting support services to corporate, non-profit, and governmental clients. PSG programming ensured minority and small business inclusion within civic and private sector supply chains as well as developing “Best in Class” Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and DEI initiatives for food producing and retail distributing corporate clients. In 2008, Cousin was promoted to President of PSG when its founder, Ambassador Ertharin Cousin, was tapped by the Obama Administration to serve as Ambassador for Food and Agriculture. In 2012 Cousin supported the Ambassador’s successful bid to become CEO of the World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian organization addressing issues of food insecurity and malnutrition.
Earlier in his career, whether managing a portfolio of clients at The Target Group, a Chicago based, national leader in minority supplier diversity; as government affairs liaison for the capital construction department at the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) during the $1.5 billion, Plan for Transformation redevelopment project or on the three (3) presidential or dozens of state and local political campaigns; Cousin pursued and promoted financial investment and economic development as the most effective tools for addressing the vexing systemic racial inequity and financial disparity issues far too prevalent in black and brown communities across Chicagoland.
Maurice earned his Executive MBA from the University of Illinois in organizational leadership and change management, a Bachelors degree in Business Economics from Florida A & M University (FAMU) and a certification in Project Management from Loyola University. Maurice is also a Father of two amazing young men Michael (18) and Maurice II (13).