staff
Allison Padilla-Goodman
Chief Executive Officer
Allison comes to Giving Kitchen after a decade of leadership at ADL (The Anti-Defamation League), a century-old national anti-hate organization. At ADL, Allison managed and led the agency’s work of fighting hate across 15 states of the South. She built and led a large matrixed team, oversaw significant revenue, developed powerful programs, advocated for inclusive policies, built and inspired boards, and exposed and responded to incidents of hatred and extremism. Her proudest accomplishments are hiring and coaching an amazing team of leaders and leading the coalition that passed Georgia’s historic Hate Crimes law in 2020.
Allison has always been a builder and a weaver. In addition to ADL, Allison has spent many years working in non-profits. She led an education non-profit program in Hong Kong and New Orleans, focused on inspiring and building future generations of educators. She built arts-centered community engagement activities for youth for a grassroots public safety organization in New Orleans. She ran the research arm of the largest Service-Learning university center in Southeast Asia, which included building a network of Asian service-learning providers. She thrives in building strategic growth plans and driving teams towards them.
Allison spent many years in academia where her work was always centered on immersive understandings of people in challenging environments. She earned a PhD and MPhil in Sociology from the City University of New York Graduate Center where her work focused on Race and Ethnicity, International Migration, and Qualitative Research Methods. Her dissertation focused on the racial politics of repopulating post-Katrina New Orleans through the lens of public institutions. She also has a Masters degree in Latin American Studies from Tulane University where her research focused on internal displacement in Colombia. Her undergraduate degree is in Sociology/Anthropology from Middlebury College where her research focused on Albanian immigrants in Italy.
Allison has lived and worked abroad in three different countries on three different continents: Italy, Hong Kong, and Colombia. She loves foreign languages and being immersed in different cultural experiences. Yet even more, she loves her hometown of New Orleans, where she always soaks in the food, music, public festivities, and culturally-rooted people. The restaurant industry’s impact on Allison has been profound. Through food service work, she met her husband, found her academic path, travelled and lived abroad, and became inspired by the woman whom her daughter would be named after.
Allison and her family have lived in Atlanta since 2017, and they have learned to love this city so much. Allison is inspired by the change-orientation in this city and its movement towards progress. She is part of Leadership Atlanta 2023 (and is an active alum), the Atlanta Civic Collaboratory, International Women’s Forum, and is an Atlanta Way 2.0 Honorary Co-Chair, in addition to several non-profit boards that she’s involved in (World Affairs Council, The Howard School, Atlanta Speech School, among others).