The Parc-Ex Curry Collective Board of Directors provides general oversight of the management and administration of the organization. Meet our members!

Our members

Leonora Indira King

Founder, Parc-Ex Curry Collective

Leonora Indira King is the founder and coordinator of the Parc-Ex Curry Collective. She is also a community worker for Afrique au Féminin where she organizes informational workshops and intercultural outings for newcomer women. Leonora obtained her PhD from McGill University’s Department of Psychiatry and then went on to complete two post-doctoral degrees where she respectively facilitated arts-based interventions for newly-arrived asylum seekers and examined the experience of Black youth in the Quebec school system. Essentially, Leonora is passionate about migrant justice, bringing people together and strengthening marginalized communities.

Simone Chen

Member of Board of Directors, Parc-Ex Curry Collective

Originally from Los Angeles, Simone has been living in Montreal since 2015, where he completed a BA at the McGill School of Environment. She seeks to cultivate participative urban agriculture and arboriculture interventions, and to galvanize the capacity of local communities to produce and access food resources through ecological and just practices. She works in Parc-Extension at the solidarity cooperative La Place Commune, where she coordinates a neighborhood fruit harvesting project. She believes that a holistic approach to building resilient local food systems necessitates critical consideration of systemic barriers that exclude the most vulnerable populations from access to land, housing and food. She believes in the power of grassroots actions to construct solidarity and ecological alternatives, with a general intention of the eventual abolition of those structures that reproduce systems of economic precarity and social division.

Deepali Patel

Member of Board of Directors, Parc-Ex Curry Collective

Deepali Patel arrived in Canada in December 2018. She is originally from Gujurat, India. She completed a bachelors of science in Food and Nutrition from Sardar Patel University in India. Deepali has been a Curry Collective chef since its inception in April 2021 and then became its board member in July 2022. She is passionate about food and cooking. When Deepali prepares a meal for others and sees satisfaction in their faces, she feels very delighted. Deepali also believes that food presentation is a reflection of the chef’s creativity. Deepali hopes that the Curry Collective continues to grow and that we have more opportunities to share Indian cuisine with the larger community.