About

Hey there, I’m Jess. That’s me over there harvesting lettuce. I’m an entrepreneur and doctoral student, living and working in Detroit.

My journey over the past few years has brought me from a cubicle at Google, through rice paddies in Cambodia, past berry patches and mobile meat units in Washington state, into Agriculture Committee rooms in Washington DC, up onto a tractor in Jefferson, Iowa and now to Detroit where I think about social entrepreneurship and the sustainable food movement as a doctoral student with the CS Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems and moonlight as chief noodler on a little project called Neighborhood Noodle.

I’m currently working on two related research projects: a study to understand the role of social enterprise in the sustainable food movement in the US, and an action research project with a peer-to-peer network of food-based social entrepreneurs that I helped to form in Metro Detroit (MDGFE). MDGFE seeks to share information, resources, and emotional support; organize technical and financial assistance; engage in reflective action around how to balance financial viability with our individual and collective social and environmental goals; and hold ourselves accountable to the commitments we make.

These days, I use this space to post academic writing, reflect on my dissertation questions, collect inspiration, and share day-to-day ramblings with people I love who tend to be scattered across the globe.

So what is this blog about?

For me, the blog’s become a space to put together pieces of a puzzle: the sustainable food movement, social enterprise, measuring social return on investment, participatory action research, local living economies and place-based development, social justice and social transformation, systems thinking, new modes of management and organizational development. It’s about big ideas and about particulars. Check out the tags over in the right-hand sidebar to see some topics.

How’d you get into this stuff?

Growing up in Orange County, California, I never thought much about where my food came from or how it was produced. I ate a lot of cheetos as a kid. 

My first real introduction to “good food” was when I visited a dear friend Jaime in Bellingham, Washington. Jaime’s dad was the manager of the local grocery coop. When they took me to the store, it was like visiting a different planet. The food looked different and smelled different. There were posters on the wall celebrating local farmers, and bulletin boards advertising community events. I had grown up in Ralphs and Albertsons and this was a new animal.

Then, in 2008, a couple of years after graduating, I left a job at Google to move to Cambodia and work at a local education-focused NGO.

In Cambodia 85% of people make a living in agriculture. Teachers I worked with often made secondary income growing rice or vegetables or raising fish. Even in the provincial capital where I lived, the pace of life was distinctly agrarian – every day the town was up at 4 or 5, in bed by 7 or 8 and time was measured by the growing season. I shopped at the wet market for veggies, fruit, meat and spices regularly. I had my coworkers and friends over for cooking parties.

I went to Cambodia to focus on empowerment and economic development through education, and came to realize that food and agriculture could be a tool to address many of these issues in a concrete, creative, positive way.

Upon returning to the States, I decided to follow my growing interest in agriculture directly to its root and apprentice on a small farm in the San Juan Islands. Those few months were some of the best in my life. I got to be outside, learn to grow food,  and become part of a wonderful, multi-generational community of people who shared many of my values. The experience opened me to new ideas of what a new kind of food system could look like.

Afterwards, committed to a path in the field, I moved to Washington DC to work at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition to learn more about the complex structures that we’ve created that define our current, largely industrial food and farming system. I grew up in a place with little social or political consciousness and NSAC was a crash course in the way our government works and my rights and responsibility as a democratic citizen.

As much as I learned in DC, I knew that I eventually wanted to be on the ground, figuring out the details of how to actually build environmentally sound, fair, economically sustainable food systems in the real world. Some of you know that I planned to enroll in the Community and Regional Development program at UC Davis in the Fall of 2010, researching values-based supply chains (e.g. new ways of getting food from producers to consumers that address fair returns for all the actors in a network, pay attention to values other than price, and provide affordable access to the end consumer).

But the universe pulled me in another direction and as of July 2011, I’ve been living and working in Detroit for a year