In the Weeds

by Daniel Browne

  Elliot and Vivienne both turned to me. “Operationalize,” “intentional,” “strategy development process”—these were terms that didn’t enter into their understanding of how the sausage gets made.

  Brad rested his chin on steepled fingers as I carefully explained our plans, his eyes closed, as if I were a Zen monk presenting him with a kōan. They stayed closed after I finished. Somehow I could tell, though, this wasn’t a Gollick situation; there was no question of him nodding off. Rather, he’d chosen to screen out all visual input, knowing it would only distract from the deep reflection underway.

  “Do you have a logic model?” he asked after a while.

  I only had a dim concept of what a logic model was, some kind of diagram or chart. All I could think to do in that moment was imitate the master.

  “We were hoping to get your advice on that,” I said.

  Brad opened his eyes to share an ambiguous glance with his colleagues. “Right, let’s skip the logic model for now. Can you give us a sense of what kind of impact you expect to have on food security in that section of Brooklyn?”

  My mouth opened, forming words my brain rejected before my voice could get involved. I’d already burned through the bodega statistics, my best material.

  “You can just ballpark it for us,” Brad prompted. “Metric tons of food produced. Percentage of the local population moving from insecure to secure…”

  I scanned the faces arrayed across from me—all benevolent, affable even. This was not a hazing. They were rooting for me to supply the right answer. They might even be disappointed if I didn’t.

  “We’re thinking of the farm mainly in terms of its educational value,” I said. “There is a hunger problem in the Triangle, and we believe we can make a dent…”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Elliot flick his hand like he was brushing dirt off the table.

  “A difference,” I caught myself. “But that’s really a secondary benefit. Our main focus is on developing an innovative curriculum and giving these kids a richer learning experience.”

  Brad rocked back and forth in his chair, his fingertips still pressed together. He might have been giving me a little bow, one sensei to another. “You’re prioritizing. That’s good. Education’s not really my area of expertise, though, so I’m going to turn the floor over to Kenesha.”

  Kenesha was the one in the sharp gray suit, curls tight against her scalp, her obelisk earrings miniature works of art. I instantly wanted her approval.

  “Thanks for giving us a chance to get to know you. Such an interesting project. My questions are basically along the same lines as Brad’s. What are you projecting in terms of achievement gains for the students?”

  This was one question I’d seen coming. Kenesha was asking if the farm would raise test scores.

  Normally, I would have let Elliot answer, but I was on a roll. “Well, this is going to be a pilot year. The plan is to work with the school to identify the students who stand to benefit the most. That’s the baseline, and from there we’ll be able to track achievement gains.”

  “But we’re going to be looking at a bunch of other indicators, too,” Elliot said. “Social-emotional outcomes—self-efficacy, regulation of emotion…”

  Kenesha straightened up in her seat. “Grit?”

  Elliot, the rascal, winked. “Can’t have a farm without grit.”

  Everyone had a good, albeit brief, laugh over that one.

  “I’m so glad to hear you’re taking the noncognitive factors into consideration,” Kenesha said. “You’d be surprised how many of the organizations that come to us don’t do that.”

  “This is not your run-of-the-mill school garden,” Vivienne said, responding to the vibes in the room like a plant opening up to light. “There are years and years of policy experience sitting at this table. I won’t say how many of them are mine, but you get the idea.”

  Kenesha gave her a look like she wanted to pat her cheek. “You can understand, then, as important as those noncognitive factors are, achievement is a go-no-go threshold for us. As a rule, we just don’t invest in projects that don’t already have evidence of gains.”

  She winced as she delivered the blow. She didn’t want to hurt us.

  I winced back, playing along. “And that’s a hard rule? Because, like Vivienne said, we feel this is a special circumstance. Not only have you got the expertise we bring to the table. There’s the location, the school, the support from Martin Gollick and Chef Brutti, names I’m sure you all know. There’s the involvement of Rita’s, which is unique for this type of project.”

  Brad bolted upright. “Rita’s is the restaurant you’re partnering with?”

  “This has been a shared vision with them from the beginning,” I said.

  “I’ve been wanting to get out there for months. You guys all know about Rita’s, right?”

  I watched their faces carefully. They seemed excited by the possibility there was any knowledge they didn’t already possess.

  Brad didn’t wait for an answer. “From what I’ve read, it’s a real experience. Pizzeria 2.0,” he said.

  Elliot threw his arms out in front of him, a genie who’s just heard the magic words. “Exactly! And they don’t want to be involved in anything that isn’t just as innovative and entrepreneurial and, uh…”

  “Cool?” Brad looked like a kid anxious to hear that teen idol X is exactly how he seems on TV.

  Elliot snapped his fingers, the genie granting his wish. “That’s it. They’re cool guys, and they want to work on cool projects, and what we’re doing is going to be the Rita’s of urban agriculture.”

  Brad had pitched his finger tent again and redoubled his rocking. It seemed dangerous to interrupt such furious cogitation, but Elliot couldn’t help pressing his luck.

  “You know, if you all wanted to take a field trip out there, we could show you the site, have a late lunch…”

  It was too much, not a gross lapse of ethics, judging by the reaction, but just enough of a misstep to snap Brad out of his fanboy paroxysms.

  “We’ve got a marathon TA session after this, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to pass. But I think we can all agree this is a conversation that needs to continue. Kenesha’s right. We understand this is still in the pilot phase, but we can’t make an investment that isn’t evidence-based. That’s at the core of our strategy.”

  Kenesha and the others nodded solemnly. But Brad wasn’t finished. “What we can do is give you a planning grant to help you make this a really kickass program.”

  “Kickass” came out a tad bumpy. He seemed to have broken it out especially for the occasion.

  “To be clear, you wouldn’t be able to spend the money on shovels or photocopies or any other program expenses. We’d want you to go out and talk to as many people who are doing this kind of work as possible, a real deep dive. We can hook you up with some names. The idea is to take what you’re learning and feed it back into the program design. Build it into your logic model. I know you said you’re looking for some help with that. We’ve got a whole toolkit. Kick the tires, see what makes sense. It’s an iterative process. Then, a year from now, if the model really works, I can guarantee you we’ll be all in. How does that sound?”

  Vivienne gave him a shrewd look, like he’d invited her to negotiate. “What about the matching gift from the Brutti Foundation?”

  “That’s between you and them. I’m sure they have their requirements, just like we have ours. But as long as they understand that the Prometheus grant can only be used for planning activities, then you won’t have a problem with us.”

  Elliot had both palms pressed to the table like he was ready to leap up and start shaking hands. But a problem had occurred to me. “The growing season.”

  Brad looked at me blandly, Vivienne with a flash of irritation.

  “We really appreciate this opportunity to go deep into the planning process with you,” I said. “But the growing season starts in a matter of weeks now, and we
have an obligation to Rita’s and Begin to Win to get seeds in the ground.”

  I was afraid Brad would start to wobble on his axis again, but he seemed to take it in stride. Elliot and Vivienne on the other hand…one particular vein in Vivienne’s temple was so taut, I could’ve reached out and played a note on it.

  “Plant away,” Brad said. “The way we see it, planning shouldn’t be a dry, theoretical exercise. You’ve got to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. In this case, literally. That’s how you learn. All we ask is that you capture the learning and share it with us.”

  “And if we want to take what we’ve learned and bring it to other schools, Prometheus will back us?”

  Brad smiled at my brass. “That’s how we hope the process will unfold. For now, just think of the planning grant as seed money.”

  “But please don’t spend it on seeds,” said Mr. Legal. Chuckles all around.

  The vein in Vivienne’s temple retreated. Brad stood, and we all followed suit. Handshake time was nigh. They weren’t a bad bunch, really, if you spoke their language.

  Mr. Legal cleared his throat. “So, Brad or Kenesha—I’m thinking probably Kenesha—will set your paperwork in motion. I assume you’re all set up as a 501c3.”

  Elliot and Vivienne both avoided eye contact with me. Hadn’t I told them we needed to file that paperwork?

  “We’re exploring our options,” I said. “The school is funded by a 501c3, and there’s a possibility they may act as our fiscal sponsor, at least in the planning phase. We’ll keep you informed.”

  Mr. Legal’s eyes went blank as if he were inwardly scanning my words for potential improprieties. But when he resurfaced it was with a nod of approval.

  Brad buttonholed us as we were shuffling out. “So, rain check on that lunch? I heard there’s all these off-menu toppings: raw-milk cheese, magic mushrooms. Is that true?”

  We pled the fifth and left him with his illusions.

  Building That Network

  Red Hook: the first stop on our Prometheus-sponsored listening tour. A Park Sloper for as long as I’d lived in Brooklyn, Red Hook had always held a dark allure for me. Just compare the two names—one redolent of yuppie privilege, a gentle, undemanding way of life; the other vivid, sharp, evoking hard work and rough trade, meat and murder.

  In truth, Red Hook wasn’t exactly a salty longshoreman’s paradise anymore. It was still relatively cut off from the rest of the city by a lack of public transportation, but now you could hop a free shuttle bus or ferry (if you were coming from Manhattan) to the waterfront IKEA and walk to Van Brunt Street. You could still hit the soccer fields for the best pupusas in the city (with a plastic baggie of mango and chili salt on the side), but now you’d have to spend the better part of an hour in line behind know-it-all bloggers. The Department of Health had gotten involved, so the dozen or so women with their plastic coolers and lawn chairs had been replaced by a small handful of professional-grade food trucks.

  The projects still had a reputation, and there was hardly a view anywhere in the neighborhood that didn’t look out onto a bus depot, but that hadn’t stopped a wave of colonists—a little hardier than the typical Park Slope denizen—from gobbling up three-story townhouses near the water for the same amount they’d spend on a one-bedroom just ten minutes away. With them came the galleries and shops (or maybe the galleries and shops came first): the liquor store doing a brisk business in small-batch whiskey brewed in a distillery just up the block; the jeweler making one-of-a-kind pieces out of hemp knots, bits of rusted anchor and other detritus from Red Hook’s nautical past; the incongruously elegant bar, passion project of an in-demand cocktail historian, its every fixture and floor tile worthy of its own “Talk of the Town” piece, every ice cube a geometric ideal. Frankly, Van Brunt still looked a bit blighted—weedy, graffitied, trash-flecked (even after the city deemed it well-trafficked enough to install garbage cans)—but maybe that was the way the new residents wanted it, a serene way station between a rough past and a boutique future.

  Right in the middle of it all, in a prime storefront between the jeweler and the liquor store, was the office of In It Together Farms, the first serious agricultural enterprise in Brooklyn since the days when it was all pretty much one big farm. In my neighborhood, the idea of a hand-to-mouth community organization hanging out its shingle on one of the main commercial drags would have been inconceivable to realtors and landlords who were busy pushing out cobblers and used bookstores in favor of cell phone stands and yogurt chains.

  I had a feeling that suited Duncan Donner, the founder of In It Together, just fine. His was the classic people-thought-I-was-crazy story, as in, “When I first came here and said, ‘I want to build a full-scale working farm on an abandoned lot in Red Hook, and I want kids from the projects to do the farming,’ people thought I was crazy!” But—these stories always hinge on a “but”—Donner was relentless. And when the neighborhood’s only grocery store closed down, leaving locals at the mercy of the bodegas, he started to seem less crazy. (No one could even dream of the world to come, in which the old shipping depot would become a supermarket so bounteous people from other neighborhoods would join Zipcar just to shop there.) The city stepped in with funding for a farm stand, and Heifer International—better known for donating livestock to third-world villages—got involved with the planning and startup. Donner, whose background was in juvenile justice, recruited idle teens from the Red Hook Houses, just like he said he would, promising them that the proceeds from the stand would be theirs to keep.

  Ten years later, on the Venn diagram of New York City, he owned the space where the circles labeled “urban farming,” “food justice,” and “youth development” overlapped. Take the idea of installing scanners at city green markets so vendors could accept food stamps—the speaker of the council had lapped up the credit, but I’d heard it started with Donner. Everything Elliot and I aspired to do in the Triangle, he had done in Red Hook. And as luck would have it, he was Prometheus’s go-to guru for all things vegetal.

  “Between you and me, Prometheus wasn’t willing to commit a dime when I needed it to get this thing off the ground,” he said in a caffeinated falsetto. He sounded like a squeaky wheel rolling down a steep hill. “Now that I’m over the hump and the Times has been out to see us, I’m their idea of the perfect consultant. They send me starry-eyed young dudes like you every month or so. I give you the tour, report back on what I think of you, they send a check. America, right?”

  I watched his ginger soul patch bob with each word. He was stomping through the office in dirt-caked work boots, cut-off jean shorts, and a black In It Together T-shirt (their logo was a pile-up of hands in gardening gloves; I could practically hear the implied “one, two, three...team!”). The floorboards groaned with every step. There were a few other people working, a pasty woman in a sunhat who seemed to be dropping off some paperwork, and a trio of black teens, all in the same T-shirt as Duncan, huddled around the one computer, which appeared to be in a state of distress. He high-fived the woman and stuck his sweaty, bald head among the teens, checking on their progress. Then he whirled around to face us.

  “Don’t worry. I give everyone a good review. You could be on Wall Street raping pensioners or Madison Avenue coming up with a cuter logo for rat poison…maybe put a little party hat on the skull and crossbones, I don’t know. But you’re here, right? And that’s good enough for me. I always tell Brad and those guys, let a thousand flowers bloom, it ain’t my money. Except for the consulting fee, of course.

  “Let’s call that Lesson Number One: you help the people who need your help. Everyone else has to pony up. You guys ready to take a walk with me? There’s something I want to show you.”

  The farm itself was five minutes away. It wasn’t until we’d come right up to it that I could see how impressive it was. While nothing much was growing, long furrows had already been dug in anticipation of the season. There was a row of chest-high compost bins, a cluster of beehives made
of remaindered shelving units donated by the nearby IKEA, even a wire pen of baby goats. I expected to see more local kids doing the day’s chores, but instead the farm was being tended by a gaggle of adults, middle-aged men and women in powder blue polo shirts and matching baseball caps. A small sign had been posted by the entrance gate: “In It Together Welcomes Windham-Mercer’s Annual Give-Back Day.”

  Duncan stood with his hands on his hips, a general surveying the ranks. “They all want to come in the summer when I’m trying to break in a dozen new youth empowerment fellows and two dozen community volunteers. There isn’t much for them to do now—I’ve got them weeding, turning compost, picking up the trash—but at least they’re not getting in the way.”

  Indeed, many of the Windham-Mercer crew were just milling around, shooting streams of Gatorade from company-branded squeeze bottles into the space between their straight, white teeth, whipping their heads back to shake off phantom bees.

  “I charge them a hundred bucks a head,” Duncan said. “Call it a guilt tax. I don’t even know what these guys do, but it must be pretty bad if they’re willing to pay that much to do our donkey work. What line were you two in anyway?”

  We told him and braced ourselves. Where did government hacks rank alongside pension rapists and poison peddlers in his rogue’s gallery?

  Duncan just fingered his soul patch. “Then you know a hell of a lot more about what you’re getting into than I did. Probably not much I can pass on you haven’t figured out already.”

  We assured him that we had figured out virtually nothing, that we were, in fact, hungry for his wisdom.

  “Gotta show Brad you’re earning that sweet grant money, right? All right. One more lesson, then I’ve got to get some work done. This is a big one. You ready? Talk to everybody. I mean, everybody. Every community board meeting, you’re there. And I mean every meeting, not just when they put you on the agenda. Every church potluck, every school fundraiser, you’re there, showing your smiling face, handing out leaflets, explaining what you’re trying to do, asking for their support. But you’re not just telling them what you need from them. You’re asking what you can do for them. ‘Oh, you need bodies for your rally protesting bus service cuts? I’m there. You need someone with fundraising experience to sit on the board of your art space? I’m there.’ I’ve been doing it for twelve years, and half the time I’m still the honky interloper. I’m telling you, every CB meeting, there’s a faction of old biddies from the Houses who say, ‘Why are we wasting time on this white boy? He’s not even from here’—meaning I wasn’t born here—‘and he ain’t gonna be here when we need him.’ Every time. I carry their groceries for them! You saw their grandchildren back at the office! But they get to have their say, everyone kind of rolls their eyes, and then the board backs us up. Because they know us. They know what we’re about. And then, when I’m having a problem with the city, which is, like, every week, I can say to them with full confidence, ‘I’ve got the community behind me. Are you sure you want this hassle?’ That, guys, is my whole life. And that is really the lesson of lessons: be prepared to spend every waking hour, and most of your few sleeping hours, thinking about it, talking about it, worrying about it, freaking out about it—and everything will work out just fine.”