Episode 97 –Food Well Alliance: Growing Together

The podcast for project managers by project managers. Project Managing Community Gardens. Hear all about an innovative project to increase access to locally grown food and build healthier communities, by empowering local growers, prioritizing local food, and saving food-producing land in a fast-growing city. Table of Contents 01:37 … Meet Britni 02:22 … Food Well Alliance 04:18 … Connecting with a Passion 05:33 … Preparing for a PM Role 07:02 … Stakeholders 07:59 … Plant Eat Repeat Project 09:01 … Aluma Farm Project 13:57 … Communication with Stakeholders 15:03 … Working with City Governments 16:06 … Problem Statement Strategy 18:09 … Facing Obstacles 20:03 … Compost Issues 22:44 … Getting a Community Garden Started 24:55 … Resources Offered to Growers 26:58 … Face to Face with End Users 29:20 … Where to get Produce 29:42 … Advice for New PM’s 30:41 … Lessons Learned 31:43 … Closing BRITNI BURKHARDSMEIER:  I think my advice would be the importance of building your project management toolbox, so learning what are those best practices, whether it’s techniques of communication, how to interact with partners externally or internally.  What are those tools you need, you know, your templates for budget and timeline and meeting notes?  But then in addition to that also still being able to stay fluid and adaptable and recognizing that you may have to change things up because every project is slightly different.  Every partner on that project is slightly different.  NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  We’ve been listening to what you’ve been telling us about what subjects you’re interested in and what kinds of guests you’d like to hear from, and so we thank you for your input. Please keep the comments about our podcast coming.  So you can leave a comment on Google, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or whichever podcast listening app you use.  You can also leave comments on the Velociteach.com website or on our social media pages, it’s your feedback that brings the kind of guest we have on our program today.  And Bill Yates, I need to tell you, I’m not sure who suggested we have a podcast about food, but I’m certainly glad they did. BILL YATES:  It’s making me hungry just thinking about that.  Looking forward to getting into that.  So Britni is going to describe some projects that she’s worked with that are really unique, the stakeholders are unique, the problems to solve are unique.  And I think, regardless of the type of project we have, we can all learn from Britni. Meet Britni NICK WALKER:  So, let’s meet our guest, she’s Britni Burkhardsmeier, a project and impact manager at the Atlanta non-profit Food Well Alliance, a collaborative network of local growers, community leaders, and city leaders, working to build thriving community gardens and farms across Metro Atlanta.  The goal is to increase access to locally grown food in order to build healthier communities.  Britni holds a master’s in public health from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, with a concentration in global nutrition.  Prior to attending graduate school, Britni worked as program coordinator on the emergency health and nutrition team at Save the Children U.S. in Washington, D.C.  Britni, welcome to Manage This. BRITNI BURKHARDSMEIER:  Thank you for having me. Food Well Alliance NICK WALKER:  Let’s get started by just learning a little bit more about the Food Well Alliance. So how did that organization get started? BRITNI BURKHARDSMEIER:  So we started in 2015 with funding from our founding benefactor, the James M. Cox Foundation.  And we really got started because it was a vision between the Cox Foundation and Bill Bolling, the founder of the Atlanta Community Food Bank.  And so together they saw an opportunity to connect members of Atlanta’s local food movement to collectively build healthier communities. NICK WALKER:  And what about you?  I mean, tell us a little a bit about your background.  So how did you meet up with this organization? BRITNI BURKHARDSMEIER:  Yeah, so I got introduced to Food Well Alliance in 2017, when I was a graduate student at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.  So I was getting my master’s in public health, with a concentration in nutrition, and through a professor and a class got introduced to Food Well Alliance and was part of a team that helped write the Atlanta’s Local Food Baseline Report, which Food Well Alliance published.  Kind of one thing led to another, and I stayed on.  And so, yeah. BILL YATES:  I’ve got something that I have to confess right off the top. NICK WALKER:  Uh-oh. BILL YATES:  I hate cucumbers. NICK WALKER:  No. BILL YATES:  So when you studied nutrition, and when we talk about local farms and farming and bringing vegetables and fruit to local communities, I have to go ahead and confess I am totally cool with this conversation as long as we don’t say we have to have cucumbers.  Can we agree to that? NICK WALKER:  So this guy, when somebody brings in masses of cucumbers that they’ve grown at home in their garden to give out to all... BILL YATES:  To share. NICK WALKER:  Yeah, to share, you kind of... BILL YATES:  I curse them. NICK WALKER:  Yeah. BRITNI BURKHARDSMEIER:  Good news is that farms and gardens grow a lot of things in addition to cucumbers, yeah. BILL YATES:  Okay, that’s good. So okay, I’m onboard with this conversation,  I’m probably going to get some hate mail on that, and I get it. They’re nutritional, but I am sorry, it just doesn’t do it for me.  There are many vegetables that I do fully endorse and embrace and eat very consistently, but cucumbers are not it. Okay. NICK WALKER:  All right. Connecting with a Passion BILL YATES:  I just had to hate on it just for a minute.  When I think about, okay, you go to school, and you pursue nutrition, and you go deep into that, and then you find an organization that connects with a passion that had to be fun for you.  And, I mean, for so many people, they’re deeper into their career.  They’ve been working for quite a while.  And they’re like, eh, still don’t really enjoy, haven’t really found that thing.  But it seems like you were able to make that connection with this organization that’s like, okay, this is a passion point for me.  Was that the case? BRITNI BURKHARDSMEIER:  Yeah.  The thing that’s also really exciting about it is, so nutrition’s really broad; right? BILL YATES:  Yeah. BRITNI BURKHARDSMEIER:  There’s a lot that fits under that, from the health side to then like food and security.  Do people have access to food?  And Food Well kind of bridges a lot of those gaps.  So, yes, I came at it originally from nutrition in terms of making sure that’s how people are getting their nutrients, and they’re staying healthy.  But then my time at Food Well Alliance, I have learned about why healthy soil and compost is so important to make sure that the food that you’re eating is nutritious; why it’s important for people to have access to these foods, whether that’s farm stands at urban farms or farmers’ markets or community gardens kind of producing for themselves and the families that are there. Preparing for a PM Role NICK WALKER:  You have been thrust in this role of project manager. BRITNI BURKHARDSMEIER:  Yes. NICK WALKER:  So what kind of prepared you for that role? BRITNI BURKHARDSMEIER:  It wasn’t something that I really knew much about going into it.  So it’s not like I went into school being like, okay, project management is what I want to do.  But it was one of those things where, in my career, both before Food Well Alliance and then really at Food Well Alliance, colleagues and managers kept kind of being like, you know, the skills you’re exhibiting are really great skills for project management. And so the more that I looked into, okay, what is project management, what does a project manager do, really realizing that that is what I was doing in the projects that I had been placed in.  And so that’s what I was enjoying doing.  I enjoyed working with a bunch of different people on something and kind of, not necessarily being the expert, but working with all of the experts and really bringing them together to produce something kind of incredible. BILL YATES:  And for not-for-profits such as the Atlanta Food Well Alliance, it’s so important to bring in somebody that’s got that skill set and that natural bent of, okay, I’m good at connecting people and managing stakeholders and helping define  requirements and then getting it done. BRITNI BURKHARDSMEIER:  Yeah.  And, you know, it’s been interesting for me because sometimes that’s just internal with my colleagues; right?  There can be a bunch of us within different teams, even though we’re a small organization, really kind of, okay, how do I project manage that internally; but then definitely externally, as well, because we do work with so many different partners. Stakeholders BILL YATES:  I wanted to ask you about those stakeholders.  We kick around that word “stakeholder.”  But you do, you’ve got internal – you’ve got experts that obviously know a lot about nutrition and a lot about land use and things like that.  But then you partner with everybody from folks wearing coveralls to people wearing three-piece suits. BRITNI BURKHARDSMEIER:  Yeah. BILL YATES:  So you have politicians, you have people with a lot of money, you have people that have very intense needs locally, what prepared you for that? BRITNI BURKHARDSMEIER:  I’m not sure, to be honest, but it is probably one of my favorite parts of what I do is working with everything from the farmers and the growers.  So I work on a couple of projects with Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture, which is an urban farm in the west side,