In this episode, I speak with Katherine Soll , a powerhouse of knowledge and change in the realm of urban agriculture. She takes us through her inspiring journey from her New York City upbringing to her influential role as the founder and CEO of Teens for Food Justice.

With a nod to Agritechture’s Henry Gordon- Smith for his support and insight, Katherine and I delve into the transformative world of hydroponic farms, the importance of food equity, and the incredible shift from food deserts to the more nuanced concept of food apartheid. It's a conversation that's not only about the growth of plants but also about the growth of young minds and communities.

We really dig into what it takes to cultivate an organization that stands firm against the winds of challenge. Katherine 's narrative is a testament to the resilience needed to lead such impactful work, and her experiences offer a treasure trove of wisdom on nurturing the next generation of leaders.

By integrating technology with hands-on education, Katherine 's team is planting the seeds for a greener, more equitable NYC, and beyond. It's a tale of hope, hard work, and the harvest that comes from truly rooting for change.

Join us as we explore the greening of urban spaces and the empowerment of youth in a movement that's redefining our relationship with food and community.

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Key Takeaways

00:00 Growing Up in NYC

10:25 Evolution of Teens for Food Justice

17:26 Building Resilient Community Farming Organization

25:09 Urban Farming Impact and Student Success

30:33 Expanding Urban Agriculture and Food Access

35:46 Letting Go and Trusting Your Team

41:19 Navigating Mission Creep in Vertical Farming

46:15 Teen Food Justice Organization Promotion

Tweetable Quotes

"One of the things that was really amazing about growing up in New York, I think, was the level of independence that you have when you're really very young. Being able to walk to school by yourself, go places with your friends by yourself, that independence gives you a perspective on the world that's really different than when you grow up in a car culture."

"I think that service is an incredible way to get people to look outside of their own self and their own interests and to understand that we're only going to thrive if we're all thriving together."

"I think that if you never have the experience of really needing to show that level of vulnerability and see that you're gonna survive, that yeah, you miss something. I think that's a really important honing process that has served me. It was extremely hard, but again, I try to approach things by saying what is the beneficial lying underneath this thing that didn't go the way I planned."

Resources Mentioned

Website - https://teensforfoodjustice.org/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/tffjinitiative

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/teensforfoodjustice/?hl=en

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/katherine.soll/

Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/teensforfoodjustice/

Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4eHV1OR7WYIye2hvskhPGg

Connect With Us

VFP - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/verticalfarmingpodcast

VFP Twitter - https://twitter.com/VerticalFarmPod

VFP Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/direct/inbox/

VFP Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/VerticalFarmPod

Vertical Farming Jobs - http://verticalfarmingjobs.com

Vertical Farming Weekly - www.getrevue.co/profile/verticalfarmingpodcast

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So, catherine Sol, founder and CEO at Teens for Food for Justice, thank you for joining me on the Vertical Farming podcast.

Hi, it's great to be with you today. Harry, Thank you so much for inviting me.

I know we've had some back and forth, mainly due to my travel times and rescheduling. So thank you for being patient with getting this rescheduled, because I wanted to make sure we had enough time for us to chat.

Great, no problem, things happen.

I'm trying to think back where I connected with you and, given that it's been a couple of back and forths, I'm wondering if it was at the indoor ag con event last year, I think it was through Henry Gordon's story yeah, that's right.

Yes.

Yeah, and Henry's been a supporter of the show. He was nice enough to be on early on when I started the podcast in 2020 and he's been on for a second visit as well. How did you first connect with Henry?

Well gosh, now we're really going back a long way, honestly, just generally in the urban ag space. I saw him in the New York ag collective originally, which he was definitely an early part of.

Sure.

And possibly through Cornell it goes back so far. Henry's been just a huge supporter and support to our organization.

Yeah.

He's been on our board and actually was just out at one of our new farms in Far Rockaway yesterday early in the morning filming there, so yeah, so he's really amazing.

He gets around a lot because sometimes I see him posting on socials and he's somewhere internationally. Yes, he actually went to Spain today, so and were you born and raised in New York?

I was, I am. Yes, both my husband and I grew up on the Upper West Side with Manhattan. We have basically both lived here all our lives. I've actually really lived here my whole life after moving up here from Greenwich Village when I was seven. Wow, my parents were born and raised in New York, as were his and we've raised our children on the Upper West Side. So really tried and true New Yorkers, as tried and true as they come.

Yeah, so I, homan, is now Minneapolis. This is where the short answer is. This is where love brought me. But I was actually raised in Yonkers, new York, and I lived in the city. I've lived in the Upper East Side, east Village, stuyvesant Town, green Point, brooklyn, so I consider myself always a New Yorker and always, at the heart, have New York in my heart. So it's always nice to get connected, even if it's just virtually, with people that have such a close connection to the city as well.

Is it snowing there?

No, we've had probably the warmest winter that, according to my partners, that we can recall. I think it broke a record for like warmest day, and it's for a state that relies heavily on winter activities like freezing lakes and snowshoeing and ice skating and everything you do when it gets to below freezing. A lot of that wasn't even wasn't around to happen. So it's interesting and part of probably a broader discussion on what's happening in the world at large, but it's interesting to see it firsthand yes.

I know how would you describe growing up in New York City. For someone who's maybe just visited or never even been there, what was that like for you?

Well, I mean, I guess my answer to that question is it was life, you know, it was childhood. It was great. One of the things that was really amazing about growing up in New York, I think, was the level of independence that you have when you're really very young being able to walk by yourself.

When you're pretty young you're able to walk to school by yourself. You're able to go places with your friends by yourself and go to their homes and go to yours. I was walking to school by myself, certainly by third grade, if not earlier than that, and I've really vivid memories of that. I'm taking the bus, taking the subway, going all over, just really that independence. I think that it gives you a perspective on the world that's really different than when you grow up in a car culture. I think my children also really appreciated having that level of independence and the ability to move around freely and to not be dependent on an adult to take you everywhere.

I think that there was a level of diversity growing up in New York City that we were exposed to that you don't necessarily get when you are in other places, and both my parents and my husband's parents and us and our children attend a New York City public school, so very familiar with our school system, which is really a monolith. So I think, being able to navigate such a large and complicated space. But within New York all the individual communities are like villages and that's kind of how I think you feel in your own neighborhood that this is your little home and you know where everything is and you know the people, you know the shopkeepers.

I definitely always felt that way as a kid.

Talk a little bit about your relationship to understanding how the supply chain of how food makes its way to big cities, and when that maybe just kind of came on your radar and it started to be something that you were becoming more aware of.

Yeah, I mean so. Growing up as a kid I think I was a little bit unique in that A lot of people that I know who are of my age and generation you know they talk about basically like all their vegetables were canned or frozen vegetables, and that was not the case in my family. My mother in particular, was a really early adopter of like all kinds of holistic and homeopathic medicines and natural foods and supplements, so she went out of her way to make sure that there was fresh fruit and vegetables on our table all the time. And when I was a child, actually, one of my favorite snacks was half a head of romaine lettuce, which to me was like gourmet food to have romaine lettuce. But we live down the block.

I live a block away from where I grew up and we live just right down the street from Fairway, which opened up when I was a kid and was really greengrocer at that point in time and you know we had the ability to get fresh produce there that maybe didn't necessarily have the ability to get in a lot of other stores and supermarkets in our community and you know a variety of items. So I mean I would say that for me I didn't feel like there was a lack of that when I was growing up because of that store being located in my community and I think you know just my mom's focus on making sure that we that's how we ate. But as I got older you clearly begin to see, as you're traveling to different neighborhoods of the city, I went to Fordham in the at Rose Hill in the Bronx for a semester and then transferred from there first to Fordham at Lincoln Center and then to NYU where I did my last three years went up by Fordham in the Bronx.

It really wasn't very much fresh food so other than on campus there really weren't many places where you could get something good to eat, and then the Upper West Side is a neighborhood that has always really had a lot of resources for good quality, fresh food, so I think I've been incredibly lucky in that regard and I think that really the issue of food insecurity and the concern about fresh food access hit home when I started the organization that was a predecessor to Teens Refugees, which was Students for Service, and really working very closely with students in high school across New York City and looking at social justice and resource inequity from neighborhood to neighborhood and really having the opportunity to spend time in food pantries in kitchen all over New York and speaking to clients of those pantries and seeing our students' reaction was for me, I think, really eye-opening around how vitally important this issue had become in our city. Not that it wasn't a vital issue before, but, as we know, over the last 15 or so years food insecurity has grown dramatically. In the last five even more so.

So you went to the School of Journalism. Was that something that you aspired to coming out of college telling stories or just reporting on what's happening in society? Is that something that's always been top of mind for you?

Yeah, I always loved the news. In my house we grew up watching the news watching the news.

It's in our listening to NPR. I've always loved the news. I've always been a bit of a news junkie in that way probably less now than I used to be. I think the news is so depressing right now, and has been for a while, but it's hard to plug in all the time in the way that one once did. I don't like to watch the news. I like to either read or listen to my news at this point.

But yeah, after I graduated from, I was interested in feature journalism and after I graduated from NYU, I did get a job in editorial working for magazine and I was an assistant and then an associate editor at. It was a design and construction trade publication, which was an area and a field that my family was involved with from its own internal business, which tied into interest that I had, as well as giving me the opportunity to write and edit, which I really loved. But there was a point where I had the opportunity to go work in the house for a company that was a company in that trade and do marketing for them. So I did that for a while and then I actually ended up going into my family business. My father got sick and he died very suddenly and there was a void there and so I went into that business and I very quickly immersed myself in business management courses and learned all the things that I needed to know to run a small business. So that kind of prepared me early on for what I do now.

Yeah, you mentioned the predecessor to Teens for Food Justice. What is the origin story for what is now Teens for Food Justice?

So when my children were in middle school and high school, they had as I'll do most New York City high school students a requirement to participate in community service hours as part of their graduation requirement.

And for myself and some of my friends particularly one who lives on the board of our organization since the beginning we just didn't see that the although they had these requirements to participate in community service, which is a really good thing, there weren't a lot of opportunities for them to really learn about social justice as part of that and to understand how social policy is made and how the organizations and agencies in our city that are tasked with addressing social injustice do their work, and we felt like it was very important for to give young people the exposure to that and to give them the feeling that they were participating in a meaningful way in making positive change in their society. We also felt like there were very few opportunities in New York City, which is one of the most segregated school districts in New York City, for in the country for kids of different backgrounds to come together and meet one another and to share their experiences and to develop some common language around social justice.

And so we created this organization called Students for Service, which was designed to connect students with agencies that were providing social services and to give those kids those kinds of real service learning and community service opportunities that would create them with policy, service and advocacy going forward in their lives. And we did that for a few years and it got big. It got big very quickly. It was all volunteer. We didn't really have a strong funding model for it in place because we didn't expect it to turn into what it did and we thought we've got to kind of drill down and focus on a specific area. We knew that our students were really concerned about how we were going to continue to feed a growing planet with shrinking resources, given the existing issues around healthy food access, and we connected with our board chair and the co-founder of Teens for Food Justice, tara Smith Tara Smith Swivel, who was really focused on all kinds of practices that could upend farming and she was very interested in hydroponics as a model and we just thought like how can we connect this new technology of hydroponic growing to this service model and engage young people in it and kind of prepare them for what we felt was going to be a, you know, significant factor in the evolution of how we grow food and that's how things for for justice was born.

For a first couple of Years we operated it, continued to operate it through this volunteer model where kids applied. We selected them and they committed coming for a year, once or twice a month, to participate in the program, building a farm at a school and running Farming for the school, distributing food to the school in its community and also running outreach events that are focused on health, nutrition and food justice advocacy for that community. And then we realized that Actually there were tremendous opportunities for connecting what we were doing to the curricular day in the after-school day for the Community that had this food insecurity need. And even though a lot of our student volunteers that were themselves food insecure, we knew that if the community took ownership of the project it would really grow and have legs. And so we changed the model and we built a new farm in a new school that had the capacity to support that. And Now we have seven farms in New York City and one in Denver and we're just growing really, really fast.

You did mention hydroponics when you got started and obviously the nature of this show is around what's happening in the vertical farming space. So we see that's something you were looking at early on. But it was the model when you started to look at Maybe hydroponics and also traditional agriculture as well, or was it just focused on what you could do in an urban environment?

We were really focused on what you could do in an urban environment, because that's where we were located.

New York.

City being what it is, and although we definitely connected our program to all of the really great work that was being done in Community food access, community led community food access and the community garden movement and so many of our neighborhoods Is on the forefront of that for a really long time I mean we were joining a party that was already in place, and so we really learned a lot from those existing organizations and Gave our students the opportunity to see soil based farms many of whom had not seen that before as well as our farm, so they could understand the context.

And even today, ten years later, our curriculum does include Hands-on opportunities for students to do Comparisons between soil based farming as well as hydroponic farming. We've done some aquaponics, we've done some aeroponics, so we do look at all of these different models.

hydroponic vertical farming is a very efficient Solution for inside a school building right, yeah and so you can really grow a lot of food and you can also provide a really rich technical and engineering experience for the students as part of that food access curriculum. So it wraps together all of the STEM concepts as well as the health and nutrition and the policy and advocacy, so it's really like a through line for the students that can start with the science of it and lead to the advocacy and activism, or it can start with the why yeah?

and.

The advocacy that comes from building a new model for producing food. And then what are the outputs of that and what are the inputs from a scientific or technological point of view that make that possible?

What was that learning curve for you? Getting started learning about hydroponics and now you know. When you look at what's available now in terms of AI, robotics and what people are doing and reading Henry's newsletter, I'm sure there's you know, you can just see how much has changed in the past ten years.

Oh, my god. I mean just from the point of view of, like, talking about the issue of food deserts or food insecurity, and even the word food deserts is basically like Gone. Now it's we've really moved beyond that to the idea of food apartheid and food swamps and all of these other issues, really trying to reframe the conversation. But in the beginning I would talk about hydroponic growing, I would talk about food insecurity or food deserts, and people didn't know what I was talking about. There was so much. What is that?

I don't know what that is now. It's like the rare bird who doesn't know what I'm talking about. These issues have become really hot topics. We hit I think we hit the beginning of a wave. We were just very lucky in terms of the timing, or more, and we also helped to drive that conversation.

We helped to build that wave.

So I think that I mean everything has changed. When we started out, we didn't have any knowledge to build what we build today and in fact, when we started building our own systems as opposed to purchasing from other people, we were learning. We were really putting it together and we had our students were down on the ground building those systems With us. We have very talented people on our staff who have really invented this program everything from the systems to our growing SOPs, to our own proprietary farm dashboard software, our curriculum, new curricula, all the time, our after-school programming. This team has really created everything from scratch, from the ground up, and For me that's the exciting part. I have like a natural Entrepreneurial spirit. I'm kind of a risk-taker. I'm not really afraid of risk. I obviously get anxious, like anybody else, but to me, the idea of trying something and it might fail is Is okay, because that's how you learn. You learn from your mistakes. We really also try to encourage that in our students. Please don't don't go into this feeling like you need to know already.

That's not what learning is learning is coming in and trying and experimenting and succeeding and failing. But the key is Not taking your mistakes and your failures. It's something as a wash. You have to look at them and say, okay, so that didn't work the way I planned, but what did I learn from that? And if you learn something from it, it worked. Yeah so I would say that that's really how we've approached the entire Organization from the beginning.

Where did you learn that resiliency?

Well, I think that. Well, I really do think that a lot of it came from the experience of taking over a business where I had Responsibilities to people. My mother was in the business, we had employees on the staff I had and I I was very young, I was in my mid-20s and I lost my dad. That was really hard. We were very close. I just got married and I just felt this tremendous responsibility. I felt a responsibility to him and his legacy, the company that he built. I felt a responsibility to my mother. I felt a responsibility to the people who work for the company to keep it going, to Not have everything come to a grinding halt when we lost him, and so that was very hard yeah.

I'm sure really hard, but I really felt like this was something that I had to do, and what I found through that process Was that if I knew, if I looked hard and if I was creative and if I did my research and I did my homework and I was willing to be vulnerable and say I don't know how to do this, that I would find the people and the resources that I needed To get me there. And I did. And I think that is really Such an important lesson for people to learn in life. I think that if you never have the experience of really meaning to show that level of vulnerability and See that you're gonna survive, that yeah.

You know you miss something. I think that's a really important honing process that has served me. It was extremely hard but again, I try to approach things by saying what is the good or the beneficial let's say beneficial that's lying underneath this thing. That didn't go the way I planned, that didn't work, that was really hard, that was difficult, that was sad, all of those things. You have to find the piece that's gonna help you move forward.

You can't help but think about how much that experience really formed who you are now and allowed you to transfer those messages and those lessons to the students and build that into them, that resiliency because obviously when you're young you feel like you can't make mistakes, or if you encounter an authority figure and you don't have the answer, you feel like you'll get in trouble. So I think learning early on that's okay, to make mistakes and learn from your mistakes and to make the next iteration better. I think the sooner or the earlier you can learn that in life I think it's such a strong thing to learn. That's gonna be helpful in the future and I'm sure you've probably seen it from any of you students as well.

Yeah, I mean I think that we really try to build a very collaborative environment within Teens for Food Justice. I think that we really approach this for our students, that one of the things about farming is it isn't an entrepreneurial experience. Every day you're inventing it. It's new because every day there's new growth, there's new life where it's nature.

We're not controlling it and, yes, in closed environment agriculture we are controlling for a lot of factors and there's tremendous reliability in that growth cycle that you don't have outside, but you still have conditions that you can't account for. And in a school building where there are so many factors that you can't control, that happens all the time. I mean, it gets really cold and the heat pumps up and now the temperature in the room has gone way up and that's having an impact on your crop yield. So I think that it's really like how do we always recognize this is our farm? This is our farm? And one of the things that I think is really great about the way in which we function as an organization within the school building is that our farms are not a school's farm, they're a campus farm, so the whole school is sharing this farm.

All of the students are eating the produce, and so many of our schools here in New York City are co-located, so we have a farm on a campus that has six schools within it here in Manhattan, and all of the students from all of the schools are participating in the program in some way, shape or form, whether it's through their curricular day lessons or it's through clubs, or it's through our afterschool program or internships, and I think that's amazing because it's such a community building experience, which is what this should be.

I mean, every part of it should be growing, should be a community experience. Feeding people is a community experience, sitting down to eat together is a community experience, and building and advocating for equitable, fair, just policies is a community experience, and I just am a really firm believer in that. It's one of the things that drove me to start the organization in the first place, which is that I grew up in a time that wasn't so me, in my opinion, from a social activism point of view, and I think that we lost a lot of that, and I really felt that within my community and it was something that I wanted to change. I wanted really to tap into the way of it, and I think that service is an incredible way to get people to be able to look outside of their own self and their own interests and to understand that we're only going to thrive if we're all thriving together.

That's beautifully put. Thank you for sharing that. How has the organization grown since starting? How big is it now?

Yeah, so we actually have 16 employees full time now, which is amazing, and we also have many, many, many part-time interns, student interns, who work for the organization. They're all paid either by us or through other programs, whether they're city programs or they're programs of other organizations where we're providing a work site for these students. So we're really proud of that. Last year, we had 65 paid interns working for the organization, which is an incredible number.

That's great.

So we operate, as I said, seven farms in New York City and one in Denver, and we have two. We're in four or five boroughs. The only borough that we're not in is Staten Island. We will be opening two additional farms in Far Rockaway, queens, during this calendar year by the beginning of the coming academic year in September 2024.

Well, I gotta reach out to you when I'm in the city next and maybe you'll give me a tour, whether I'd love to see one of them.

Oh, that'd be great. We love to give tours. Our students love to give tours.

Yeah, have you seen students that have joined the program early on and then just kind of made their way through the program and then have gone on to see them graduate and get them maybe a career in CEA or maybe somewhere else? But obviously, having had the organization for 10 years now, you get to see the journey of some of the students who have been through that program. I wonder what that experience has been like.

So I think that the really important thing to focus on is that we're not really focused on the exclusive outcome of students going through a program and becoming farmers. First of all, cea, particularly in New York, is minuscule, tiny, nascent industry. There aren't a lot of opportunities for students who graduate from our program to get jobs in that industry here in New York, and a lot of our students are not students who are moving out of New York, right? So what I think is what we look at is how is this experience, how is the experience of growing food in your school making it available to your community, what you're learning and sharing about the importance of a healthier, plant-based diet? And what is our? Why do we exist? What does our food system look like?

It does and why is it designed to make healthy food available in some communities and lousy food available in others? And so where does that take you? Where does that take you as an adult? And so we've had kids who have gone on to. We have a student who went on to do a year of service in Israel and ended up working on a kid boat. So that was her choice, because she wanted to continue in agriculture.

So that's a specific story about a kid who directly took the experience of farming in New York City to growing food elsewhere.

But we have students who have gone into nursing programs who have said that because of their experience on the farm they understand the importance of sharing information about healthy eating with their patients because, as a clinician, that's a very important part of the task that they have. We have students who are interested in going into engineering, and the part of the program that they really are interested in is the technology of the systems. This is their first real hands-on opportunity to understand a machine and really how a machine of this level of sophistication works, with all the automation and the pumps and the pipes and all of the controls. We have students who have gone into public policy as a result of being a part of our program, and so we don't see ourselves as primarily and exclusively an agricultural training program. But what we are believing is that as this industry grows, our students are going to come out of this with the experience, the knowledge and the understanding to be able to be A part of that and to drive it. So we haven't seen that yet.

Yeah but we believe that we are going to start to see it and you have to remember that in the middle of this period of 10 years, we had three years of completely lost time during COVID yeah and, in that time, their kids, who graduated.

We lost track of them. So I think that is one of the more important challenges that we see ourselves as having, which is really, how do we continue to follow our students and to see how the program is impacting them once they graduate in a much more robust way, now that the pandemic is behind us?

Yeah, that's great to hear those success stories as well. I started the show in 2020, just before the pandemic. Not, this wasn't planned and I just was interested in the topic and I had Connected to. Someone gave me a book that connected me to Dixon, this bomb. Yeah, he's booked, who a lot of people consider. Got father vertical farming right and that's when I started the interviews. But then March 2020 is when I had my first one scheduled, right in the middle.

And thankfully kudos to my first early guests who continued to make time to get those recorded. But it was so interesting because, immediately to your earlier point, the concepts of supply chain disruptions and food deserts and last mile Really skyrocketed to everyone's attention and we were forced to. And then again, with the Ukraine war, you know in terms of like, where's our food coming from? How much access do we have to fresh food, and so the one positive that did come out of that was just this awareness and just the alarm bells being sounded that this is something that really and you're seeing it firsthand in New York City that this is something that needs to be top of mind for more people right.

And so I was going to ask about the outreach, and you did mention the Denver school. So is that something that's intentional to grow this, or do you just by nature of what you're doing? Are you attracting the interest of other cities?

I think it's both. I mean, it's definitely both the Denver expansion and which was started before the pandemic, like in 20, probably late 2018, early 20, late 2017, early 2018 so that I had read an article that Denver was instituting attacks on highly processed food and was going to divert that into a fund for children's health. And Our board chair grew up in Denver and she is very connected with the Denver community and I said, if anything was ever meant to be, it's this when she was beyond excited that the idea that she could bring this program potentially to her hometown. She's a new yorker now, but she grew up there and so we reached out to people that we knew in the community and were connected with Denver public schools and they Were thrilled with the idea of this program immediately.

I mean, denver is an ag state.

They have robust agricultural ct education across the state, but specifically in Denver, which is something that we don't really have in New York City, where she's dying to develop that, and so there was a really good fit and so it just everything aligned there, and what I think is most important about that is that as a city, they were looking at this issue in a very holistic way, and I think that Is, for us, really an important lesson, because we've also talked with other cities where there's interest in the part of a funder or there's interest on the part of A particular legislator, or whatever it might be, or a developer, but I think you need to have it sort of baked into the philosophical culture of the city.

This is an initiative that we are going to make primary with tax dollars, and that Is, for us, I think, what really made Denver succeed right out of the gate, made it easy for us to Bring a program to life there, because it aligned with so many initiatives that they already had in place there and we're instituting. So we are really interested in continuing to expand and obviously food insecurity is a problem that exists everywhere, so there is no place that can't use better food access and Isn't going to benefit from training a new generation in how to build a healthy, sustainable, affordable, just food system. So we hope that there will be a lot more of such alignments between city policy and school and education policy and funding policy that will open up the doors for organizations like teams for food justice to come in and to help to make that all possible.

Sounds very exciting in terms of the potential for other cities seeing what you've been able to put together and that partnership and getting them Interested in possibly reaching I'm sure reaching out and maybe even hearing it on this, on this episode to learn.

That would be great.

I'm curious. You know, obviously, the experience you had having to take over your father's business and then the 10, almost 11 years with teams for food justice. How have you grown as a leader over that time?

Oh wow, what a great question. Well, I like to think that always, from the beginning, I was a really good team player. That helps?

yes, and very open To other people's ideas and not super directive. I definitely think that particular quality is something that I have worked very, very hard to develop, which is to not to really practice that collaborative approach that I've been talking about in so far as our students are concerned, but to really try to really take that approach and really listen to what others have to say in the organization. It's when you build. Being a CEO or an ED of an organization is a really unique thing and it's kind of lonely.

Yeah.

Because, even though you have a lot of other people who are supporting this and who are right there with you and are struggling with the problems, particularly as a founder, there's a sense of ownership and responsibility to it, as if it were a person that just is really hard to let go of. And I think that trusting that other people are gonna have that level of care and concern and willingness to really give themselves to this mission and to the entity as if it were a life human in the way that you did, because it came from you, is hard and I think that over time I've really come to see that other people really care for this as much as I do and that it has the ability to live on without me being the driver of everything and learning how to let go and to trust that other people have it, which is how you get to 16 people.

You cannot do that if you aren't able to step away. And so my company that I ran many years ago, that I took over and which I grew and built and ran for more than seven years and it evolved a lot. It was never as big as we are now. I didn't have a board. Now I'd have all of those things.

So I think that that would be to me, in many ways, the most significant way that I've grown, which would be to be able to let go and believe and trust that culture is there and to be able to credit myself for saying that's a culture that I built, that I planted the seed of that, and other people have contributed hugely to making that grow, and so I can trust them to nurture it and to carry it. And I don't have to be in every decision and I don't have to be the final answer on everything. And you know what? It's very freeing to be able to do that. It's a relief. You cannot, as your organization grows, you just can't be in every part of it. You can't. It's not possible that your organization can't thrive.

Such an important reminder and, as an entrepreneur and business owner myself, I think it's helpful to see that this is something that's always top of mind disability to be able to trust your team and to know that maybe the first time it won't be exactly the way you would have liked it done, but to know that they're adding their own spin to it and to your early to the point you made is this idea of that knowing if the vision is there, if everyone has the shared vision, then they're all gonna be using their own methods and their own path to get there. But I think that must be freeing and comforting for you to be able to see the growth in your team members and to know that you can continuously assign them more and more responsibility and they take over and they eventually starts to become its own entity and they start to act as if you were the one making the decision.

Right or they're acting in a way. That was totally different thing.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And I'm able to see that's a good thing, sure.

And I think that's a growth, that's a perspective that I didn't have and I missed, and my team overall is young and they bring ideas that are fresh and are in. A lot of them are closer to our students and their perspective, and I think that's really important and critical, really understanding and being very sensitive to how our students are experiencing the program, which is much more difficult for me to see, and I'm a huge remove from being a student myself. So it's just such an important part of growing an organization is being able to take that journey with the organization and to allow it to flow and to allow other people to take the wheel and to be able to step back and trust that the ship's gonna stay afloat and it's gonna go in directions that you might not have anticipated but that are gonna be good, and where they're not, you work together, of course, correct.

Yeah, that's helpful to thank you for articulating that. As a leader, I'm sure the answer to this question changes daily, but what's a tough question you've had to ask yourself recently?

Oh my gosh, that's a tough question I've had to ask myself recently. I feel like I have those questions like every other minute.

Yeah, we all do yeah.

Yeah, I mean I think that the tough question that you're always having to ask yourself when you're running an organization, but particularly a not-for-profit organization, where the majority of the money that you have to do your work is coming from gifts- right.

Whether they're grants or it's government funding or it's an individual giving. It's money that people are giving you to do your work, and I think that the hardest question that you always have is assessing whether or not the grant that you're being offered, or the gift that you're being given, or the opportunity that's arising which is coming with funds that you can really use is going to continue to move your mission forward in the way that you really believe is the right way and that you collectively, as a group within the organization, agree is the right way.

I think that it's so easy to have mission creep because the money is so necessary. All the time we're always struggling to raise the money to do the work, and so the money comes along and that you'll be able to use some of it to advance what you're already doing. But it's got this other thing to it and now you've got to assess whether or not that other thing is going to eat you alive, and I think that's one of the things. Those are some of the hardest questions that when and it's not just about money, but it's about partnership opportunities that I think the difficult.

I'm so interested in opportunities, right Like, I love to explore these opportunities, I love to connect with people, so it's always the question of is this the right use of my time, of the organization's resources, of my program managers time of my systems, people's time, or is this just going to pull us into a direction that we can't sustain, even though, like it looks like it could be interesting in this way and we could do these things with it. But is it really the right thing for us? Now, maybe the answer is no, but in the future let's put that aside and revisit it. I think those are always the hardest questions for me.

Yeah, and that's someone I think a lot of the listeners will be able to relate to. So, as we get close to wrapping up, because of the nature of the show and that it's listened to by a lot of leaders in the vertical farming industry, I've been saving some time at the end of these conversations for any message that you might have for people. The leaders in the vertical farming space, especially, be interested in your perspective, having been doing this for almost 11 years. So is there anything that comes to mind in terms of just a message that you would have for the leaders in this space?

Yeah, I mean I would say that, like our students love the farms, they love the program, they love having the opportunity to grow food, like the idea that they're growing food using machines in their schools is like they just can't believe it and they connect to it so deeply and so viscerally from just like the excitement about what they're growing and like now we're growing radishes and they can't believe it. I mean, kids who've been with the program for four years are like we're growing radishes you said we couldn't grow things like look like radishes. Right To the kid who's eating the salad in the cafeteria and says, jesus, this is really good salad. And her friend next to her says, well, I grew that for you, you're welcome. So, whatever it is, they're so excited by it.

And there's this whole generation right of young people who are connecting with this new farming technology, who are really connected to how this can transform the way we produce and eat food.

Yeah, and I would just emphasize to the industry invest in educational programs that are connecting young people to this technology and to this industry.

Develop this new generation of leaders and drivers of this movement. The yields and the benefits will be phenomenal. And I think that the industry is less connected to young people and the development of this workforce than it can be, and I would love to see greater and deeper connections and the opportunity for organizations like mine and there are lots of us across the country doing it in different kinds of ways to be able to provide these workforce transitions for our young people, to provide internships for our students, to provide the opportunity to come together and to provide the opportunity to come and tour the farms and see them. There's that disconnect and it would be really great if we could kind of break through that and make this a more tangible, real thing for our students to see that this is what it looks like if you go and do this for a living and then you're going to see those kids who are graduating from high school, having had a farm in their school and going into this industry.

Yeah Well, thank you for saying that, and hopefully the message is received by listeners and the leaders in the industry, because I think it's important as well. So, catherine, thank you so much for this amazing and inspiring conversation. It's obviously because of my connection to New York City. It's a special place in my heart to see what's happening and to grow awareness for this really important thing that you're doing to connect people more closely to their food and where it comes from and to build that relationship.

I think early on is so important. So I applaud you and congratulate you on all the work you've done over the past 11 years to get to this point, and I think you mentioned this earlier how we're sort of riding this crest of interest now in vertical farming and I think we've made it through a couple of the tough stretches now, and now there's more awareness and so hopefully that makes your job a little bit easier and hopefully, from a funding perspective, people have more interest in supporting your cause, which I think is helpful as well. So thanks again for the real inspiring conversation. The website is teensforfoodjusticeorg. Is there anything else you'd like to direct people to or have for people to connect with you?

You can check out our Instagram. All of the links are on the website, but you can check out our Instagram. You can check out our Twitter or X, which is TFFJ initiative. All the rest are teens for food justice on Facebook, on LinkedIn and Harry, thank you so much. This was an amazing conversation and I really appreciate that we were able to make this happen, and thank you for giving me this opportunity to share our story.

Yeah, likewise, we'll have all the links in the show notes as well. So, people, if the listener viewer wants to look at that as well. Thanks again for your time, catherine. I really appreciate it.

Thank you, Harry.