Transcript

Can an urban farmer earn a living wage? | Teresa O'Donnell | TEDxHouston

[Applause] I don't consider myself a great planner. I feel like a lot of the events in my life have just sort of happened. I started my career as a pediatric ICU nurse because my mom thought it was a good career option for me and I had no other idea what I was going to do. Um, I happen to love the ICU. I love the excitement of it. I saw the very best and worst in people and I learned just tons about myself and other people. But after five years, I was burned out and I knew I needed to do something else. So, I decided to go back to school and get a master's in business. And the reason I chose that is because I heard that the entrance exam for the graduate business school was easier than the one for law school. So you can kind of kind of see how my life goes. Um my brother Pat on the other hand is a great planner. He um creates lists. He has shortterm goals and long-term goals. He is always following up on his goals and it's really quite amazing. So when he approached me 26 years ago and asked me if I would help him start a software company, I thought a couple things. I thought, well, I'm a new MBA and um I thought and I don't have a plan. So sure, yes. Yes, I'll do it. Um I'm glad I did because we created a really successful software company that for 26 years sold software and services into the largest corporate legal departments in the world. Um, while I was there, I wore a lot of hats and I learned a lot about being an entrepreneur. So, five years ago at our company, we decided to uh create a new initiative where we invested in our employees. We wanted to make sure that anyone that worked for our company was better off having worked there whether they stayed six months or 20 years. And so we decided to follow this book called well-being, the five essential elements. And according to the author, there's five universal elements that contribute to a person's well-being over their lifetime. And they are career well-being, social well-being, financial well-being, physical well-being, and community well-being. And so all the vice presidents read the book and we all took one of the elements to initiate at our company. So for example, for physical well-being, we hired a chef to cook us healthy lunches every day and we brought in a yoga teacher twice a week. For social, we planned social events at work and then we did them outside work so we could bring our families. I volunteered for community well-being. And so my job was to go out into the community and see how we could help. So the first thing that I noticed when I was searching for something for us to do was an article in the Houston Chronicle about refugees. And these were refugees from war torn regions that were resettling here in Houston. And they were um very well educated. They were doctors, lawyers, and engineers. And the article was about the trouble they were having finding work. So I thought, well, that sounds like a good fit because we're a professional organization. They're professionals. You know, they probably just need their resumes reviewed. We could conduct some mock interviews with them. We probably could even get them some leads on job interviews and we get them on their way and they'd be fine. So, I called up um a local refugee resettlement agency here in Houston and I offered our services and the lady was very gracious that I talked to and she thanked me very much for calling. But she said, "Yes, they are having problems, but let me tell you who's really having problems here." And these are refugees that are arriving also from war torn regions of the world that are undereducated and that don't speak the English language and have no marketable job skills. And I probably just went, "Wow." Because that just seemed really like a big problem that I didn't know how to solve. And I wasn't sure how our company could do anything about it. But before I could hang up on her, she invited me to go on an airport pickup with her. So, a couple weeks later, I found myself at Hobby Airport at midnight waiting to pick up a family of nine from Somalia. I'm tearing up. Um, [Applause] so in the time I was waiting to go, I read up a little bit on refugees and what I found out is that to be a refugee, you actually have to make it out of your country. So you have to flee your country before you can be considered a refugee. And once you get out of your country, then you can apply with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for refugee status. But you also have to prove that you are um being persecuted like for your religion or that you're in fear of your life and that you no longer trust your government to be able to protect you. Once you're granted refugee status, then you wait an average of five to 10 years before you're relocated to a permanent host country. So, I knew the refugees we were about to pick up had been on a very, very long journey. And as I sat there waiting, I tried to imagine what it would be like if I had to flee my country and fear my life. And would I try to get my daughter out of college? How would I get to her? You know, just these. And then I just felt very unsettled thinking about it. So, I just quit thinking about it. Uh, soon they were here. Um, they were exhausted. There was seven children and two adults, two parents. And um first thing I noticed, they were all dressed identically. They all had on matching tennis shoes, matching jeans, matching t-shirts. They all had a big badge on identify them as refugees. And they each carried a small little governmentissued bag that contained all their belongings. So I really didn't have a role. I was just along for the ride. Um, but we were going to take them to their new apartment over in Southwest Houston. So, after some paperwork was checked, we got in a van and headed over to um, their new apartment. And I learned on the way that four of these children belonged to the couple and the other three were actually their nieces and their nephew and that their parents had been killed. And I didn't find out how they were killed. I just knew that the children were orphans. And I imagine it had to do something with why the whole family fled the country. So, um, those three children were not going to be allowed to come with their aunt and uncle. But the story that I got to hear through an interpreter was that the mom cried so loud and so long and so hard that they let her bring them. Um, when we got to the apartment, we um taught them how to flush the toilet, how to mix hot and cold water, how to turn on a stove, how to work the oven, microwave. They were amazed at all the food in their house. It was really cool. And by the time I left an hour later, I knew this had been like a pivotal moment for me that my heart had been changed and I was probably gonna my life was probably going to change. But I really did not know what we could do. I couldn't see the fit between our software company and these refugees that were coming without language or marketable job skills. So the next thing that happened was I saw a PBS special about the actress Tippi Hedrin. Does anyone remember Tippy Hedrin? She was a 60s movie star, most notably in Alfred Hitchcock movies, and The Birds is the one she's most famous for. She's also Melanie Griffith's mother for those that are a little bit younger than me. Um, and she in the 1970s was a international relief coordinator with uh food for the hungry. And so one of her jobs was to go out and visit Vietnamese refugees in a refugee camp outside Sacramento. And so she'd go out there every week. And one week when she was out there, they were admiring her nails. And so she came back and she asked her manicurist if she would come out and teach some of the women how to do nails. And that simple act um created a billion-doll industry that even today is still dominated by Vietnamese ref uh Vietnamese Americans. And my entrepreneurial brain just started spinning. I was like, "What could it be? What could it be for this new set of refugees? What kind of business could it be?" I started meeting with business people and people that worked with refugees and um no one could think of anything. So a little bit of time went on and then I um read another article in the chronicle and it was by one of the founders of Urban Harvest which is a local nonprofit community garden, school gardens training and he used the term market gardening. I was like, "Market gardening, market gardening. What is that?" And he seemed to imply that you could make some money doing it. So, you know, my brain's already thinking, "What's this industry? What's this industry?" So, I called him up and I said, "Basically, what do you mean? What what is this? I've been in Houston my whole life. I haven't seen anybody farming or market gardening or what is this? You can make money doing this? Thought food had to come from California." Um so he said yes that um because there's such a demand for local food um in his experience working with market gardeners um he thought that about an acre of land would generate enough produce sold locally in farmers markets to generate a living wage for a family. But then nobody had really done it and uh so he you know there was no data for me to go look at. So, I called back the refugee agency, talked to my new friend there, and um asked her if by chance these new refugees were farmers. And she said, "Yeah, they're all farmers." And I was like, "Oh." I mean, I get goosebumps still when I say hear that. Um because it was like maybe maybe all the dots are connecting. Maybe this is the answer for them. Well, I'm not a farmer and I know nothing about farming, but I met two market gardeners who were very interested in helping with this project. They were going to train the refugees in how to farm in Houston because the seasons are different and how to um sell because they were market gardeners. They've been selling at a farmers market and they also had some experience designing farms. So, they were going to help with that. Then I also learned about a church who had three acres of land that was empty and they thought the idea sounded kind of cool and they felt like they were not being good stewards of the land God gave them. So um I went and talked to them several times and this church also introduced us to 14 congalles refugees who had all been farmers and who all wanted to farm again. So, we got them all together and um I think I probably told them four times that they were going to be pioneers and that we had never tried this before and we didn't know if it was going to work and did they still want to try it and they all did. Um so, the message to them really was don't quit your night job because they all had overnight jobs um working in factories because really I knew they needed to make a living. um but that every Saturday we would have a training class and um just go through organic gardening. We didn't know if they they probably used pesticides before, so we wanted to make sure they knew how to grow without using chemicals and then how to grow in the seasons. And then we were going to train them in um how to sell their produce in Houston. Everything was clicking along really well until it didn't. Everything just stopped. We couldn't get the lease on the land. Just month after month, nothing was moving forward. The farmers were calling me, "When are we going to start?" My market gardeners were calling me, "When are we going to start?" Um, it was a really, really hard time for me. I was saying things to myself that weren't very nice. Like, who do I think I am that I can do something to change anything? And why would anybody follow me? And what am I crazy? And um I was just filled with fear. It was just really, really rough. And my brother is like a rock. This is what he says to me. He says, "I think God said yes, but not yet." And I tried to hold on to that. And I'll tell you, 10 months later, after the worst drought in recorded history in Houston, the land opened up and we got to start. And if we would have started when I wanted to start, we probably would not have made it. [Applause] So, we got some people out from my company and the farmers and our trainers and we started building out one acre of that three acres because we wanted to see if you really could make a living off an acre of land. So we built and we built and it took us a while to build and we started training the farmers on the land. We took them to market and started training them at the market. Then we started planting and we watched it grow. Then we started harvesting it. Then we started taking it to market and we started selling out. So we sold at a farmers market. We also sold as community supported agriculture subscriptions where people would come pick up their bag every week. And we sold the local chefs. And guess what? We proved you can make a living wage off an acre of land. So something unusual started happening that I didn't really anticipate and that was that friends and family started coming out to volunteer to help us build more farms. We had high schools come out. We had church groups come out. We had university students come out. And people were just like coming out by the droves to help us. It was very very encouraging. And one thing that I started to realize, family started coming out. People started coming out to have fun and to meet our farmers. And they started coming out to go on farm tours. That's my brother Pat in the cowboy hat over here. And they came out to pick strawberries and to sit at farm dinners and eat local produce. Just flick through these a little bit. And what I began to realize is that Plant It Forward is bigger than an opportunity for refugees and it's even bigger than local food and it's bigger than transforming land into farms. It really is about creating community well-being. So, at Planet Forward, we have a vision of a farm in every neighborhood, and I hope we'll be bringing community wellness to your neighborhood soon. Thank you very much.