Civil Eats

Children in the Victory Garden

This is the final part of our 4-part series on the process of creating Slow Food Nation. See the intro to the series here, Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

Over the past month, Slow Food Nation has been interviewing and surveying all of the collaborators in the inaugural edition including the team, curators, designers, sponsors, vendors, farmers, food producers and community organizations who built this year’s event. We are gathering the knowledge necessary to make recommendations on the future of Slow Food Nation based on what we learned this year. I hope we’ll be able to announce some concrete next steps with Slow Food USA for the event in the space of a few weeks, but I’d like to share some of the information that we’ve gathered so far. Read More

This is part 3 of our 4-part series on the process of creating Slow Food Nation. See the intro to the series here, Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

When I came on as Executive Director in December 2007, Slow Food Nation had exactly one employee. Our dedicated board chair Katrina Heron provided top-level support, but we were a team of just two staff – our content director Sarah Weiner and myself. We had about $70,000 in the bank, and our biggest assets were a clear idea of what elements the event could be built from, the strong vision of a “good, clean, and fair” food system from Slow Food, and the overarching goal of being a platform for a broader food movement. Although Slow Food USA is our parent organization, they were understandably unable to provide any financial resources or any staff support beyond promotion of the event to their membership and planning the Slow Food Convivium leader’s congress to be held during the event. During the months of planning, many California Slow Food Convivium leaders were huge assets, organizing Slow Journeys, fundraisers and joining the Slow Food Nation team. At the peak of our capacity in June and July, the Slow Food Nation team totaled 32 people (average age of 28), about one-third working for free as full-time staff, all crammed into a 1600 sq ft office. The purpose of this post is to tell a bit more of the story of how we grew from December 2007 to September 2008 – with a focus on funding. Read More

This is part 2 of our 4-part series on the process of creating Slow Food Nation. See the intro to the series here and Part 1 here.

The Slow Food Nation team knew that it had to live up to the “Nation” in the title by providing a venue to celebrate America’s foods as part of the mandate of celebrating a good, clean and fair food system. The question was how to do that without requiring that hundreds of food producers come to San Francisco and incur the costs of travel, lodging, and demands on their valuable time. One thing I had heard loud and clear during our initial outreach was that farmers and food artisans were tired of coming to events (Slow Food and other) and being asked to do everything for free, including donate product and work, for the benefit of (often well-heeled) ticket buyers. Read More

This is part 1 of our 4-part series on the process of creating Slow Food Nation. See the intro to the series here.

How best can an event be used to build a “slow food nation”? Katrina Heron, the chair of the SFN board, and I set out to answer that question in December 2007, shortly after we both joined the organization. We convened a creative planning group to assess what the event could achieve, inviting business and non-profit leaders, as well as people who had been involved in the early stages of the event in 2007 when Alice Waters had originally conceived of hosting a grand event celebrating Slow Food. Read More

As the Executive Director of Slow Food Nation, I wholeheartedly disclose my deep conflict of interest in reporting on last weekend’s events. This week, I am writing a series of blog posts about the experience of building Slow Food Nation, on our resources and team, and on what we learned from the event. Read More