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.

So much of Slow Food Nation was done with such haste and hurry that it is novel and amazing to have time to reflect, dialogue, and discuss. It’s also great to learn that although the event was hugely ambitious, the vast majority of people we have spoken with feel that an ambitious and highly visible big step was the right choice for this time, this city, and this community. In general, the community feels that an event that requires such great financial and in-kind support needs to happen every two years – like the international events on which Slow Food Nation is broadly modeled. I am pleased that most of the community that built Slow Food Nation agreed that the event needs to move beyond San Francisco for the next edition (the cities of Des Moines and Washington DC came up often in our interviews and discussions). People felt that the city of San Francisco was a natural choice for a first edition, but to build greater impact, the event needed to grow in areas where it could contribute even more to building a food culture, and many of the curators and designers who participated in this first edition volunteered to help advise future in-kind supporters in other cities based on their experiences in the inaugural edition in San Francisco.

I am also learning how much the event was a clear reflection of the city of San Francisco – its mature and vibrant food scene, its incredibly active non-profit community working in food justice, sustainability, and advocacy, and its food-savvy residents. A future event needs to reflect the fabric and color of the community it serves – just as in the city of San Francisco, our event took on the shine, shape and passion of the city. A future event would need to do the same in the city it serves and to build event elements that reflect local food culture and community. That’s why I do not feel like a future event would need to look or feel at all like the inaugural edition – it might take on a completely different scope based on the context of the community it serves.

In the ten days immediately after the event, everyone we spoke with was very focused on the details (lines were too long, Slow Food Nation should have managed the volunteer program directly, etc), but with the distance of a few weeks, some broader ideas have been emerging. This is where things get interesting for me. What are the conditions for success for an event building on Slow Food Nation? What are the fundamental elements of city and community that made this event possible? Based on these broader questions, here’s what we think is fundamental for future editions: a strong and positive relationship with the city government; highly visible, accessible and symbolic event locations; a relationship with an interested and engaged design community; strong spokespeople; a cohesive and collaborative team; the ability to make most of the event free of charge; and willingness from members of the local food community to take on leadership roles in the event planning. In retrospect, these were the broad underpinnings of success for Slow Food Nation, and are concepts that need to be seriously considered in identifying a location and community for future events.

So, we continue to interview, download, listen, and learn as we understand the role of the inaugural edition. Through this, we’ll accomplish something more important: gather the knowledge necessary to understand what could be the most powerful and transformative next steps for Slow Food Nation.

Labor Day weekend presented a milestone in the sustainable food movement as gourmands and activists convened in the Bay Area at Slow Food Nation’s first pass at assimilating the pleasures of food, food pathway transparency, and open conversation about the policies that govern its production. Attendants and passersby ate, celebrated, and engaged, during a spirited instant when a bare sketch of an embryonic food culture began to appear.

The various events involved never aspired to describe or even gesture to all the contours of the food landscape. Even so, this inability—to do and be all things to our eating conscience—underscored a vital question: what should Slow Food do and be? The question was examined a Slow Food Nation-sponsored panel on the Wednesday following the festival.

So it was that days after pleasured and pained visitors alternately paced the sandbag-ringed spirals of kale outside the civic center and ate salami contemplatively in Fort Mason’s cavernous halls, Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan, Fred Kirschenmann, and Raj Patel laid clear the intricacies and extremities of our food crisis, grounding their examinations in the weekend’s themes and concerns. Their questions and assertions were a clarion call. They pieced the disparate shapes of the Slow Food question together in a rough and nubby metaphorical fabric. The original poetry of the term “Slow Food” was reawakened; we were reminded that the right to pleasure is not exotic, privileged, and specialized, but concrete, human, and universal.

When a child starts to eat, he exercises his right to refuse food. He shakes his head in a universal gesture of rejection. Michael Pollan, who invoked the gesture, suggested that its universality derives from the commonality of that first objection, a gustatory one. The part poetic-part practical Slow Food movement should seize upon that image of original protest, and demand that we all, farmer, factory-worker, and foodie, purse our lips and shake our heads at once. Imagining such a large-scale refusal, one realizes how many neighbors’ heads we would see, as we momentarily expanded the scope of our daily vision, how much more of our landscape we’d suddenly perceive.

We Slow Fooders should graft this denial onto our inchoate agenda. As much as we tout and support food that is good, clean and fair, we should protest food that is bad, dirty, and unjust. We should call for a national hunger strike to demand our right to real food, which is so inextricable from our right to pleasure—which should not be, by Jeffersonian accounting, the exclusive province of the exclusively rich—a right so imbedded in human existence you can’t dig around its shape deeply enough to find its boundaries. Perhaps the very tip of the pyramid, which is how Vandana Shiva protectively cast the visible, viand-scarfing, wine-slugging pleasure-prioritizing American Slow Food movement, should look down the long shape of its base and lift it up through stark, symbolic social action.

Maybe we, who, as Raj Patel pointed out, are for the first time in human history being “made for our food” rather than the other way around, should take the opportunity of this moment in the spotlight and defend the “right” in the “right to pleasure,” rather than the pleasure. And then, once the powers that be have capitulated, have read and signed the Declaration for Food and Agriculture, unveiled on August 28 at Slow Food Nation’s opening ceremony, we can all break fast together, eat eggs laid by hens we’re allowed to keep in our backyards, fry bacon we’re allowed to buy from farmers down the road, sop it up with bread baked with unadulterated, unsubsidized flour, milled in many mills, in many ways, by many hands. Then, we can feast.

Photo: The Inadvertent Gardener Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

We knew that Slow Food Nation could not evolve into a space for the few – it had to be broad and inclusive – we had to encourage dialogue, discussion, engagement, and participation to make this thing work. I believed that people would ignore Slow Food Nation if we were judgmental and demanding about how they had to participate, or how they had to be in order to be welcome. Too often I had seen Slow Food and other food events not succeed in being inclusive because there was a sense that you already had to be “in the know” about food and food politics to even understand the language of the event. I tested the response to this vision with a few conversations with corporate sponsors, and realized that although some funders were doubtful of our capacity to actually execute such a big and broad event, they were thrilled with the inclusive vision. I was also wary about having too much corporate visibility at the event – we wanted to keep the vibe at Slow Food Nation low-key and not at all reminiscent of a trade show like Fancy Food or the Natural Foods Expo. We wanted to feel polished and smooth, but authentic and real. I felt strongly that it would actually prove to be an asset for our sponsors in the long term to really focus attention on the artisans and food producers instead of directing all eyes towards logos and corporate stands. In general, potential sponsors were excited about the celebratory and inclusive vision, and were happy that this event would not be branded with a message of “do this, not that”. Although I had hoped that we would find a major partner for the whole event – a presenting sponsor who could underwrite the total of $1,000,000+ hard costs we anticipated – we left that hopeful fantasy behind pretty early, and realized that the funding for the event (similar to the content) would be a tapestry of hundreds of different sources, ranging from the purely philanthropic to the totally corporate. In retrospect, having literally hundreds of separated funders along with a few big sponsors was extremely useful for Slow Food Nation – it held us accountable to many different people in may different sectors and made us work to make sure that the event was really delivering economic returns in branding and visibility for the values-driven businesses who are so crucial to building a more sustainable food system.

Our first major funder – Rodale – came through in early spring. At the time, we had still not worked out all the options for visibility, but were starting to think laterally. Instead of a classic “footprint” for an event stand, how about offering “ownership” of a certain area to a top-tier partner? What about offering logo visibility in the website and on event signage? We explored personalized email blasts, collaborative press strategies, and slowly evolved a sponsorship package that offered corporate partners a range of visibility for their investment. More importantly, we really engaged potential partners in a conversation about what we could offer them, and tried to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach to proposals. At the same time, I started conversations with a range of foundations. Grants are not a typical way to finance and event, but because this event was so focused on supporting the non-profit and social change community, as well as delivering strong social returns, many foundations were interested. Grant funding was key to securing funds for a few key staff positions – our Agrarian Arts and Justice programs among them – as well as to funding some specific event elements like Changemakers Day, the Native Foods pavilion, and more.

Basing an event on hundreds of conversations and fragile human networks requires more people and time than a classic event model of selling stands. I learned that by involving so many groups, restaurants, collaborators, etc – so crucial to our mission of serving as a broad platform for the food movement – we also made our planning process rather complicated. Instead of one person sitting down and dreaming up the workshop topics, we invited proposals and received 150, which then needed to be parsed, grouped, synthesized, followed up on, etc. Instead of choosing one type of vinyl and one foamcore to make everything in the event space, we had 25 architects, five builders, and hundreds of collaborators. This pushed up the staff time needed and then the budget numbers up – it seemed (ironically) like the more engagement we encouraged the more money we needed. But a magical shift started to happen around May as the many people we had reached out to involve in the event planning in January and February were stepping up and really owning pieces – solving problems before they happened. More than the funding coming into place, this shift in the collaborative spirit of the event was a clear sign that this event as we had envisioned it was really doable.

The team grew slowly but surely, there were a few months where payroll was rather tight, but by May we had enough guaranteed contracts and sponsors to be confident in reaching budget. Around the same time, we found an incredible event producer—Dominic Phillips Event Marketing (DPEM)—which partnered with us and offering in-kind support and decades of event management experience. DPEM’s role was to execute all of the logistics of the event: rentals, build outs, volunteer management, and more. DPEM came on board after two other events companies told us that what we were trying to do with green building and thousands of products was too complicated. Although DPEM told us recently that they really did not think Slow Food Nation was possible at the start, they said they warmed to us because of the great food in the office, the idealism and enthusiasm, and – most importantly – a real passion for our mission, and for building awareness and understanding of food, health and the environment.

Although we met our targets for fundraising for Slow Food Nation, we certainly did not exceed them. Ticket sales, the sale of Patron’s packages, our victory Garden fundraising dinner, and other efforts were necessary to meet all of the hard costs of the event. I will not have a final amount of profit from the event until early October, but I am confident that there will be sufficient for seed money for a future edition of Slow Food Nation. More importantly, I hope that what we’ve learned about fundraising, and quickly building our small non-profit via diversified revenue and aggressive promotion via in-kind partnerships will be helpful for other organizations. Please be in touch if you are planning (or dreaming) of planning a values-driven, inclusive event and would like to learn more about our process, resources, business plan, or more.

Anya Fernald began her career in food working in rural development in southeastern Sicily developing cooperatives for artisan cheesemakers. She then spent four years working for Slow Food International in Italy, working as the Program Director for the Slow Food Foundation. Anya returned to her home state of California in 2005 to work as Program Director at the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF). Anya went on leave from CAFF in late 2007 to launch the inaugural edition of Slow Food Nation in San Francisco.

Image: Scene from the tap water station at Slow Food Nation. Photo courtesy of David Gartner.

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.

So we came up with the idea of buying all the products and building the stands that would feature the product for our event. If the producer had the means and desire to attend, they were welcome, but this event would support them and would strive to not be a financial burden on the people we were trying to help. The only exception was the wine pavilions, where we asked each featured producer to donate one case of wine because we simply did not have the financial resources to purchase them all. This would turn the trade-show concept on its head—no stall fees, vendors, or sponsor zones.

To do this, we needed people to lead each of the areas, and we identified “curators” to select and present products in each of the areas. Simultaneously, we restarted a conversation with a group of architects that had been involved in some of the early planning for the event and were eager to build a collaboration, led by Hans Baldauf, a partner of BCV Architects. Hans’ vision led to the concept of pairing each curator with an architect, and giving them a limited budget and the requirement to use only recycled and repurposed materials to build an exhibit that was educational, engaging, delicious and values-driven.

The architects were creative and bold – taking the mandate of using simple agricultural building blocks from the agricultural landscape (pallets, crates, etc) to the max and coming up with groundbreaking ideas about representing taste, land, and flavor via the built environment. I am proud to say that over 90 percent of the materials that were used in the Pavilions were borrowed and are already being reused, and about 10 percent have been broken down and recycled. There’s one outstanding example of this philosophy: the Native Foods Pavilion was built entirely out of native grasses and materials gathered in the Bay Area and built on site.

We learned that being really green is a little more expensive (the building and materials alone of the Taste Pavilions cost Slow Food Nation over $300,000) and a lot more complicated than the status quo, but the beauty, creativity, and passion communicated through the pavilions were worth it. The Pavilions, and the revenue and sponsorship dollars they generated, are also a key part of the global approach of Slow Food Nation. The ability to make the entire Civic Center venue free of charge was due in large part to the possibility of generating revenue through the Pavilions. Via the Taste Pavilions, we were able to partially subsidiz the costs of running the Civic Center venue, including the Victory Garden, Slow on the Go, and Marketplace.

Although we had originally hoped to price entry into the Taste Pavilions at $25/head, we struggled to find a way to make the numbers work at that level – especially since the curators responsible for selecting and purchasing products for the Pavilions also raised concerns about the ability to handle flow and anticipate volume of product – which eliminated the possibility of having a general opening of the pavilions that could potentially be flooded with participants.

We also wanted to limit participation to ensure that the experience of visiting the pavilions was pleasant and that people had the time to enjoy a “slow” interaction with the food and design. Our event producer came up with the idea of two daily timed sessions of 2000 people each (about half the total capacity of the Festival Pavilion at Fort Mason), and we decided to address our concerns about access at the $65 ticket price by offering a few (imperfect) solutions: food producer and chef scholarships at $25 via our website (about 300 tickets) as well as gifting tickets to community organizations via the Slow Food Nation Justice program (about 50 tickets).

Anya Fernald began her career in food working in rural development in southeastern Sicily developing cooperatives for artisan cheesemakers. She then spent four years working for Slow Food International in Italy, working as the Program Director for the Slow Food Foundation. Anya returned to her home state of California in 2005 to work as Program Director at the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF). Anya went on leave from CAFF in late 2007 to launch the inaugural edition of Slow Food Nation in San Francisco.

Image: Scott Chernis, Pizza making at the Slow Food Nation Bread Pavilion in the Taste Pavilions at Fort Mason.

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.

The mandate we developed with their input was clear: Serve as a platform for the food movement, allow the various leaders in the environmental, advocacy and justice movement to use the event as a stage while adhering to the values of the global movement of building a good, clean and fair food system. The reality was tough: $70,000 in the bank account at the start of 2008, two staff people, and a tiny sublet room for an office (more on that in tomorrow’s post).

My immediate background prior to working for Slow Food Nation was running a very hands-on and grassroots distribution company serving low-income public schools and hospitals with local produce, as well as running healthy food advocacy programs in public schools around the state and the California Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaign supporting small family farmers in the state. I was extremely aware of the need for non-profits to access the promotional power of Slow Food. Although I had deep links to Slow Food’s California membership, I was perplexed that the local non-profits were not able to leverage the Slow Food network successfully to promote the real on-the-ground work.

I had all the necessary connections, having worked for Slow Food International for years, but was not able to connect the dots between the consumer activists at Slow Food and the real infrastructure-building programs that were building a new mainstream for American agriculture. I saw the opportunity to lead Slow Food Nation as a chance to do just that—leverage the Slow Food movement to support the incredible range of activities led by non-profits, triple-bottom-line-businesses, farmers, and educators around the country. I hoped that Slow Food Nation could provide a grand stage for them to share their stories, products, and more with an audience that Slow Food Nation convened.

The outreach component of event planning started officially on February 15 in a Slow Food Nation Town Hall meeting. We invited all of the non-profits, advocates, health professionals, and educators we knew. Alice Waters and Mayor Newsom gave speeches voicing their support for the event and I asked the audience of 200 people a simple question: “How can Slow Food Nation serve you?” Many of the requests that came out of the meeting grew into different elements of the event. We developed numerous (yes, perhaps too many) event activities to be able to engage and assist as many partners as possible. The Changemakers Day agenda was built with feedback from non-profits during that meeting, and we presented the fundraising “Slow Dinners” and other collaborative programs for feedback.

We decided to focus each stall in the Marketplace on a single food product as a result of hearing from local farmers market associations that they did not want the Slow Food Nation marketplace to be another (competitive) farmers market, but rather an advertisement for farmers markets globally. I had seen the success of the single-product markets at Slow Food’s international events, and decided to present a version of that at Slow Food Nation. The effect is to focus attention on a single special product by facilitating conversations and encouraging curiosity.

Another outcome of the planning process that was reinforced in our Town Hall meeting was that Slow Food Nation was ready to be the home of a discussion. The Slow Food movement has not been successful yet in the U.S. in meaningful inclusion or support of the food justice movement, so we invited food justice organizational leaders and Slow Food leaders and provided a space for conversation at Changemakers Day. That certainly did not solve this issue, but it was a beginning, and one that engaged in tackling a challenging and complex problem.

Another example of the fruits of the collaborative process are programs like fooddeclaration.org, which was a direct response to the request “how can we serve you” by Roots of Change. Throughout the planning process we made an effort to give as much ownership and autonomy of the event programs as possible to the many collaborators—taste pavilion curators, partners, and more. This was strategic as well; without real ownership and participation from a wide range of people with concrete skills, this event would never have happened.

At the same time, this reaching out and engagement required trust in the network, and belief that although the resulting event would not be as homogenous and complete as having built and designed every piece ourselves, it would be more powerful, more creative, and have more of that beautiful chaos and at times conflict from which true innovation can be born.

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.

Slow Food Nation met the goal of energizing and empowering the American food movement by involving a broad group of collaborators, and I hope to share my experiences with all of you to inform future green events, movement building, and broad collaborative programs. As I reread the blogs, articles, tweets, and emails – and reflect on my experience over the past week – I feel that the net result of the event was far more powerful than I had let myself dream. I also know that Slow Food Nation was far from perfect, and I was frustrated many times by the omission of voices, stories and perspectives in the event.

In this week’s posts, I want to explain, reflect on, and acknowledge various aspects of our planning and constraints to hopefully deepen (or explain) the experience we all shared in San Francisco on Labor Day Weekend.

Check back tomorrow for the first of four posts on the following topics:

Defining and Planning Slow Food Nation

The Real Picture: Our Team and Resources

The Backstory on the Taste Pavilions & Civic Center Plaza

Next Steps for Slow Food Nation

Anya Fernald began her career in food working in rural development in southeastern Sicily developing cooperatives for artisan cheesemakers. She then spent four years working for Slow Food International in Italy, working as the Program Director for the Slow Food Foundation. Anya returned to her home state of California in 2005 to work as Program Director at the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF). Anya went on leave from CAFF in late 2007 to launch the inaugural edition of Slow Food Nation in San Francisco.

Many of us think of wine and cheese as two great tastes that go great together (like pizza and beer, milk and cookies). At Saturday night’s Taste Workshop celebrating American Raw Milk Cheese, we were treated to a different kind of pairing—cheese and beer. Two cheese experts, Jeff Roberts (also a Slow Food USA Board Member and beer aficionado) and Laura Werlin, led us through the tasting of seven cheeses and six craft ales.

The cheeses and their makers hailed from Alabama, Indiana, Oregon, Wisconsin, Vermont, and California; several of the cheese makers were in the room with us and shared their processes, working with their sheep, Guernsey cows, Nubian dwarf goats, etc, to craft and shepherd (as it were) that milk into beautiful artisanal cheeses. Ever seen a cheese that’s been rubbed with paprika? Hillis Peak Cheese from Pholia Farm Creamery was a first for me and I fell in love with its spicy, rich, creamy flavor. (It goes really well with Dogfish’s Midas Touch Golde Elixir.

Most surprising were the ways in which the cheeses changed in combination with the beer, and vice versa. Six pieces of fantastic farmstead cheese + seven diverse and delicious craft ales meant several interesting and surprising flavor combinations.

If you are interested in reading more about American Raw Milk cheeses, check out Jeff’s Book The Atlas of American Artisan Cheese, and Laura’s book Cheese Essentials.

On the heels of last weekend’s successful Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco, participants will discuss where the Slow Food Movement should go from here, especially with regard to the world food crisis. This panel will feature food activist and Vice President of Slow Food International Dr. Vandana Shiva, author and Knight Professor of Journalism Michael Pollan, author and scholar Dr. Raj Patel, and farmer and scholar Dr. Frederick Kirschenmann, moderated by author and Professor of Geography Richard Walker.

September 3, 2008, 7pm, Wheeler Auditorium at UC Berkeley

Tickets: Tickets are available to the public for $10 at 510.642.9988, tickets.berkeley.edu, at the Ticket Office, which is located at the northeast corner of Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus.

For more information: http://journalism.berkeley.edu/events/details.php?ID=529

See more at the Slow Food Nation flickr album (now almost 700 photos strong!). If you have your own photos to add, please put them in the SFN08 pool and consider giving them a Creative Commons license so they can be shared on blogs and among the community!

All images: Sarah Rich.

As the sun sets on the fourth and final day of Slow Food Nation, we’re thrilled to announce that the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden will remain in place on the lawn of San Francisco City Hall until November. The garden, which has been producing substantial amounts of fresh produce and supplied some of the food for this weekend’s events, has received tremendous support from Mayor Gavin Newsom and the city. Most everyone who has come down to witness the beauty and bounty of the garden has voiced their desires to see this project become a permanent symbol of San Francisco’s progressive position on food, farming, and social justice.

“By all accounts, this has been a wonderful installation for the city and has been a highly visible demonstration of our commitment to the issues embodied in how our food system operates,” said Mayor Newsom. “From protecting the environment, to supporting our local and regional economy, to ensuring we can provide access to wholesome, nutritious food for all San Franciscans, the Victory Garden has given us a powerful platform from which to make the case for more good, clean and fair food in this country.”

If you haven’t visited the garden yet, please do! The corn is high, the squash are mature, and the California native wildflowers are in full bloom.

Images: jrodmanjr and Sarah Rich