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Pie Ranch
Learning to Collaborate - Youth Leaders Sprouting In The Field

September 4, 2008
By Karen Heisler,  Pie Ranch 

Can you recall the first time in your life that you felt the power of leadership and accomplishment in the adult world?  At Pie Ranch, we were honored to witness our youth marching past this milestone last month as they hosted 30 other youth from around the country during the 10th Annual Rooted in Community (RIC) conference. Fortuitously located in the Bay Area, the 10th RIC conference was a milestone not just for our youth, but for the RIC community as well. For the first time, the conference planning committee hailed not from one or two organizations, but ten Bay Area youth food system and food justice organizations – a testament to the growth of youth leadership in food systems work!
On the first full day of the conference, attendees piled into buses destined for a day of hands on work and learning at four farm or garden sites on the Central Coast between San Francisco and Santa Cruz. I watched our Pie Ranch students Mark, Scott, Andy, Anh, David, and Asher shed their familiar roles as students, and claim their rightful places as hosts and ambassadors for the farm they know as their farm, Pie Ranch -  www.pieranch.org.

They ran the day flawlessly. In the early afternoon, my farm partner, Nancy and I turned to one another and remarked that usually by this time in a farm work day we were accustomed to feeling a bit stressed. Just at that moment, one of our young Pie students hustled by, wearing the mildly tense visage of someone who is feeling responsible for orchestrating a great group learning experience. And great it was! Through months of planning and development, our Pie Ranch youth, hailing from our longest running school partnership with Mission High School in San Francisco http://www.missionhs.org/, wowed us by graciously leading their peers from the Rooted in Community conference in a series of learning activities that included berry and wheat harvesting, grinding fresh flour to make pie for the conference, and tying it all together by sharing the knowledge they’ve acquired working with us, and most importantly, with one another, during the last 3 years.

They achieved much of this knowledge by actively learning how to craft and orchestrate this experience together. There were moments during the planning season that felt so dispersed and so unraveled. Observing and encouraging the last weeks of harmonizing and the negotiations around roles and sharing leadership among these youth was awe-inspiring. Witnessing their success on the big day was nothing short of breathtaking.

When was the last time that you felt your capacity and competence inextricably tied to collaboration with others?  And can you recall the first time you felt the power of working in synergistic relationship? If you are a faithful reader of this newsletter, I will wager that you have this experience often, as authentic productive collaboration is increasingly a hallmark of our movement, and of the change we are making in California’s food system. We are on the brink of an unprecedented explosion of collaborative creativity in our time and collaborative work. I recognize daily that my drive to learn to be ever more effective at creating lasting positive change is part of something much larger and more diverse than any of us can be alone. The more I commit to this growth curve, the more I become aware of how much I have to learn in putting values into practice, and daily I am grateful to have chosen this field to conduct this practice. 

For me, set-backs in collaboration can be very painful and unhinging. The disappointment of such set-backs, the invalidation or insecurity of not hearing or not being heard, of discovering that a mutually held truth simply isn’t - can sometimes be enough to motivate a retreat into a solo act. One of our youth struggled through an evening at the recent conference, restraining himself from leaving in protest of a wrong that he had suffered. The presence and support of the community ultimately yielded a result that would have been unlikely achieved alone.

Going at it alone is still the dominant culturally-supported default setting. This is a posture that is often associated, positively, with our nation’s founding spirit. It is true that to collaborate well requires a developed and confident sense of oneself, one’s strengths and limitations. But our social and cultural infrastructure – schools, the law, commerce and business forms, even the North American family during the late 20th Century, to name a few - all orbit around a strong and somewhat exclusionary notion of independence. Working with others has often found footing only in transactions and exchange, not in co-creation.

From our founding, Pie Ranch’s vision has included the goal of modeling new forms of collaborative co-creation. Jered Lawson, Nancy Vail and I came together committed to the principles of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), particularly the fundamental principles embedded in this social and economic model that rely on the mutual valuing of complementary resources and reciprocal exchange and contribution. Community Supported Agriculture offers a good lens for exploring the challenges of balancing interdependence and autonomy.  This exploration is further served by the committed relationship between Pie Ranch and Mission Pie, a for-profit business established in San Francisco in part to be in reciprocal relationship with the non-profit educational Pie Ranch. The youth who work at Pie Ranch and at Mission Pie help us to understand the potential that such dedicated relationships between institutions can be.  Our most valuable offering might well be to support the growing individual self-sufficiency of these youth with lived experience in robust models of collaboration. It is our hope that they will learn from these models – then go out and create new businesses and organizations that reflect their own goals and achieve maximum collaborative power, in order to accelerate the pace of change in reclaiming our food system.

In this spirit, Nancy offered up a closing activity to the Rooted in Community day at Pie Ranch. Reflecting about the inspiration and honor of working with the youth, she commended their commitment to building knowledge and capacity together in the movement – just as the buckwheat cover crop builds the soil. Then the group of 40 formed an evenly-spaced line along the Eastern edge of a beautifully spaded 1/4–acre block and paused, facing the Pacific. Nancy called on us to shout out, in unison, our words of aspiration for the coming year, and simultaneously we cast arcs of buckwheat seed from our bags, out into the open waiting field. Because each person present participated with gusto, the field was seeded in minutes. Now the buckwheat is in flower, and our youth are sowing the seeds of our future food system, together.
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