This week, Stephanie Henry shared her journey from a food insecure childhood to helping write and shape policy to help diversify our local food systems. Stephanie is a food systems activist, the Director of Cultivation Lab, the chairwoman of Slow Food Wayne, a member of Hoosier Young Farmers, the Indiana Farmers Union, and the Food Council of Northeast Indiana. She’s on the programming committee for the Local Food Forum, a grant reviewer for USDA SARE, and was named one of Greater Fort Wayne Business Weekly’s Forty Under 40 for 2019.
She shares how, as a young adult, she had a dream of starting a farm-to-table restaurant, but when she was writing her business plan discovered how little farming in Northeastern Indiana was actually producing food she could use. Most of our region is devoted to monocropping, a practice that is bad for the environment and worse for creating a sustainable local food system. She started taking an interest in policy, and her journey led her all the way to Washington DC on an internship working on the Farm Bill. She was able to advocate for language that directly benefits Indiana farmers, and has now returned to Fort Wayne to help shape our state’s Food Charter and diversify our food systems.
For more information on the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the Farm Bill, visit their website.
To learn more about Slow Food Wayne, check out their Facebook.
Our musician this week is Sunny Taylor. The song is a gem hidden at the end of her 2008 Lock the Door and Leave album as a hidden bonus track. It’s called “Gypsy,” and was inspired by a pair of boots she bought, and written about not fitting in as a young person. You can find her music on iTunes and Spotify, as well as Facebook.
Special thanks to our sponsors, Steve Tyler and Radiance of Silverbirch Studios for giving us a space to record and helping us sound amazing. Thank you also to Rosalind & the Way for our gorgeous intro music, to Traci Henning-Kolberg for editing out our mistakes and making us sound fantastic.