Our Team Together At Last

Video Calls As Our New Office

The last two years have brought a lot of changes for everyone. It has felt like we are holding on to the rails of a boat going through some seriously choppy water. As our society continues to face division, the pandemic, and natural disasters, here at the Chef Ann Foundation (and at many organizations) we have altered the way we work forevermore. We are now a completely virtual organization with a tiny (maybe 100 sq. ft.) office in Boulder, Colorado that acts solely as a storage space. We have 20 team members that span the US from California to Alabama to Pennsylvania to Illinois to Texas. There have been many benefits of this new way of operation. Team members no longer spend upwards of an hour and a half commuting each day (if they lived in Denver), we get an on-the-ground sense of what school districts are going through in many states, we are saving approximately $30,000 per year on office space, and we have the ability to hire the most qualified candidates because their location is no longer a barrier.

There are also some struggles with this new way of work. I worry about team members not getting enough in-person socialization and how that might contribute to mental health issues. We seem to jam pack as many video meetings into a day as possible, by default causing “zoom fatigue.” We try to support social interaction by adding weekly “coffee chats” and “catch-up” times into our schedule, but it is not the same as sitting down with someone face-to-face. The thing I miss the most is having shared meals with team members. For an organization whose mission is based on food, it was important that we had a working kitchen in our office. We shared meals together, had potlucks, and gathered around the island for breaks. We would talk about recipes we have tried, taste each other’s leftovers, have birthday celebrations with each other’s favorite desserts, and cook together.

I have not been together with the entire Chef Ann team in person since we shut down our office in March of 2020. Since then, we have hired six team members that I had never even met in person and two that I had only met once. I also had not been together with our entire Chef Ann Board of Directors since the summer of 2019. When we decided to have our first in-person board and team retreat we vacillated on dates, locations, experiences, and working topic discussion ideas. It seemed like there were a lot of hurdles to get us to this gathering: the comfort of the attendees, financial expenses, planning an event for 30ish people on top of our full-time jobs, finding the right time… and the list went on.

Connecting with the Community

June 12th marked the first day of our in-person gathering. This day was just for our Board of Directors and was geared around higher-level strategy discussions surrounding growth. On top of actually being able to give folks hugs, seeing people in person was even more pronounced than I thought it would be. Following the first session with the board, our team and board visited a local breadmaker at a shop called Moxie Bread Co. It’s owned and was founded by master baker Andy Clark who was a James Beard Award semifinalist. Andy’s mission is to make amazing bread and baked products using as many local Colorado heirloom grains as possible. Andy hosted a tasting for us and we all got our PhDs in the science of breadmaking, grain milling, and the harvesting of different Colorado heirloom grains. We were also joined by staff from the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) food team who share a partnership with Moxie. Andy is currently teaching the culinary staff at BVSD how to use heirloom grains, which has allowed the staff to incorporate them into their monthly dessert program (yes, dessert once per month...NICE!).

It was a hot day, reaching almost 100 degrees. Members of our team had just flown in that day and likely landed only hours before this kick-off experience. What stuck out to me during our time at Moxie was that food is art, culinary art. There is so much tied to food: the way it’s grown, the way it’s prepared, how it’s eaten. This in-person experience with a true diehard food evangelical kicked off our time together with so much meaning. We have had virtual food gatherings over COVID; we got the team pasta makers and had a pasta-making session, purchased everyone bamboo steamers and made our own dumplings, and ordered canning paraphernalia for jarring our own fruit. These events are important and we need them as a virtual organization. But what I learned at Andy’s is that nothing can replace gathering around and enjoying food in person.

One of our team gathering goals was to give back to our community and support food establishments that had supported CAF over the years. We had an amazing dinner catered by Blackbelly held at our COO’s house. Hosea, the owner and lead Chef at Blackbelly has been a staple in Boulder for some time, he was also the winner of Top Chef Season 5 and is dedicated to producing authentic cuisine using local and high-quality ingredients. Additionally, he has participated in a Real School Food Challenge and humbly gives his time whenever requested to help spread the word about scratch cooking in school food. The team also enjoyed a delicious meal at River and Woods, where owners Josh and Kate Dinar and Lead Chef Daniel Asher have created a local treasure by serving up unique dishes, procuring local and seasonal ingredients, and infusing culinary mastery. The River and Woods team has also shown up to participate in Real School Food challenges and helped us advocate for school food reform. For these local restaurants, the last 2 years have been ROUGH. They have had to pivot, re-pivot, and face possible closures, labor shortages, and general uncertainty for their livelihood and families. We knew we wanted to support these folks during this event because if COVID taught us anything it is that community is everything.

There were many, many strategy work sessions around creating a sustainable path to ensure we executed these initiatives with the same credible high-quality work others expect from us, and we expect from ourselves. We talked about how talented our staff is, and how do we maintain the talent we have cultivated in our team when we’re growing? How do we make sure our operational specialists have the experience and training to support change in our partner districts? How do we maintain our intimate team culture with the kind of growth we are about to embark on? We have lots of follow-ups and more working sessions, but the biggest take-away from our meetings were these three items:

1. Most supporters are going ‘low touch’, digital, virtual, automated. We need to go ‘high-touch’. Our districts need to see us; we need to be in their kitchens seeing what is going on, supporting their staff, and understanding the problems on the ground. Digital classes are great and we have some amazing ones through the School Food Institute, but with the pace school food teams are working and the obstacles they are facing, they need a deeper level of partnership from us.
2. Yes, our team is virtual and we have to do many things virtually because of it, but how we maintain our culture is by making sure we have high-touch goals threaded through. While we might only be able to have one big gathering every year, we are encouraging smaller trips with different groups getting out into school districts, seeing the realities, volunteering, getting to farms, and seeing each other (in real life).
3. The last piece we made sure to acknowledge is that our organization is founded by Chef Ann Cooper (aka the Renegade Lunch Lady) means we are progressive and we have to continue to push for change. Yes, we want to meet districts where they are and help them move comfortably to change but at the same time, some of our programs need to push the limits and stretch our thinking. This will come with risk, and while we will be disciplined and diligent in our approaches, we will also take big leaps. This will come with challenges, learnings, and obstacles - but renegade is in our DNA and we need to continue embracing our renegade while we grow.