The work week begins and I’m ready to learn about the work involved in designing. We establish a schedule for ourselves and we start with a discussion about what Jenny wants us to accomplish for her over the next four weeks. Both of us will help prepare for the Food Hub meeting next week and both of us will work on separate pieces of Jenny’s branding of herself. My main focus is to create a polished website that will attract clients, students, and organizations alike to call on Jenny for her expertise and magnetic energy for teaching, public speaking, design work, and climate change adaptation strategy. Before I begin this work- I start with simple tasks such compiling resources for Jenny’s permaculture teaching binders and cleaning up an existing reading and watching list.
The Food Hub meeting that Jenny will be hosting is an essential turning point for the future of this project. The concept so far is for a co-operatively owned Food Hub and permanent Farmers Market for the North Shore of Maui. The Food Hub would operate under its own label and would have commercial kitchens for Maui grown value added products to be made. Then if the farmer’s market were in the same location it would allow for much easier transport of these products. Jenny wants the farmers market to be made from a 2-3 story Ibuku bamboo structure which would serve as a beautiful tourist hot spot to shop for local goods and grab lunch at locally sourced cafes in any kind of weather. At night this structure would turn into a stunning venue for farm-to-table meals, events, and even weddings. Properties that need to be considered would also have room to allow for farming, especially for incubator plots that would connect the farmers of the co-op to mentor young or financially strapped upcoming farmers. These incubator plots would also allow new farmers to brand their food and products through the Food Hub next door.
Jenny had advocated for this project in the past, especially for its promise to increase locally grown food trade to push out the inconceivable amount of imports that Maui currently relies on. There was funding allotted for her initial time building the framework and for the start of the next steps to making it a reality- but the project’s supporting organization went through political clashes and the newly instated head of the organization released the grant and county money back to the donors. Therefore this meeting is going to be the pinnacle to see whether the community desires it to happen and what solutions can sprout from new alliances.
In our design projects Jenny gave this project to one of the groups and they drew up very creative, thoughtfully mapped designs. She wanted to showcase their work for the meeting to get people excited about all the possibilities that this project can offer, so I made sure to streamline their design and redraw what needed to be cleaned up. My favorite part of this was to imagine and draw different techniques for how people may one day utilize the incubator farm. I pinned up the designs to her office walls to properly display the students’ designs as a real presentation. Beyond this I began to work on her website by organizing an outline and familiarizing myself with wordpress code. Over the weekend I conceptualized a logo for the Food Hub that also would make it’s debut on every bit of the presentation for the Food Hub meeting… but more on that to come.