CRAFT at Chatham University Brings Good Things to the Table
This article was originally published in the Spring 2022 edition of the Chatham Recorder Alumni Magazine. To view the full magazine, click here.
Blurring the lines of culture, religion, and geography in a way few things can, food is a great unifier. And our collective interest in how our food is grown, sold, and prepared has never been stronger.
The Center for Regional Agriculture, Food, and Transformation (CRAFT) at Chatham University has become a thread woven throughout the local food community. Launched in 2010, the work at CRAFT is driven by a passion for food and those who grow, sell, and make it. The CRAFT team has shared their knowledge and resources with both the Chatham campus and wider community for over a decade, with the intention of strengthening the food ecosystem. And every aspect of CRAFT’s operation provides opportunities for student learning and contribution.
CRAFT has relied on grant funding for its various programs and initiatives since its inception. “We have had a lot of generous funding from foundations, but also a couple of USDA grants and funding from some other corporate foundations, like Bank of America and the Richard King Mellon Foundation. It depends on the project we’re working on,” says Alice Julier, director of CRAFT and the Master of Arts in Food Studies (MAFS) program at Chatham. In addition to grants and fundraising, additional funding comes from programming and consulting services.
CRAFT’s core philosophy and approach to everything they do is simple: “Everybody eats,” explains Julier. She says the vision for CRAFT was “a combination of things—wanting to have information available for people was a key driving force. We also wanted to have food programs for locals that weren’t tied to an academic schedule but were available for students.” Providing learning and networking opportunities for students was always a critical piece of the big picture, as well. “We’ve had grad assistants and student workers from the beginning. We have several who work in the food service program and help gather data. Many of the people who come in and do workshops are Chatham alumni. We try to keep a wide social capital network going—alumni return and they bring in their expertise,” Julier says.
CRAFT has four broad program areas:
• food system education, which includes weekly baking, butchering, and cooking workshops
• food system research, an open-source Regional Food System Inventory of local producers, processors, and more
• food system intervention, collaborating with community partners to identify solutions to develop or improve systems
• food industry support, with particular focus on consulting and business coaching services available through the Food Innovation Lab
Within each area, the team works on initiatives that empower communities to change the food system, whether as producers or other food system professionals.
Getting to the heart of CRAFT
The Food Innovation Lab is at the center of CRAFT’s food industry support services, providing consulting and business coaching services to food entrepreneurs and businesses throughout the region. “The Food Innovation Lab works with food businesses to help them better compete in the food economy—anyone from farmers to restaurants. We do a lot of work with commercial kitchens. We also work with composting companies and other supporting businesses. We assist with everything from product and process development to strategic work to different certifications,” explains Nicolette Spudic, Food Innovation Lab manager and instructor in Chatham’s food studies program. “[Food professionals] use our services from a couple of buckets. The first is training. We offer some marketing-specific classes, and we have a six-week startup success classes to prepare people to work with food. We offer ServSafe certification training, and we do a lot of research and planning for commercial kitchens.” Other offerings include workshops in everything from butchering to baking to working with local grains.
Spudic is particularly enthusiastic about the lab’s work with commercial kitchens. “You have to work out of a commercial kitchen if you’re a caterer, and for the most part, it is very expensive to create your own kitchen. Commissary kitchens, large kitchens that can be shared with other food professionals, have been popping up to get around this. We’ve done some research and planning to help two commercial kitchens. It’s exciting because they create so many opportunities for small businesses,” she says.
One local municipality is exploring options for a community kitchen and enlisted help from Spudic and her team. The City of Washington, PA was looking to repurpose a vacant city-owned property; they were presented with the idea of converting it into a community kitchen or kitchen incubator space. With limited knowledge of and manpower to create such a space, city leaders recognized the need for expertise from an outside organization and reached out to CRAFT. “In order to proceed, we knew we had to do some research,” said Christy Bean Rowing, executive director of City of Washington Citywide Development Corporation. “As far as a knowledge base, I don’t know of another organization that has the resources, maybe not immediately at their fingertips, but can access them very quickly.” Spudic and one of her team members held listening sessions with Washington’s city leaders to get a better idea of the project scope, then conducted a walk-through of the identified site.
Jared Greenberg, MAFS ’22 played a key role in the research for the project. A survey was developed and distributed to CRAFT’s mailing list with input from stakeholders in the City of Washington, including farmers’ markets, restaurants, and their local business incubator. “CRAFT got the results back from the survey, took the key themes throughout, and added some startup costs and best practices from some of the responders. Our biggest takeaway was it validated the community’s need for this space. Now we’re seeking funding based on their findings,” Rowing explains. She adds CRAFT’s assistance was instrumental to this project. “The tools and expertise that CRAFT brought to Washington—you could not put a price tag on it. What they allow us to do is grow in our own programming without having to have considerable experts on our team. We sit at the crossroads of city folk and agriculture folk—CRAFT has helped us see a path to marry those two groups in a more holistic and sustainable way for our community.”
Using benchmarking data
CRAFT’s benchmarking data has also been an important resource for the local food community. As program manager at CRAFT, Cynthia Caul has participated in culinary tourism initiatives and assisted with contracted research projects with entities geared toward fostering a robust food system. Caul notes their Regional Food System Inventory, a repository of data about growers, restaurants, and other food-based entities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, as a standout project for her. “We’ve been working on that for most of the Center’s duration,” she explains. “It started as a small contract from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. It’s the most comprehensive look at food system stakeholders in our region. It’s a database with some geographic information system maps as well. It includes the name of the business, where it’s located, the types of products they have, other products they might provide, whether they sell wholesale or direct to consumers.” CRAFT’s team can conduct various searches and customize data results for interested parties based on their need.
Caul invites more students to take advantage of the learning opportunities available at CRAFT. “There are opportunities to engage—I don’t think many students know that. It’s a chance for students to get actual professional experience you can learn from, put on a resume, and do the work they’re learning about in their classes.”
Opportunities for students at CRAFT
CRAFT has long been a vital on-campus learning lab for graduate students in Chatham’s food studies program. Students not only learn critical skills they can use in a professional setting, but they broaden their general body of knowledge about the local food economy.
As student outreach and research coordinator, Ani Steele, MAFS ’22, is responsible for connecting CRAFT with the Chatham community. Among her projects, she moderates “A Food Lover’s Elective,” a webinar series about food, featuring a wide range of guests. Steele is the first student outreach and research coordinator and says she has had the opportunity to make the position her own—a sense of autonomy she has found throughout her time at CRAFT. “CRAFT has given me a lot of guidance, but also a lot of space. I’ve had a lot of opportunities to be creative and test things out, like a community cookbook project and other things. But there has also been a lot of guidance, such as how
you write a proposal, how to scale my big ideas down into concrete actions to put them into practice. I’m hoping to work with local businesses after graduation—help local farmers and restaurant owners highlight their culture and say what they want to say through their food. This might mean culinary trails or agritourism—they’re the things I’m interested in. CRAFT has helped me with the hard skills, and with honing my attention to detail and be clear and specific in my communication by bridging the bigger picture with actionable steps.”
Jasmine Pope, MAFS ’22 quantitative research analyst and second year master’s student in the food studies program, has worked at CRAFT throughout her entire time at Chatham. As part of the quantitative team, she is on the front lines of data collection and analysis. “There’s a lot of collaboration,” she says. “This past year we’ve been streamlining our data collecting. When you’re on the quant team, you’re kind of in the weeds—it’s so overwhelming. To hear the food lab talk about how our work has helped them and their clients—it’s nice to see the benefit of your work.” Pope stresses CRAFT’s work benefits the entire community: “It’s an all-around resource-rich organization that seeks to connect people to the food system in a very meaningful way.”
Hands-on learning opportunities
Workshops have been a vital part of CRAFT’s offerings from the beginning. CRAFT program manager Cassandra Malis, MAFS ’16 oversees the workshop programming. “Workshops are a way to highlight different shops and business owners and engage them with community members,” Malis explains. “The goal is to pair hands-on culinary and food production skills with academic, cultural, and scientific knowledge.” She adds, “A good number of our instructors are food studies alumni, which is kind of cool. It’s fun to showcase graduates and where they are now. People graduate and go on to really incredible things.” Workshops run the gamut from baking (showcasing regionally grown and milled grains) to whole animal butchering to fermentation. Others focus on regional cuisines, such as Caribbean or Indian, or seasonal ingredients. Instructors are given considerable latitude for what to teach. Although offered several times a year, typically in the fall and spring terms, the workshops often sell out.
Four graduate students implement the workshops. “They make it happen,” Malis said. “It’s a popular student job, and we get a lot of applications every year. It’s a lot of work, though!”
Julier feels fortunate to do work that is not only meaningful to so many, but enjoyable. “Our work environment and the way we do things models our beliefs. We’re incredibly collaborative and very much cooperative. Even if I’m the director, I look to others, including the students, for input on what we should do. It’s just fun. Part of my drive was to do something that brought joy in terms of the work we do.”