Hey Angie! Thank you again for participating in The Magic Word's first featured interview. Can you share with folks a bit about who you are, what you do, and what brought you to your work?

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In conversation with...

Thanks for inviting me, Lucy!

In terms of a little about me, for the last decade, I’ve been designing and building meaningful food experiences with communities. What does this look like in terms of work? Well, I am currently the Entrepreneur in Residence with Emerson Collective and founder of Project Reflect, a design lab. Prior to this, I served as the Executive Director of the Edible Schoolyard Project, a nonprofit based in Berkeley, CA that is focused on providing hands-on learning experiences in gardens, kitchens, and cafeterias that connect children to nature, food, and each other. Before joining Edible, I served as the Director of Innovation and Strategy with San Francisco Unified School District’s Future Dining Experience, where I oversaw the redesign of the school meal experience. I have also worked to expand access to market opportunities for chefs and food entrepreneurs who are women, immigrants, and people of color while at the non-profit La Cocina.

My work has been influenced by my time as a Stanford University d.school Civic Innovation Fellow, where I learned the design thinking process and explored the question of why students were choosing hunger over school meals. The answer is simple yet complex: they are responding to a system that was never designed for them. To learn more, check out this Op-Ed I wrote for Civil Eats on the topic.

All this is to say, I love food and I have always known I wanted to work in the food space. My mother taught me about the power and beauty of sharing a meal around a table, and I’ve carried that with me throughout my career.

Angela McKee Brown

The theme for this month's newsletter is welcome. What do you think it means for someone to feel and be welcome? And how is feeling welcome connected to feeling a sense of belonging?

I appreciate that you chose the theme of "welcome" for your first newsletter! I’ve been fascinated by the concepts of joy and belonging for a while now and I think there is an aspect of each that connects to the feeling of being welcomed. When you feel joy and belonging, you are feeling a sense of freedom and ease. If one is truly welcomed in a space, I think that means you are able to feel joy and that you belong in that space. This means you are able to be your fullest self, be truly heard/understood, and find connection in the space. This doesn’t mean you aren’t challenged. It just means you aren’t dismissed outright because there is trust associated with the interaction. We see the word "Welcome!" everywhere, and it doesn’t always mean what I described. When not done with intention, the word "welcome" serves as an artificial greeting that lets you know there is an entrance, but is ambiguous about what will be on the other side of that entrance. If we are intentional about how we design our "welcome," we can transform who enters a space and what the experience is once they are inside. It is important to be generous and kind when welcoming people in and it is equally as important to be generous and intentional about what they are experiencing once they are inside.

From your perspective and experience, how is cultivating a welcoming environment connected to designing more equitable food futures?

Great question and great questions are key to the design process. So, this prompt makes me think of the work I’ve done with school cafeterias to make them more welcoming and inviting for students. When researching why students were opting out of school meals, one of the big reasons was that the school cafeteria didn’t feel welcoming. Students didn’t want to enter the space because of this. So, when I think about the importance of a welcoming environment in designing more equitable food futures, I think about what happens when a cafeteria space isn’t welcoming and the impact that has on children eating. This can also be seen by people feeling OK to shop in a grocery store or eat at a restaurant or feeling like they can enter and harvest from a community garden or shop at a farmers market. When we are intentional with our designs and create obvious and understandable cues to welcome people into a space, we are creating access to nourishment. While working with the school district, we spent A LOT of time talking with students and making sure their thoughts and ideas were represented in the designs we put forth. I can create a design that makes sense and is obvious to me, but it could mean something completely different to a 15-year-old or someone with a different lived experience than me. In order to create welcoming spaces, we must design with those for whom the space is for. That is how you are going to get the best insights and actually be able to prototype if the designs work before you release the final design. A community should be able to clearly see their fingerprints all over the final design they are using. That is when you will have achieved something that is welcoming and transforms who uses the experience and how the experience is used. This is paramount for creating more equitable food futures.

[Image description: Angela is smiling in a portrait photograph. She is wearing a black tank top and standing in front of a wall of colorful sticky notes.]

Where can folks go if they want to learn more about you and your work?

A lot of my work looks like your work,Lucy, so I’m super glad that folks reading this are already part of your community and connected with you. If they would like to learn more about my work, please click the links provided above or send me an email at angelamckeebrown@gmail.com so we can connect and chat. Lucy and I are looking for projects to work on together, so holler if you have a design need we can meet.