Author: Swati Singh

Picnic Sandwiches

Published by Swati Singh

One day a white Ford Econoline van appeared, so old that its paint was matted, its enamel sheared away by time and smogwinds. The sound was unnerving when I scratched my stubby nails on its side to examine it, but I accepted it. It had a defunct refrigeration unit the size of a case of small water bottles on top and a huge sticker decal on one side that read “Picnic Sandwiches” in a chubby typewriter font. Deli, Catering, Delivery. (626) something something something – something something something something. I have no idea where my father procured this adorable hunk of junk, but I loved it. It was fantastically unreliable, breaking down with such tenacity that the guy at Lynn’s Auto Body had a dedicated space cleared for it. My dad had that crooked mechanic’s number on speed dial. I wonder now who he called first from the blue call boxes that dotted the sidelines of all of the highways where Picnic Sandwiches decided to stop to have lunch and a long nap – my …

Journey to Atlantis

Published by Swati Singh

I remember what I wore on the day I moved into my freshman year dorm because it was more than the shirt on my back. It was hot that day in San Diego. October can be like that in Southern California. Sure the season turns, but it’s a trepidatious three point turn that lurches in and out of Summer like a beat up Toyota minivan. There were no elevators in Atlantis, the residence hall that I was assigned to. They were all named after historic fleets, mine a shuttle, but funny – I didn’t feel like I was taking off. My room was on the top floor up five stairwells with sharp turns and dividing walls that made it impossible to see my new neighbors even when they weren’t new anymore, a change for a girl from a town where every one knew everyone else. During the tour I had learned that these buildings were constructed around the time George Winne Jr., set himself on fire in Revelle Plaza in 1970 in protest to the …

My Madame Bovary Story

Published by Swati Singh

Emma Bovary, the ill-fated protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s eponymous novel, struggled to live within the confines of provincial life. She grew up on a convent and thought marriage would be her entry into an existence more nuanced than the farm life she knew. Her husband was a respectable doctor and loved her, but she found him boring and filled her idle time reading romance novels that gave her the scintillating, sensual escape she was looking for. Marriage didn’t extinguish Emma’s taste for extravagance. Before long, she sought the kind of thrill she found in the erotic pages she burned through. She took two lovers, Léon and Rodolphe, both of whom ultimately rejected her. She racked up a bill during her exploits and became destitute, eventually committing suicide lest her private affairs be exposed, and her young daughter and husband humiliated. It’s a foreboding tale my traditionalist anti-novella father would have loved for my sister and I to read so he could wave his finger in our faces and say, “See! Look what happens!” But that …

The Backyard at Longview

Published by Swati Singh

In my silent picture memories out back in the old house at Longview, a few places stand out. The window above the sink overlooking the backyard where I would see my mother watching us play. I imagine myself there now for I look like her and there is nothing to look onto, but the sun setting on a life we once knew when we were all together indefinitely. Outside, there was a hearth somebody had built out of stone and cement where my dad cooked spiced and succulent meat and fish, sometimes bread. He would let me poke open the aluminum foil to see if steam was piping, the matte smoke from his cigarette swirling and blending into the cool twilight air like a ghost hiding and hanging high. As I venture farther these characters and their habits recede into time and it is just me in timeless spaces that know me like ancestral land. I imagine thinking of these places when I am dying. I return to them now because they are where my …

The Garden, Dad, and I

Published by Swati Singh

I spent much of my time growing up, especially my adolescent years, with my father in our backyard garden. We had this lust to grow things together. I would be home from school waiting for him and the second he got home, we’d be out there with our seeds. Our garden wasn’t neat and symmetrical like the ones I’d see in my mother’s magazines. This was my dad’s messy space where he could smoke his Winstons and be a philosopher. I loved my father so much, I wanted to be him – cool and aloof, unattached, yet deeply tethered to the poetry of being. He was my first great love. Dad was a busy man in those days and, like a writer trying to force out words, he stretched daylight to do what he loved most – farm. We share the “early to bed, early to rise” gene, so I fell into his routines with ease. It wasn’t difficult for me to choose hanging out with my old man over playing with the boys down …

Peggy

Published by Swati Singh

When I moved in with Peggy for almost a year in 2009, she was 88 years old. This past January, Peggy turned 100. I haven’t seen her since 2013 or 2014, but we’ve miraculously stayed in touch over the phone despite her hopping states and retirement communities several times. We talk once or twice a year, usually by accident. I’ll be scrolling through my phone and will stumble upon Peggy’s number. I just hit dial whenever that happens, taking it as a sign to check in. Or she’ll just randomly call. Nobody else from Plantation, Florida calls me, so I answer. Sometime’s she’ll ask, “Now who am I talking to?” Many great conversations have started that way. What I love about Peggy and her whole her generation is that they answer the call. They give human voices primacy over all other forms of communication. I talked to Peggy a few days ago and her memory is slipping. Each time we connect, I’m certain it’s going to be our last conversation. And maybe I’m right. But …

A Beautiful Harvest

Published by Swati Singh

I caught up with Louie the peach farmer last week and we talked about the troubling water situation in California. Louie also grows almonds, a mainstay in our state, but also one of our most water-consuming crops. Louie is no stranger to this reality, but it’s tough to transition away from a crop you’ve been working with your whole life. Always looking to the bright side, Louie shared some good news — he was able to buy the water allotment from one of his neighbors who doesn’t use his acreage for agriculture. With the gift of his gallons, Louie was able to have a bountiful fruit harvest. Our conversation hopped to the farm laborers who made it all happen. Louie’s operation is smaller than the farms that typically make the news. He is not the guy getting interviewed by reporters on immigration and farm labor management. Some folks on his crew have been with him for decades and Louie pays them an above market wage. According to Louie, giving people dignity is just good business. …

The Wild Alone

Published by Swati Singh

Louie Boer is a college chum of my father’s, a peach farmer, and somewhat of a mythical figure. I remember him visiting the house when I was a kid, driving down from Modesto in his ginormous truck, wearing a thick lined windbreaker and work boots. He is a big guy – towering, Dutch, and agricultural. Louie is the kind of guy you look at and think, “Your mom fed you well growing up.” As gentle as he is big, Louie is a rugged but soft-spoken intellectual. I remember sitting at the dinner table listening to him and my dad talk about the good old days, fishing up the Central Coast, reading, and just being free outdoors. They talked about life, God, and family while my mom served Louie Indian food – puffed up rotis, sautéed vegetables, and my dad’s chicken curry. About a month ago, Louie got COVID, and then a couple of weeks ago, he disappeared. My father grew desolate trying to reach him, and every day he would talk to some friend or …

These Legumes Offer a Leg Up

Published by Swati Singh

In 1989, Jossy Eyre was volunteering at a daytime women’s shelter in Denver as part of her master’s degree in social work. There she met dozens of jobless women with little sense of where they were going or what came next. After a period of relative safety and stability at the shelter, the women simply stopped showing up. Jossy worked at the shelter for the entire academic year, and it didn’t take long for familiar faces to reappear. Often, the women had gotten jobs during their time away, but struggled to keep them. Jossy’s talks with them revealed an interconnected web of social and financial challenges that required a more sustainable solution. So she did what all accidental social entrepreneurs do – she asked herself what she knew how to do, and how she could use her skills to create opportunities for others. 500 Bucks and a Vision Jossy knew how to make soup. So she invested $500 of her own money and put two women to work making single pot mixes – 10 Bean, …

Vote With Your Feet to End Youth Homelessness

Published by Swati Singh

Sam Harper was thrust into the life of a social entrepreneur early. “I was 18, and my buddy asked me to join a class project,” he recalls. A student at St. John’s University in Minnesota, Sam said yes to an audacious plan – selling warm knit beanies with a give-back model that would provide a free beanie for every child suffering from cancer in the United States. It was a new business model at the time that took off after a few short years, inspiring Sam to search for his own socially conscious business concept as college came to a close. The next opportunity popped up quickly. “One of my friends had this idea for a sock company,” Sam says. “He discovered that socks were the most requested, but least donated item at homeless shelters across America.” The friend was Michael Mader, another Minneapolis-based social entrepreneur searching for a way to help the local homeless community. So in 2016, Sam and Michael joined forces to launch Hippy Feet, a one-for-one social enterprise that sold warm, fuzzy …

It’s a Beautiful Day for Refugees

Published by Swati Singh

Where does most granola begin? Probably in a factory, or maybe a sticky bowl at home during an oatmeal cookie project gone wrong. At Beautiful Day, a nonprofit gourmet granola powerhouse in Rhode Island, the answer may surprise you – a classroom. In 2008, Keith Cooper was an educator struggling to meet the learning needs of his refugee students. The decontextualized atmosphere of the western classroom – desks and chairs arranged in neat rows – wasn’t conducive to learning for kids who had just arrived from camps. Since most people learn by doing, Keith decided that one of his personal hobbies might be a perfect hands-on project. So he got together with his friend Geoff Gordon and started teaching his students how to make granola. English improved. Morale improved. Students found something that bound them together and gave them purpose – and Keith saw a chance to make it all sustainable. Honoring Work & Roots Fast-forward a dozen years, and Beautiful Day is a thriving nonprofit with a mission “to help refugees, especially youth and the most …

Unaccompanied Minors Become Unstoppable Women

Published by Swati Singh

Tucked away in a quiet unassuming neighborhood in Nairobi, Kenya is a remarkable, open green space for refugee girls escaping some of the most troubled regions of Africa. Like a tree-lined cul-de-sac in an American suburb, the lush landscape stands in sharp contrast to the chaos of conflict zones. “We deliberately chose a safer and peaceful place for our campus,” says Emily Snider, Director of Marketing for RefuSHE. “There are fewer triggers here.” Triggers abound throughout East Africa, home to a smoldering refugee crisis where more than 1.3 million people live in blistering, under-resourced camps in Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Thousands have spent an entire lifetime in exile, searching for the kind of stillness found at RefuSHE’s sanctuary. Every displaced person is vulnerable by definition, but RefuSHE was founded specifically to serve the most vulnerable of all: unaccompanied girls and young women. Some are orphans, while others become separated from family during the flight to safety. Along the way, many young women get sucked up in militia and sexual violence, leading to layered and complex …

Impact is the Spice of Life

Published by Swati Singh

Northeastern Afghanistan might be the last place on earth that you’d expect to find inspiration for a new social impact business – especially in the food industry. With short summers and jagged peaks that soar past 20,000 feet, the Hindu Kush mountains defy any attempts at profitable farming. But once a year, foragers head up the cliffs to gather wild mountain cumin, a favorite local spice that’s largely unknown in the rest of the world. As a young aid worker stationed in Afghanistan, Ethan Frisch surely wasn’t the first Westerner to taste the stuff, but thanks to his background as a chef in New York City, he instantly recognized that it was something special. That rare, tiny seed was the inspiration for Burlap & Barrel, a single-origin spice company that sources unique and beautiful products from smallholder farmers sustaining an ancient trade in some of the most remote parts of the world. The company aims to reduce inequality and exploitation in food systems by connecting farmers to high value markets. Ethan founded the company with Ori …

Vintners with a Vision for Impact

Published by Swati Singh

In 2007, when Jake Kloberdanz found out that a loved one had been diagnosed with cancer, he turned to his work friends for support. All recent college grads cutting their teeth in the wine industry, they revisited an audacious idea they’d discussed earlier: Could they sell wine and donate money to worthy causes like cancer research? “Breast cancer awareness typically lasts for a month,” says Kristen Shroyer, one of Jake’s friends. “There was no wine giving back, so we wondered how we could use what we knew to keep a cause going all year long.” “We really had no idea what we were doing,” Brandon Hall admits, but he and the rest of the group — Jake, Tiffany, Tom, Sarah, and Kristen — weren’t about to let that stop them from launching ONEHOPE Wine, the first built-from-the-ground-up, purpose-driven wine brand. “I was selling wine out of my car!” laughs Kristen, who’s now EVP for Partnerships. In an industry dominated by big players, the team’s naivete may have been an asset, and their common mission is certainly …

Artisans with Heart, Gifts with a Conscience

Published by Swati Singh

Susan Gomez recalls waiting nervously on an isolated road in southern Arizona for her ride across the border to Mata Ortiz, Mexico. The air was thick, and she could hear thunder in the distance. Her business partner, Mayra Castellanos, had implored her not to go. A native of Juarez, Mayra was familiar with the big-city narcos culture that was seeping into rural villages like Mata Ortiz. But Susan was determined to make her first trip to meet local Mexican artisans whose livelihoods were endangered by the growing drug violence. Just a few years ago, “busloads of tourists were driving into Mata Ortiz twice a day to buy pottery from a thriving collective of 600 artisans. Now they are destitute because people are afraid to travel, and many are leaving their craft.” Preserving traditional Mexican art forms is central to the mission of Amigos Art & Pottery, a retail social enterprise Susan and Mayra founded to help artisans transcend obscurity and poverty by showcasing and selling their wares for a fair price in the US. “Precio justo” …