Pie Ranch #PhoenixRising
I decided to donate a portion of A Pie in the Sky’s profits from our August 29 pop-up to Pie Ranch, after they had suffered losses from the devastating CZU Lightning Complex Fire, including losing their 157-year-old farmhouse. We ended up donating $342.24 total, thanks to your support in purchasing pies and a few generous donor customers.
THE DECISIONs TO DONATE
My decisions to donate, both to Pie Ranch and #BakersAgainstRacism, was not fully straightforward. My complicated brain got in the way, and three questions weighed on my mind. I want to share them here because I think they are worth consideration, and I still do not have it fully figured out. The questions were:
1) Was I simply jumping onto a bandwagon because it felt like the “cool” thing to do? I wanted to be sure I took the time to examine my motivation, to understand the causes, and to come from a place of true solidarity rather than passing whims. This was especially true of the #BakersAgainstRacism pop-up.
2) Am I doing this for reputation’s sake, or out of the spirit of generosity? To combat this, I told myself in both instances that I would commit to a donation amount that would make me feel uncomfortable. Meaning if the percentage I am committing feels easy, then I am not doing enough. That is not to say that small donations are not helpful, but rather, this is my way to ensure I am not doing this as a marketing gimmick.
3) Lastly, why Pie Ranch and why Farms to Grow? How do I choose among so many different organizations to give to? Straight up, I chose Pie Ranch and Farms to Grow because I feel passionately about their work and/or I felt a personal pull to them. And I think that this is how most people choose to donate. Yet I can’t help but ask a few questions of the donation practices in our country (including my own!) – who gets to choose to donate, how do they make their decisions, what are their motivations, does our donation culture actually contribute to creating a larger wealth gap, why has there been an uptick in cooperate “conscientiousness” in recent decades? I do not have the answers, and I am not going to let these question stop me from donating, but I still think these questions are worth examining.
I recognize I can be an over-thinker, and at the end of the day, the decision to donate comes down to: would donating help, amount big or small? Yes. Then let’s do this!
WHY Pie Ranch? ITS HIDDEN YET POWERFUL ROLE IN MY ULTIMATE VISION FOR A PIE IN THE SKY
My motivation to donate to Pie Ranch in particular, as opposed to another organization affected by the fires, was really because of a one-time visit three years ago that made me fall in love with their work and ethos.
I learned of Pie Ranch’s devastation through the news one early morning one or two days after the incident. I am incredibly lucky to say this is the first time a place I have visited in person has burned down, EVER, in my life...I think… Pie Ranch’s news hit differently than the other stories of the wildfires. It felt so real and so close. But, I actually have no personal ties with Pie Ranch. I had merely toured their farm three years ago, and got to see first-hand the incredible work they are doing around cultivating a healthy and just food system from seed to table. At the time, I was naive and wide-eyed, and did not fully grasp the immensity of their mission. Now, I still have much to learn, but I am less naive.
In my journey to start A Pie in the Sky, two organizations that immediately caught my eye were Pie Ranch and the now-closed Mission Pie. Surprisingly, yet not surprisingly, these two had strong ties to one another. Karen Heisler, co-founder of Mission Pie, also helped found Pie Ranch, and to my knowledge, Mission Pie sourced a good portion of their ingredients from Pie Ranch. I have had the honor of meeting both Karen Heisler and Nancy Vail, another co-founder of Pie Ranch and current executive director. Nancy, because she herself led the tour I went on three years ago, and Karen because she generously accepted an invitation to lunch so I could pick her brain. Without exaggeration, Nancy and Karen both embodied and oozed every ounce of the convictions expressed on their websites – the drive to create fair and equitable food microcosms as their organizations, with an emphasis on spreading awareness. I knew I was meeting the real deals, and I wanted to piggy-back on their mission through A Pie in the Sky.
Sadly, I have faced hiccups, and I am nowhere near where I want A Pie in the Sky to be as far as contributing to a fairer food system goes.
While our mission has always been, and continues to be to create smiles and community through pie, our mission was at one point stated on this very website as “using delicious pies to bring smiles to people’s faces, while operating with careful consideration and thoughtfulness toward our communities, resources, and environment.” Our vision was stated as:
A Pie in the Sky is dedicated to selling home-style pies to spread joy and humanity. We are committed to fostering a sense of community and creating a culture of awareness and care for all humans, creatures, and the environment. We strive to source our ingredients responsibly, use our resources efficiently, eliminate our waste as much as possible, and treat our employees and customers with respect and compassion. Our vision is to use delicious pies to examine how we can build a better community.
But this mission has so many intricacies and contradictions, the biggest one being: how does a business provide living wages to its employees, source their ingredients responsibly, all the while remaining accessible to all economic tiers of the general population? (This contradiction is unfortunately human-made, created by how our food system is set-up, but this topic is huge and needs to be left for another post.)
I thought I might’ve found an answer earlier in the year. Before COVID-19 hit, I was brainstorming pretty seriously a Pay-As-You-Wish and Pie-It-Forward (get it?!? Like Pay-It-Forward, but Pie-It-Forward?? I actually have to give credit to this clever play on words to a friend) model for this project. However, it was an endeavor I had strong doubts around, and of course, the pandemic hit, which put me out of work and made the idea seem that much more daunting.
In the ample amount of free time between the start of shelter-in-place in March and the start of the pop-ups in July, I did a lot of reflecting, some experimenting, I attempted to start some projects with like-minded individuals in connection with my vision, almost put the dream aside and started to look for desk jobs, but finally decided I needed to swallow a few hard truths, take some risks, give a stab at a different approach, start getting more vulnerable, and go with what I had. After about two years of scratching my head over the above contradiction (source responsibly, be a sustainable business, AND be affordable to all?), I decided I needed to bite off less in the beginning. I watered down my mission and stuck to the barebones of what A Pie in the Sky has always been about – spreading joy and building community. I stuck with your typical business model, slapped a price onto the pies, put together a quick pop-up webpage, forced myself to get active on Instagram (social media is love-hate for me, leaning heavily toward hate), chose an inaugural date, swallowed my fears of whether my pies were good enough, and went for it.
Through some miracle, the reception of A Pie in the Sky has exceeded my expectations by thousand times, of course, thanks to the amazing support of my customers and my immediate circle. I still hesitate to be too optimistic and put up expectations, but I am feeling more hopeful than ever before that I can dust off my seemingly “too ambitious” mission and start to chip away at it bit by bit. How much of my hugely idealistic dream can I achieve? i have no idea. Working towards it will be a process, it will be slow, I will stumble, but I want to approach this methodically and sustainably. Again, I am nowhere near close to what I want to be doing. But I assure you, the same vision is in my head, it is in my heart, and I am taking baby steps every week.
All in all, we need more organizations like Pie Ranch and Mission Pie, and I am tremendously grateful to have the privilege of pooling together support from you all, to pass that support on to them. I wish them a most smooth recovery, and know that as Nancy Vail posted, like a #PhoenixRising, they will rise from the ashes stronger and more beautiful than before. If you would like to continue supporting them, you can donate at https://www.pieranch.org/take-action. In the meantime, I will continue to chip away at my mission and dream, and look forward to seeing what you and I can create together. I can in no way do this on my own.