Four years ago as I was just about to leave The Food Project to move out to a little farm town in Western MA, the staff took a few minutes out of a Wednesday morning staff meeting to practice our ‘elevator speech’. This was an exercise designed to make people think about how they described The Food Project.

As we practiced our talks in front of the rest of the staff, the laughter got stronger as people had one minute to fumble through their earnest descriptions. “Harvesting…youth development…straight talk…lead remediation…breaking through barriers, neighbors, hundreds of thousands of pounds, work in shelters, chefs, markets, CSA, leadership training…” Evidently, depending upon what role you had with the organization, the one minute elevator speech could vary from a passionate talk on youth leadership to a ramble on great future plans for Boston’s entire food system.

Now I am back again, working part-time to get the word out about The Food Project. I have a baby daughter and my husband and I have fixed up an old farmhouse to the comfortable point where we no longer have to lob shoes or other objects into empty rooms to scare away what might be scurrying around in there. Much has changed. It seems as if the organization has gone from a small, hardworking nonprofit with huge dreams to a middle-sized organization realizing some of the those huge dreams and working harder than ever to do it well. Just getting familiar again with everything that goes on at The Food Project was an accomplishment and yet I was surprised when I spoke with a journalist last week and she referred to the organization as a “farm-teaching program.”

“We are no summer camp,” I spluttered and went on to reel off entire paragraphs about what The Food Project was doing. I am sure that she checked her email during this time, or even put the phone down and padded off to take a look in the kitchen, but I couldn’t stop myself. I pushed on with new land that needed us, an upcoming trip that some interns were taking to Vermont….blah blah blah.

In the next few months, The Food Project either needs to slow it down, or more productively, I need to reign in my elevator speech. How do I communicate everything this place does without losing who I am speaking to? That’s a question that I am thinking about all the time.