Laura Degrace — The Mad Scientist of Workshops

 

This is Laura DeGrace. Don’t mention a community project idea around Laura unless you’re better than half serious about following through because the next day your inbox will have urgent messages about funding possibilities and probably a list of potential recruits and clients.

Her logic is simple: If the idea resonated enough to tell someone then why wouldn’t you get out there and try to make it happen? Hers is a mindset of making possibilities into realities.

Green Eye Coop

Many of her projects — and there are a lot of them — are about food: cooking it, growing it, supplying it, teaching about it, protecting it. Her flagship is Green Eye Coop, which she says gives some coherence to all the stuff she’s organizing. Creating the co-operative also moved her from mostly volunteer work towards a living income for doing the things she was doing anyway.

Love for Organizing

We take for granted that someone who spends most of their time organizing courses and workshops about food and food security is someone who is obsessed about food and food security. Laura told us that she’s really about organizing. An idea pops into her head, she wants to make it happen. An idea pops into someone else’s head, she’ll get in on organize that too.

And as if she didn’t have enough ideas for workshops, she recently traveled to California with a couple of friends, Janet Hamilton and Jen Hudson, to take a week-long master food and preserving course. So, you can be expecting a swarm of preserving workshops in the near future.