| |
Bill Addison
8/1/2009
Hang out at Atlanta’s organic food community hot spots long enough and eventually you’ll run into Jonathan Tescher. A wiry, fast-talking twenty-nine-year-old with a magnetic grin, Tescher works as a behind-the-scenes maestro to foster connections that help farmers and producers best reach consumers. Talk with Tescher about his work with farmers markets and advocacy groups, and he’ll tell you, in sterling post-sixties-era activism speak, that he simply wants to be of the “highest and best use.” But don’t relegate him too quickly to the granola set: Fresh from earning his MBA at Georgia State University this past May, he’ll just as quickly spearhead a discussion on the benefits of establishing an umbrella organization for local farmers markets and its “potential efficacies involving economy of scale.”
 This heart-for-service-meets-head-for-business duality has served him well. In 2006, after organizing East Atlanta’s Youth Empowerment Festival and teaching the kids to grow basil plants that they could sell, he felt motivated to establish the now-thriving East Atlanta Village Farmers Market. Connections made during an internship at East Lake’s Gaia Gardens (and a successive part-time gig as its bookkeeper) led him to his two current titles: manager of Morningside Farmers Market and farmer services coordinator at Georgia Organics. Watching him charm the Saturday morning regulars at Morningside, or hearing him talk about working with a dairy farmer who needed help navigating bureaucracy, one wonders if Tescher won’t soon be drifting from nonprofits to politics. The offices for Georgia’s Department of Agriculture are up for reelection next November, after all.
Photograph by Jamey Guy
This article originally appeared in the August 2009 issue of Atlanta magazine
|
«
Return to previous page
»
Send to a friend
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|