Podcast Spotlight: Emmett McKinney

In the third episode of our Spotlight Series, The Move co-hosts Ceasar McDowell and Ayushi Roy interview Emmett McKinney. We Talk about his work with the Food Association of Nashville and how listening to our first season changed his experience working with food systems.

Ayushi: [00:00:00] Hey. Welcome to The Spotlight. This is a special edition of The Move, where we get to highlight some of the work we came across in the process of recording our current season. I hope you enjoy these conversations as much as we did.

Ceasar: [00:00:24] How are you doing Ayushi?

Ayushi: [00:00:26] Hey, Ceasar, I’m good. How are you?

Ceasar: [00:00:28] I’m doing well, I’m doing well, I’m doing well. Who we spotlighting today?

Ayushi: [00:00:32] Today we have on our spotlight Emmet McKinney.

Ceasar: [00:00:35] Ah, Emmet.

Ayushi: [00:00:36] He’s a first year, Masters of City Planning student at MIT, and a wonderful human, just a good friend.

Ceasar: [00:00:43] Yeah, I haven’t had him in any class or I haven’t been able to do any work with him, but always the hallway conversations with him about is work, what he’s interested in, has been really good. He’s actually such an earnest person.

Ayushi: [00:00:57] Yes.

Ceasar: [00:00:57] Really about doing the deep work of democracy.

Ayushi: [00:01:00] Exactly.

Ceasar: [00:01:01] Let’s hear it from him.

Welcome. We’ve been going back and forth, hearing from lots of people, that have been listening to the show. Some have been inspired by it, and some of them said, “Oh, that was really great, because this really connected to my work,” so we thought we’d invite some of those folks in, and talk about it. It’s not so much about saying, “Oh, yes, we’ve heard everything you’ve said and followed your model.” That’s not what we mean, but it’s just that by listening to the show it made people think about their work in a different way, engage in something a little bit differently, or they have a perspective on it that can really deepen not only our understanding, but the listeners’ also.

Ayushi: [00:01:48] Yeah. We’ve gotten feedback a lot of this work is really about the community aspect of it, right? It’s how you re-look at the people you work with and the way that you speak to them, way that you hold space for them, et cetera. I personally, was just very touched by your reflections of the season, which is why I’m so happy you’re here. We figured that there’s so many people in the shoes that you’re in, whether it’s by being a student, whether it’s working on the issues that you work on, the way that you think, being from California.

I think the perspective that you might be able to offer, the ways that your style of looking at things or approaching your work changed by hearing that first work that we put together, is something that we would love to be able to share with the rest of our growing community.

Emmett McKinney: [00:02:36] Yeah. Awesome. When I listened to the season for the first time, a few episodes especially stuck out to me, and one was with Curtis Ogden, and talking about networks and the way people relate to each other. My background is in environmental law and policy work, and sustainability probably defined, so the visual that he used of the (inaudible) root system in soils and pulling up a plant and realizing how complex it is, really stuck out to me. I understood that in a tactile way.

That framing of what is a network and what are we as planners and concerned citizens supposed to do then was really interesting. I think that we tend to have an idea in our mind about what the problem is, and we go and access a network to try to understand what capacity is there, and try to understand how we might be able to solve that problem. I think that’s really a effective way of working, but it jumps the gun.

A more exciting way to work for me is just sort of stepping back and asking, “What is?” I think Curtis said you don’t have to build these networks, they already are. It like, blew my mind, in part because it’s so intuitive. Like, of course. Anybody who has ever pulled up a plant in a garden or thought about how people related to each other, understands that people work together, but it’s a real challenge to operationalize that ethic. One of the really cool things about the design principles is it breaks it into sort of manageable pieces and allows people to map on their intuition to an actual approach to carrying out whatever project it is. It gives them a vocabulary for it.

Ayushi: [00:04:27] Yeah.

Ceasar: [00:04:28] I’m just interested in something that you said about Curtis saying that you don’t have to build these things, they just are, and everything. How does that, from places you’ve been working in, stuff you’ve done, how did that manifest. I mean, how do you see that?

Emmett McKinney: [00:04:40] Sure. Yeah. One of the big projects that I worked on prior to coming to MIT was the Nashville Food Waste Initiative. This is a joint project, really lead by the Natural Resources Defense Council, with support from an organization that I worked with, the Environmental Law Institute, which is effectively community organizing work. It seeks to help institutions like hotels, restaurants, cafeterias, cafes, as well as households, city government, all work together to keep food out of landfills, be it by preventing surplus food generation in the first place, donating the extra food that does get prepared to people who can use it, and composting what’s left.

I really zeroed in on that middle part, of getting the extra prepared food to people who need it, and we zeroed in specifically on prepared food. The type of thing, like at a wedding or after some big event where there’s two or three trays of steamed vegetables or meatloaf or mac and cheese or whatever it is, which is really good, nutritious food, and if you’ve ever had a party and been like, “Ah, I just don’t really know what to do with this, but someone can use it but I don’t know where to take it.” It’s that problem that we were going after.

I had the privilege to go down to Nashville and speak to all the Last Mile organizations.

Ayushi: [00:05:58] What’s a-

Emmett McKinney: [00:05:59] These are folks who are covering the last mile say between a food bank and the restaurant and the actual person in need. It’s that last little linkage, so we were getting very specific. This tied together a lot of my interests, and a lot of the principles. One is obviously designing first sustainability, making sure there’s no waste.

Ayushi: [00:06:18] Yeah.

Emmett McKinney: [00:06:18] But it also had a lot to do with innovating from the margins, right, and really going down to the smallest actor, and understanding and benefiting from their knowledge about how the food system worked. I met with folks who would organize meals on a few nights a week in church basements, I would meet with chefs in restaurants and institutions, and ask, “What are all the challenges that you face in moving this food from one place to the next?”

It was so much more complex than I even understood it to be. You don’t just wrap it up and hand it off to somebody. You got to make sure you have a driver available at the right time, that that driver knows how to handle the food, that you can find a nonprofit who’s even interested in the kind of food that you want, and so on and so forth. Right, that have enough space in their fridge. Just peeling back all these layers to what is an intuitively solvable issue, when you think a lot more about the problems that we see and realize in society have so many more layers to them, and we would be well served to just step back and ask, “How is this working? What is the network that already is?”

Specifically, we talked to a lot of nonprofits who explained, “Don’t give me any more bread. We have too much bread.” They have a really good sense for who the other nonprofits are working in that area, as well as the relevant businesses, and there’s an incredible amount of institutional knowledge, right? Especially in the sort of policy world, we talk about capacity building, but that’s not really what we need. I like to think more about activating the network that’s already there. It touches on a few other design principles too, but I can stop there.

Ceasar: [00:07:52] This last mile, is what you-

Emmett McKinney: [00:07:54] A last mile organization. (crosstalk) LMO.

Ayushi: [00:07:57] Oh.

Ceasar: [00:07:57] Yeah. It’s the same issue that comes up around technology deployment and stuff like that, and particularly, how do you connect the last mile. That’s where it kind of came from. All these either through transportation networks, information networks, and basically what you’re saying, well, there are these human networks, where there’s a last mile effort and the connection there, really, if you can make that connection, it really does serve so many more people, particularly people at the margins.

Emmett McKinney: [00:08:25] Right. The interesting thing about food waste is Silicon Valley is all over this. There are tons of apps out there that about themselves as like an Uber for extra food, and they think that you can just call somebody to come pick it up and drive it. This was tried in Nashville, and it’s been deployed in a lot of other cities. The first time an app came to Nashville, it had some success. It got a few people on board, but sort of fizzled out before it could make the huge effect that it was really looking for.

Another principle that the podcast really cued off for me was engaging in analog versus digital. Some folks we spoke to, like restaurants, were really interested in having an app, that they could just call somebody at the end of the day and not have to develop a personal relationship or when they’re trying to close up shop and go home, not have to deal with some driver, but other folks really wanted to know, if they’re going to open up their back door into their kitchen, they want to know which individual is going to come in there every single time.

It wasn’t until I had done, I think like 18 or 19 interviews that I finally got the one liner that just explained everything to me. This restaurateur says, “Nashville is a relationship based town.” That just rang for me because it reframed this whole idea that everybody there understands how to handle food. That’s not where the breakdown is. The breakdown is getting people connected in a way that feels right to them. You can deploy an app in some cities, and culturally, that just really takes root. It’s perfect. Nashville, at least at the time that I was there, wasn’t quite ready for that yet, and that’s okay. That’s great.

I found that I actually had to do a lot less hand-holding than I was expecting to. I thought I was going to have to really work hard to connect folks, and I could basically just send one email to a nonprofit and a restaurant, and say, “Hey, your schedules match up nicely, and your needs match up nicely,” and they were just off to the race. It was the idea of activating the network that’s already there, which was really exciting to me, and listening to the podcast has given me some contour about that experience that I already had.

Ayushi: [00:10:32] I love that idea of instead of capacity building, sort of connecting the existing networks that are working and that space. I just think that’s so fascinating because there is such a movement around, “There’s an app for that. We’re just going to build a tech front end, get some great UX designers, and call it a day.” That really undermines the nature of how much this work is just relationship focused, or trust focused, and trust dependent.

I’m wondering if, in your work in Tennessee, or in Nashville, you had this experience with connecting networks in an analog fashion that worked for you. How do you connect Last Mile organizations with the people in need in an analog form? What does that even look like?

Ceasar: [00:11:27] Good question.

Emmett McKinney: [00:11:27] That is a good question.

Ayushi: [00:11:28] Because if there’s not an app for it, what’s the alternative?

Emmett McKinney: [00:11:31] Right. I should give credit where credit is due, also, to the coauthors and real visionaries of this report, who are Linda Bragan at ELI and Joanne Burkencamp at the Natural Resources Defense Council. One of the cool things that NFWI does, the food waste initiative, is bring people together, just getting them all in the same room. After we did this research, the landscape analysis, we brought in all of the same folks that we interviewed, and all the restaurateurs, and made a really diverse room, again, in terms of statures. We had city officials, activists, experts, academics, and all of the people who were actually, physically holding the trays to get it to the people in need.

We presented that same research and asked, “Does this land for you? Does this reflect what you told us, and is this helpful to you?” On one hand that was good for us to sharpen our research and have some confirmation, but I think the real value of that was getting all those people in the room. It was the secondary benefit of people looking around and saying, “Hey, there are actually a lot of folks around here who are keyed into this issue and who understand and get it, and if we can just overcome the logistical needs, like the mundane things like what size packaging do we need so that I can store it in my kitchen and it can fit in your trunk,” and so on and so on, that I think really created a lot of momentum there.

I also realized that something again as simple as helping people engage analog is not easy. Not only just the work that it takes just to get everybody in the same room is a lot. I think we should really pay attention to this as an area that requires expertise and innovation the same way that we talk about digitizing relationships.

Ceasar: [00:13:22] I like that point. There needs to be investment in these analog networks, what it takes for people to come together. We’re not very good at that. It’s a place where we don’t do a lot now. I’m just thinking about, well, what would that look like? Can you have incubators for creating new analog methods for people (crosstalk)

Emmett McKinney: [00:13:51] I want to pose that question back to you. What does engaging an analog look like for areas that are substantively highly technical? One of the really cool things about food is that everybody just gets it. I can say like tray of mac and cheese, everyone pictures that. When you foster that collaboration around making our transportation network more efficient, or streamlining flows of information within city governments, things that are vital to our communities working together, how do you create that space in a more, sort of like-

(inaudible) for it. High tech environment, I guess.

Ayushi: [00:14:28] Yeah, I mean I think that’s sort of this amazing great question, like an amazing meta question, also, for the work that we’re trying to do here, right? In a lot of ways, I think the whole idea behind the (inaudible) framework is to rethink the way in which we take government’s structures for granted. Right, and rethink the ways in which governance currently does or does not engage with its communities that it’s responsible for. It’s so hard, to your point, to create a community. I mean, we’re trying. Hopefully it’s kind of working. You’re in the room, so it’s kind of working.

Ceasar: [00:15:06] Kind of working.

Emmett McKinney: [00:15:07] Yeah, I am.

Ayushi: [00:15:08] It’s hard to get people to mobilize in an analog fashion around these sorts of either maybe invisible or information based sort of structural issues. I mean, the same thing goes with climate change, right? It’s just like the time duration there is so hard to understand, not to mention it’s so hard to visualize, that it’s so hard to mobilize people around these kinds of issues. One of our hopes is to tap into the medium of conversation, of analog conversation, us sitting here face-to-face, and making that accessible at some level in a broader capacity.

Ultimately, yeah, we want you, we want our other guests to be in the same room and all be these kinds of design thinkers that are rethinking the way in which we do solve whether it’s food waste problems or what not.

Emmett McKinney: [00:16:04] Yeah. I love that whole idea of focusing on the medium through which we engage.

Ayushi: [00:16:10] Yeah.

Emmett McKinney: [00:16:10] Hearing the podcast, and thinking, “Oh, those are two people that I know, and I can literally go down the hall and say I want to be part of that conversation,” I had an amazing privilege to be part of that by literally being in the same building and being able to do that, but I think that same excitement that generates in people, that says, “Oh, I know people,” and they’re really smart and they’re engaging in a way that I know how to engage, is really cool.

I think it’s good also that you brought up climate change. This is something that keeps me up at night, and that has sort of guided my interests to this point, about just the sheer scale and complexity of it. I mean, on the one hand it takes decades to unfold, right, and has been centuries in the making, and so there’s sort of this despair that comes with it, but I often have a hard time sort of working within the climate space because it manifests in food in water, in water, in transportation, in housing, in just about every other field, and so as a guiding metric it isn’t really all that good, so I’m constantly searching for the right place to latch on and get some traction and apply the things that I know about and am excited about and have an intuition for, and to the extent that we can create dialogs that allow people to engage with things that really matter to climate change without branding them of saying you have to be a climate scientist or an environmentalist to be welcome into this space is really, really important.

Ceasar: [00:17:43] This issue of branding is interesting because we do that so much with the public.

Ayushi: [00:17:48] I just wrote that down, in all caps, branding.

Ceasar: [00:17:50] Branding. Yeah, that’s what we do to people. You’re a Republican, you’re a Democrat, you’re this, you’re that, you’re anti this, you’re for that.

Ayushi: [00:17:59] Yeah.

Ceasar: [00:17:59] (inaudible) it’s absolutely necessary to figure out how to break out of that. One tool we’ve been using in some other work I’ve been involved in is this thing about what we call this kind of Question Campaigns, where you enter a conversation with people not by asking what they think about something or what they think the solution is, but basically just asking them what their question is about it. We’ve done this around domestic violence, around transportation, around a number of issues and the fascinating thing about it is, by virtue of being, people have questions, right? We don’t often pay attention to or create the space for people to raise the questions on their mind, to say, “Oh, well this is the question I have.”

Of course, you have to frame the larger ones, so like in transportation, the one we did in Boston was like, “What’s your question about the future of mobility in Boston?” Well, the funny thing about that, we had everything from seven-year-old kids to 90-year-old had questions about that. Then, soon as you do that, and you just do the next step which is (inaudible) , some people have similar questions in the room together. People find themselves in the spaces with people they never thought they’d be in a relationship with. Right? Because the questions about these sets of experiences that are out there, and we share them, but the branding kind of gets in our way from seeing the extent to which we share them.

Emmett McKinney: [00:19:35] Yeah.

Ayushi: [00:19:36] Oh, man.

Ceasar: [00:19:36] We need these techniques to kind of push through that. Because, everything’s organized around it, right? The media’s organized around it.

Ayushi: [00:19:46] Our education system’s organized around it.

Emmett McKinney: [00:19:49] Because order’s helpful, right. I mean-

Ayushi: [00:19:51] Is that what it is?

Emmett McKinney: [00:19:53] Let me finish. Yeah, (inaudible) .

Ayushi: [00:19:55] Very technocratic of you, Emmett.

Emmett McKinney: [00:20:00] I know. I 100 percent agree with the whole idea that leading with an open-ended question or just asking, “What is your question?” Is the really exciting thing. That brought me to urban planning school because I thought, I’m interested in climate change, but before I can sling around words like sustainability or resilience with any sense of tangibility or credibility or feeling like I’m standing on firmer ground, before I can do that, I need to know what matters to people every day. Whether they understand it as climate related or not, and then once we really understand that, then we can talk about it, but let’s not put the cart before the horse.

The sort of underlying ideal in this is what do we need to do in order to create a more just society that realizes the ideal society that we want? I think that people’s tendency to bucket things and organize them come from that same impulse of how do we get from here to there? This issue is urgent, we need to figure out what the move is, so let’s not worry too much about the details. We need to be mission-aligned.

I think reconciling those impulses, right, of just crowdsourcing the question of importance, to trying to just drive the issue home that you have already decided matters I think is really interesting and challenging. Leading with that open ended question I think is really important.

Ayushi: [00:21:23] Wow. That is perhaps the best critique I’ve ever heard of the mission driven framing for so many companies that are trying to do good in these various spaces. Like you said, what if, I mean, both of you were talking about this, what if instead of being driven based on your mission, you were driven based on the questions that people were asking, or you were driven based on what you’ve heard? Just like being a good listener in this space. I’ve never actually considered, I mean, what you were saying earlier Ceasar, labels are so limiting. The branding that we have is so limiting. The fact that we’re branded on these either phenotypical or communitarian labels that we were given external to our own choosing often. Instead of having communities based on labels, if we were grouped based on the questions that we had, the concept of polarization, if it were still to be a concept, would be just so different.

Ceasar: [00:22:28] Some years ago, I had this idea about freshmen orientation at MIT, and the idea would be before students came, they actually submitted the questions they were most interested in. Basically, the problem would be what’s the question you think is most important in front of the world, and you’d have to submit three of those. Then, when your questions come in, there’s a couple things. We do an orientation, you get to connect with people who have the same question, and in those events, what you’re doing is sharing what in your life experience led you to that question, so you can see how it actually goes differently.

Then, on the other end, you attach all that to a database of information and resources and people at MIT, so you say, and if you’re really interested in this question you can go talk to this person or connect with this research project because it is already starting to move on the things you’re interested in. Instead of let’s navigate, figure out your way through this place, you can actually clearly map the kind of questions that people have that are driving them to really the set of things that are here, and relationships that are here.

Ayushi: [00:23:47] I would much rather be- the word branding is already so weird, but I’d much rather have to answer to or be held accountable to the questions I have, than where I was born or the color of my skin, right? That would just sound so much cooler. I love that world. That’s the world I want.

Emmett McKinney: [00:24:07] The sort of personal, existential crisis I’ve been having over the past two to three weeks is like-

Ayushi: [00:24:12] I thought you were saying two to three decades.

Emmett McKinney: [00:24:15] (crosstalk) right. No. Two to three weeks, is what kind of guy am I going to be. Am I going to be a housing guy or a climate guy. Constrained by the amount of time that we have to get a degree in this or that, I’ve already been grappling with what things are things that I should let go and what are not, and I would much rather be able to just say, the thing that I’m really worried about in society is that we sacrifice individual needs for collective ones.

This plays out in climate for me, because again, we create these interventions that are dubbed sustainable. We’re going to put a train here instead of houses so that more people can ride the train instead of a car. That’s sustainable if you were carbon emissions, but the people who live in those houses don’t find that very sustainable, right? I think it’s a reality of living in a democracy and living in a resource constrained world that for every intervention there are going to be people who benefit and people who don’t.

This isn’t a new idea, but I think that when thinking about how we deploy our public resources, our time, our energy, having a clear of a guiding principle for how we reconcile the needs of the minority over the majority is something that interests me a lot.

Ceasar: [00:25:46] I know you’re doing- You’re here.

Emmett McKinney: [00:25:48] I’m here.

Ceasar: [00:25:49] You’re going to be leaving at some point in time. Coming here, as you said, struggling, what kind of guy are you going to be, a housing guy-

Emmett McKinney: [00:25:56] Maybe.

Ceasar: [00:25:57] Climate guy. Who knows what it is? As you look out, not just way far in the future, but I’m kind of curious in terms of just, even the things that you’re doing now, your classwork or the projects or things that were close by in the past, how are you seeing your own personal journey in relation to this broader social journey. We’ve been talking about this social journey about society and democracies. How does your own personal journey connect up with that? Where are the tensions?

Emmett McKinney: [00:26:37] Yeah.

Ceasar: [00:26:37] Where’s the flow? Where’s the tension?

Emmett McKinney: [00:26:42] Yeah.

Ayushi: [00:26:43] Wow. That’s a hard question.

Emmett McKinney: [00:26:45] The personal journey for me has been in benchmarking progress. I think a uniquely challenging thing about coming to Cambridge, both MIT and (inaudible) and Harvard, and the community around here that is again sort of branded as a paragon of excellence and innovation and breakthroughs. That’s all very exciting, and I think it makes it really challenging to show up and say, “Here are the skills that I have, and here are the ones that I want to gain,” and then learning how to benchmark yourself against people who are already expert in that skill that you want to gain.

My personal journey has been finding progress in incremental gain, and being able to establish myself in the new space and say, “I understand something different about this field,” be it data analysis or programming or transportation or whatever it is. I’ve established myself in this space, and that’s really valuable, and now I can stand on the same ground as people who are expert in this and know what people are talking about when they describe some new web data (inaudible) interface, or they talk about a design process.

I think having the basic vocabulary and the confidence to exist in a space, and then also creating the self-awareness to know what skills and capabilities you bring, and the light in the synergy ball of things, rather than in your own capability to do all of them, I think has been my big journey.

Ayushi: [00:28:21] I love that, enjoying the light in the connection of various things as opposed to aspiring to single handedly fulfill the world’s dreams.

Emmett McKinney: [00:28:29] Yeah. Everybody wants to run, bat, and hit. Everybody wants to be the MVP, the all around, and we put a premium on that, and some people do that, and that’s great, but also if we’re interested in social and collective action, it requires each of us to be-

Ayushi: [00:28:46] Just one part of this big collective.

Emmett McKinney: [00:28:47] Yeah, and cool with deferring to other people’s expertise on things, and valuing the expertise of people who don’t usually get stamped experts. Like, people who carry around trays of mac and cheese. They know really critical information that I didn’t have, even though I had ostensively studied waste management and urban sustainability from a university perspective, right? It’s widening that arena and delighting in poking that place in it. That’s really exciting.

Ceasar: [00:29:21] Emmett, I really appreciate you coming in today.

Ayushi: [00:29:23] I love that. Thank you so much for being here.

Ceasar: [00:29:25] I love this ending piece, too, because I think you’re right. We’ve got to be able to honor and recognize the knowledge of everyone along this spectrum, right, from the person who thinks and designs some of these systems to as you said the person who’s carrying the mac and cheese. Yeah, I love that, and I think in one of our things we talked about early on in our show, last season was this whole thing about designing for the margins. One of the things that’s in that notion is that, we really can’t come up with solutions or approaches to problems that are going to lead us to more equitable and just outcomes if we are not also able at the same time to make sure folks who are at the margins to society and the knowledge and experience they have from their own lived experience is included in part of thinking about what the problem is, and how to approach it.

Ayushi: [00:30:22] Thank you so much for listening to our Spotlight episode today with Emmett McKinney.

Ceasar: [00:30:27] Stay tuned for season two which will be coming up in the next couple of weeks. We’re a production of Department of Urban Students and Planning at MIT with support from MIT’s office of Open Learning.

Ayushi: [00:30:38] Our sound is produced by Dave Lishansky. Our content by Julia Curbera and Misael Galdamez. I am Ayushi Roy.

Ceasar: [00:30:45] I’m Ceasar McDowell.

Ayushi: [00:30:47] You can find us online at TheMove.MIT.edu.

Ceasar: [00:30:51] And on our medium site at-

Ayushi: [00:30:53] Medium.com/themovemit as well as our Twitter and Facebook. Thanks so much.

Ceasar: [00:31:02] Goodbye.