Exploring Inclusive Employment in Hydroponic Farming with Jen Tennican ~ 612

Jen Tennican:
This is Jen Tennican, and you’re listening to the Think Inclusive Podcast.

Tim Villegas:
Recording from beautiful Marietta, Georgia, you’re listening to the Think Inclusive Podcast, Episode 27. I’m your host, Tim Villegas. Today we have a fantastic conversation with filmmaker Jen Tennican about her new film, Hearts of Glass. But before we get into the interview, I have a few announcements.

The first thing I want to talk to you about is how you can support the podcast. You can go to patreon.com/thinkinclusivepodcast or anchor.fm/think-inclusive. Anytime anyone signs up for a monthly contribution, it helps pay for the production and transcription costs for the podcast. We do have a lot of our podcasts available through transcription, and if you’re interested in those, go ahead and click on the podcast tab on thinkinclusive.us. Again, thank you to those who have contributed—we really appreciate it.

The other announcement is something we talked about last week. We are officially offering inclusion coaching and educational consulting through our website. If you want more information about that, go to the services tab on thinkinclusive.us. There, you can subscribe to our Think Inclusive “not-so-weekly” email. We try to keep it light—less spam in your inbox is probably a good thing. We’ll be sending out an email very soon. If you missed out on the podcast discount for the inclusion coaching, we’ll be sending out another way you can get a discount on those services.

So those are all the announcements. I want to tell you about Jen. Today on the podcast, we have filmmaker Jen Tennican. We talk about her most recent project, Hearts of Glass, which she sees as an opportunity to raise awareness about local sustainable food production and the need for inclusive, fair-paying job opportunities for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

If you like the podcast, help other people find us by giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the Think Inclusive Podcast. You can also tell your best friends—we love word-of-mouth promotion. So please, please tell people about us.

And so, without further ado, here’s the interview.

Tim Villegas:
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Think Inclusive Podcast. I’m your host, Tim Villegas. I am very excited to introduce Jen Tennican, a filmmaker. She began making documentary films in the late ’90s in Boston before moving to Jackson, Wyoming in 2000. Her previous award-winning documentaries, The Stagecoach Bar: An American Crossroads and Far Afield: A Conservation Love Story, have been distributed nationally by American Public Television.

Currently, she is partnering with her local Slow Food chapter, Slow Food in the Tetons, to produce Hearts of Glass, a film focused on a cutting-edge vertical hydroponic greenhouse with a social mission in Jackson Hole. Hearts of Glass tells the story of the first critical year of operation of Vertical Harvest, a highly innovative but risky experiment in growing crops and providing meaningful employment to people with disabilities.

Jen’s films have community at their heart, and Hearts of Glass is an opportunity to raise awareness about local sustainable food production and the need for inclusive, fair-paying job opportunities for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Thank you for joining us on the Think Inclusive Podcast, Jen.

Jen Tennican:
You’re welcome, Tim. It’s great to be here. I can tell you how long ago I wrote that, though, because our film changed from being the first year to covering the first 15 months—which is not as sexy a number. It’s a hard number. Like, couldn’t it just be a year and a half or two years or a year? No, it’s 15 months.

Tim Villegas:
Yes. Well, that’s okay. It had been a while since I had watched the film, but as I was reviewing it before our conversation, I was just reminded about how beautiful this story is and how wonderfully it captures the idea of this innovative practice of sustainable food—but also disability rights. So it’s kind of like this mashup of agriculture and disability rights in a documentary, and I have never experienced that before. So kudos to you. This was great.

Jen Tennican:
Fantastic. It hadn’t been done before.

Jen Tennican:
It is a really interesting story, and the great thing about it is it was happening in my backyard, so I didn’t really have to go very far to cover it. I’m actually, in the same way that the Slow Food movement has practiced sort of locavore, local food, I’m a local filmmaker. I don’t think any of my last three films have been farther than 20 miles from my house. I’m trying to save the world by only making local films.

Jen Tennican:
Right, right, right. And yeah, because I had reached out to you to be a test screening of the film. Unlike the previous two films that I had done, with this film, I went through a series of test screenings with various audiences. We didn’t focus just on disability—we obviously reached out to some disability viewers and advocacy groups—but we tried to mix up our audiences so we had a lot of different perspectives on it. And yeah, your feedback was helpful. That’s why in the write-up I sent you when we were originally going to do this podcast—what, six or eight months ago—it said it was covering a year and not 15 months. So some things have changed.

But it really is something incredibly innovative and is not going on anywhere else in the world at this moment. This particular combination of a high-tech vertical farm in a purpose-built building on an extremely small footprint with the amount of technology crammed into it—I mean, in ways you don’t even have to say so much about the technology because the images of the vertical carousels and the horizontal carousels just sort of speak for themselves. They look so cool and high-tech.

And then the combined social mission—Vertical Harvest was always envisioned to bring these two things together: a community need for local year-round produce, which is very difficult to grow in Jackson, which has a four- to five-month outdoor growing season, and meaningful, competitively paid jobs for community members with disabilities.

Tim Villegas:
So I have two questions to kind of start us off. What was your involvement in this project as far as Vertical Harvest goes? How did you first learn about it, and why was it important to you to even make this documentary about this particular issue—the combining of issues, the greenhouse, and the employment for people with disabilities?

Jen Tennican:
Well, I first became aware—Jackson is a small town. We have 10,000 people in our town, so chances are a lot of people know each other. I did know the two—and then it turned out to be three—women who founded it. It was about an eight-year process from the inception of the idea of Vertical Harvest to the point where the doors were opening and they were growing produce.

I think I helped my friends at some point with the Kickstarter video for it or contributed some footage. It went through several iterations. In the beginning, it was a nonprofit where people were donating, and then it eventually morphed into a—this is very sexy—low-profit limited liability corporation.

Tim Villegas:
Yes.

Jen Tennican:
Which is a low-profit company. The social mission is primary. There are investors who expect a return on their investment, but it is slow money and patient capital. All that kind of B Corp, social investing—that is quite hot at the moment.

Tim Villegas:
Yeah. I was actually just thinking about B Corps because that’s something that—it popped into my head. A low-profit organization? That sounds a lot like Think Inclusive.

Jen Tennican:
It is bad marketing.

Tim Villegas:
It is.

Jen Tennican:
That’s a great business: “It’s completely low-profit. Would you like to invest?”

Tim Villegas:
That’s right. So all the investors out there—no, that’s fantastic. So it sounds like you were just trying to help them out. Then what drew you to wanting to make the documentary?

Jen Tennican:
Well, yeah. As I said, it was an eight-year process for them to bring this to fruition. I was making other films during the interim, and I happened to finish the last one, Far Afield: A Conservation Love Story, just as they were finishing building the greenhouse. I did have this moment where I thought, “Ooh, I really could use a break,” because being an independent film producer makes you want to curl up in the fetal position a lot.

But I thought, this really is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to capture this moment in time. It’s a startup. It not only has the social mission, but it has all of this high-tech hydroponic vertical farming equipment. It just seemed like I should do it, and I couldn’t pass it up.

It’s very important to have editorial separation in the work that you do as a documentary filmmaker. The film is not for Vertical Harvest, and they did not financially support it. But it clearly is about them, and I’m sure it will be a benefit to them in some ways. But it is nice to have editorial separation, and it is nice that I live in a small town and people were comfortable with my reputation. They let us have really unfettered access. I’m sure there were some things they would have preferred we didn’t film. I know every time the people from Vertical Harvest watch it, they enjoy it, but they also go through angst around some of the highs and lows of the business model and dialing in the growing of crops. There were a lot of variables, for sure.

Tim Villegas:
Yeah. So there are several themes in Hearts of Glass, and I’m wondering if these themes were intentional or if they just kind of came out organically in the film. You have this theme of creating an environment where people with intellectual disabilities and typically developing workers are working together. And just how empowering that is—because when you watch the film, the people working side by side are equals and peers. That is, as an educator and someone who wants to promote that type of inclusion in our communities and schools, so refreshing to see.

Then you have the idea that people with disabilities are working for a competitive wage—they’re not being paid subminimum wages. And then you have this whole other story of how the greenhouse works in general, which was fascinating. Could you talk about those themes? Were they intentionally put out, or how did that play out as you were making the film?

Jen Tennican:
A couple of things. I feel like I missed part of your other question before, so I’m going to go back because it touches on disability. A lot of people who make films about disability have a personal connection to it. I didn’t really have one before working on the film. So for me, just from a very personal experience, I started to get introduced to people in my community that, for whatever reason, I hadn’t been aware of or in the same circles with. It was very rewarding to get a sense of what people’s capabilities are and to meet families, job support staff, caregivers—lots of different people involved in the whole process—and just really get a sense of the complex web that is created within a community.

I think just seeing the employment model—which is not all the way toward one side of the spectrum on completely integrated and competitive—but it is definitely toward the correct side of the spectrum, in my opinion. Their breakdown of workers is probably 50% with disabilities and 50% without. Seeing how their startup culture and corporate culture was very inclusive and accepting—everyone was contributing to the same mission. People with disabilities as employees were extremely visible and a vital part of the business.

Jen Tennican:
And just to see, as you mentioned, people treated with dignity—and dignity to fail, right? To perhaps not achieve something. It was also different from the other films that I’ve done. The previous films had been retrospective. I had found a story that I wanted to tell that had already happened. I could choose my characters, do my research, and figure out which stories I wanted to tell. This was unfolding.

It was extremely stressful in terms of, are we following the right employees? Will there be enough drama? Will people evolve and change? What’s going to happen? Nobody has the budget—nor should they spend every day filming in that greenhouse during our 15-month period. That would have been a disaster in terms of trying to go through all the footage.

So we tried to really get a sense of what was going on, figure out the dynamics. We probably followed eight or nine characters and then had to whittle that down to five main characters. They ended up being cross-disability and ranging in age from their twenties to their fifties—men and women. So it was, I think, a very good spectrum that we ended up following.

Tim Villegas:
Yeah. So the diversity in your characters was intentional?

Jen Tennican:
Intentional in a way, but also just, I think, good luck. We ended up with a good range just because that’s whose stories panned out. It would have been good no matter what, but it was very important to us to have at least one female character. We did manage that.

Tim Villegas:
That’s good. Yeah. So the character of Micah that you’re talking about is fascinating. She also has her side business of producing artwork, which is a really nice part of her story.

I did want to bring up one part of Johnny’s story—and I guess this is the educator in me. There’s a scene where they’re having some sort of beginning-of-the-day pep talk. The manager asks everyone to share how they bring joy to the world or something like that. Johnny perks up and says, “Well, I recite movie lines.”

As the educator in me, it would have been so easy for that manager to say, “Well, that’s really not on topic,” or “Let’s bring it back, Johnny.” But instead, she goes with it. She uses his interest, which is obviously reciting movie lines. Then he recites this movie line, which is so on point with the tone of the group. I don’t want to spoil anything, but it was just a really great moment.

Those kinds of things, as someone who is interested in disability rights and inclusion, I love to see. I would love for people to see that scene and experience the dignity that is given to the workers. I just wanted to share that because that was really powerful for me.

Jen Tennican:
Oh, that’s good. I think there are things—coming from outside the disability world and maybe being sometimes hypersensitive, not knowing—we ran those scenes by advisors to make sure it didn’t seem like people were laughing at Johnny so much as laughing with him. That it wasn’t a derisive kind of feel or like making someone perform.

Tim Villegas:
Right, right. Yeah, that’s good. Did you have a favorite story or something about the portraits that you did that really stuck out to you?

Jen Tennican:
Well, I think I have a favorite scene in the movie. Actually, I probably have several favorite scenes. But Johnny, in addition to being a big movie fan, is a brony—he’s a My Little Pony fan. There are bronies who don’t have disabilities and bronies with disabilities. I’ve had some feedback occasionally where people are like, “That’s infantile. You shouldn’t show that.” And I was like, “Whoa. If a person without a disability can be a brony, can’t a person with a disability be a brony?”

There’s a scene where Johnny puts on his My Little Pony outfit for the character Shining Armor and performs at a three-year-old’s birthday party. He deals with all the chaos and the noise, and you can really see how he has developed skills to deal with some of it. It even gets a little out of hand in a moment, but he pulls it back in. It’s about seeing growth in characters over the course of the film. To me, that was a beautiful little story. I mean, there’s nothing better than somebody in a pony costume, in my opinion.

Jen Tennican:
And really, he’s working the room at that three-year-old birthday party.

Tim Villegas:
Yeah. Overall, how did the making of this film impact you personally?

Jen Tennican:
As I said, I didn’t have a lot of exposure to my fellow citizens with disabilities here in Jackson. It’s allowed me to develop some friendships with people that—I say friendships because they extend beyond the filmmaker-subject lines. It’s great to know Sean. I don’t necessarily think of him as “Sean with a disability.” Sean has strengths and weaknesses. He’s a great worker and super fun to hang out with.

It’s a small town, so I feel like it’s just opened my eyes to how I can extend my community and the value of natural supports on the job or just in life. I saw that happen at Vertical Harvest. There are only so many things we can show in a film, and I think that’s one thing you probably don’t get as much of a sense of. But we saw friendships evolve and natural supports evolve through work relationships.

Jen Tennican:
There are a number of employees who have job supports that helped them throughout this period that we filmed, but there are also coworkers that just function as natural supports. So I think just being kind, being inclusive, engaging with people—my goal was that when people walked away from this film, they knew enough about our five major characters that they could start up a conversation or know what their likes or dislikes were. That they really got a little window into people’s personalities and they weren’t just sort of monolithic portrayals of people with disabilities—to be pitied or where you never learn enough about their character to really care.

Tim Villegas:
Right. So Jen, what was the biggest thing that you learned about the vertical hydroponic greenhouse in making this film?

Jen Tennican:
That it is perhaps more stressful to run a hydroponic vertical farm than it is to make a film about one. It just takes brave and committed people to take that kind of risk. They did a ton of research to create this vertical farm and the employment model, but where the rubber meets the road is when you get into the greenhouse and you’re beginning to grow things. The commitment, the ups and downs, the fact that these people were in it for the long haul—it was impressive. There were times when we were filming where I was just like, “Oh my goodness, I feel so much for you people,” meaning everyone who works at Vertical Harvest.

Tim Villegas:
Well, Hearts of Glass is fantastic. I can’t wait for our listeners to see the film. So tell us how they can see the film—if it’s even possible at this point.

Jen Tennican:
Right. We’re very early in our festival run, and that is the first phase of distribution for the film. So people, unfortunately—well, people can see it if they come to the Wild & Scenic Film Festival in January in Nevada City, California. We just got selected for that. But we’re a little ways off from having public screenings.

There will come a point where we want to encourage community screenings. People will be able to buy a download of the film—all of those wonderful things that happen—but we’re a little ways off from that. We’ve presented some excerpts and had panel discussions at a couple of disability conferences, and we’re looking forward to attending TASH’s national conference in Portland at the end of November. One of our main characters, Ty Warner, will be there with his father. I think it’s really important when we do these presentations to have a self-advocate employee there as part of it.

So what you can do right now is follow us on social media, and you can find out when and where you’ll be able to see the film.

Tim Villegas:
Fantastic. I would assume heartsofglassfilm.com is where they can see a trailer of the film. Do you have excerpts on there as well?

Jen Tennican:
We have a couple of different versions of the trailer on the Facebook page. As our cover photo, we have a mosaic version of our trailer. We have a presence on Facebook, Instagram, and we’re working on Twitter—because boy, doesn’t Twitter need work? You really have to work that one.

Tim Villegas:
Exactly, exactly. Alright. Well, Jen Tennican, thank you for taking time out to be on the Think Inclusive Podcast. We look forward to promoting the film when it becomes more available to the public. Thank you for your time.

Jen Tennican:
Yeah, thank you, Tim.

Tim Villegas:
That is our show. We would like to thank Jen for being a guest on the Think Inclusive Podcast. Make sure to get updates about her film Hearts of Glass at heartsofglassfilm.com and jentennicanproductions.com. You can also follow Hearts of Glass on Twitter and Instagram.

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From Marietta, Georgia, please join us again on the Think Inclusive Podcast. Thanks for your time and attention.