People-First Tourism Lab Blog

  Foraging is a practice as old as time. The hunting and gathering lifestyle was the root of all human existence until 10,000 BC when crop domestication proliferated into agriculture. Until then, humankind relied on an intimate understanding of nature’s bounty for subsistence. Civilization has since abandoned the hunter-gatherer culture and evolved to remove most of the population from the intricacies of food production. Urban foraging is the modern take on humanity’s most primal tradition. Simply put, it involves harvesting wild vegetation in urban environments and using it as a source of food. Daniel Woody is a North Carolina native with a longstanding love for foraging. At a young age, his grandfather and mother taught him the ways of foraging. As he grew older and wiser, he carried on the family trade, even practicing across the NC State University campus as a student. His weekly excursions and growing reputation laid the groundwork for his current venture, Wild Food Foragers...

  Green Panda Farms in Siler City, NC is not your typical farm. In fact, it is an urban farm housed in an 1800 square foot warehouse, owned and operated by Navy Veteran Tenita Solanto. Tenita branched into the farming world after attending the Minority Landowners Conference and hearing that the “art of farming is going away with the upcoming generations.” Inspired to keep the tradition alive, she went home and started teaching herself the ins and outs of gardening, until settling on microgreens. Today, she uses her background in Information Technology to incorporate breakthrough technologies into her farming endeavor.     Farmer Tenita Solanto, of Green panda Farms Kim Harry and her husband Brian opened Minka Farm in Efland, NC in 2007. Originally from the suburbs of Chicago, Kim moved to NC and earned her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from NC State University. Her love for animals made livestock farming an easy decision. She raises cows, pigs, chickens, g...

This past week I was fortunate enough to be graced by the presence of the one and only, Krystal DaMuse. Krystal is the textbook definition of a Renaissance Woman. Her positively infectious personality has allowed her to advance into the world of event planning, producing, and hosting. Before breaking into her entrepreneurial role, she worked a 9 to 5 job in the fortune 500 arena. Her experiences in corporate America taught her to be business savvy, giving her the confidence to step away and pursue her aspirations.  First and foremost, Krystal is a speaker, but she is also a doer. She has worked on a plethora of projects, such as selling her own merchandise at The Black Flea Market in Raleigh, NC, and hosting open mic nights showcasing premier poetry at City Soul Café. The Black Flea Market is a bi-weekly pop-up market featuring an array of local Black entrepreneurs and their products, live music, and home-cooked food. The market’s mission is to keep “circulating the Black dollar an...