Connection
This is our mission, it’s why we’re here
Founded in San Francisco in 2009, Fare Resources is a collective of consultant-entrepreneurs with a shared mission: to create and support businesses that value economic, environmental and social responsibility. We believe that strong local communities and economies are built from financially stable businesses with positive connections between their products, services, people, and environment. We aim to increase the bottom line profitability of local food systems and the good food movement through the creation of successful businesses and food programs.
Structures and systems are the irreplaceable tools for transforming innovative ideas. We make systems that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely, and most importantly, adaptive.
Our background in education helps us support people who work at all operational levels. We have first-hand experience and most likely have occupied the role of any one of your employees, partners, and investors at some point in our collective careers. We aim to increase the bottom line profitability of local food systems and the good food movement through three types of relationships we offer: consulting, coaching and teaching.
People
People are the root of companies. Our team is made up of passionate, inquisitive, and hard-working collaborators who are dedicated to seeing a positive shift within the food system. We are compassionate listeners and make decisions from the heart and encourage others to do the same. Our work is based on relationships and team building, rather than individual successes.
To help entrepreneurs, we must be entrepreneurial ourselves. We too are small business owners, serial entrepreneurs if you will, keeping our hands and minds nimble by investing in our own food businesses. We also share physical space with each other; actively farming, gardening, cheffing, and manual laboring frequently, because dirty hands make great minds.
In order to teach we must continue to learn. We consistently position ourselves alongside partners, collaborators, experts, and industry leaders in order to continue our own education. These people are just as often our clients and collaborators as they are our mentors.
These are the individuals who make up the diverse collection of Fare Resources’ staff. Our backgrounds and skills are varied, and together we are a cooperative force, fighting the good fight. In addition to the stakeholders listed below, we often call on colleagues from our community who are experts in specific food industry sectors.
- Olivia Sargeant - Olivia began her path to resistance in her father’s tomato garden in California and her uncle’s vineyard in Italy. Olivia is the managing partner of Farm 255, a unique “farm-AND-table” operation in Athens, Georgia, founded in 2005, that grows much of its produce on its own farm, Full Moon Farms. With her partners, she also has opened Farm Burger in nearby Atlanta, serving 100% local grass-fed burgers sourced entirely from their Moonshine Meats collective (a pasture-based producers cooperative that supplies grass-fed beef for four restaurants with a whole-animal mentality.) Olivia also acts as creative director for the symbiotic businesses. Prior to her Georgia adventures, Olivia worked in New York as an associate producer for Cabengo, a creative studio that develops communications strategy, usability, architecture, and interaction design projects for world-class cultural and educational institutions and non-profit organizations. Olivia also works as a community organizer for grassroots networks and non-profit organizations such as Slow Food International, The National Young Farmers Coalition, and The Greenhorns. She recently began the Southeastern Young & Beginning Farmers Alliance, the only regional grassroots effort promoting community development and policy change for the new agrarians of the Southeast. She is a Leadership Board member of The Spence Group, a nascent food and farming re-granting foundation that aims to gift million in its first three years. Olivia lives nomadically between the US and Italy, working with clients in every locale, and double digging her father’s garden on her days off.
- Gabriel Cole - Gabriel is the founder of Fare Resources. He has been an entrepreneur his entire life, and it runs in his veins. His grandfather was one of the founders of Haagen-Dazs and his father, mother, brother, sister, and aunt, are all entrepreneurs. He started his first business in high school (after attending culinary school Junior year), a chocolate truffle business. Since that spry age of 16, Gabriel has launched a packaged pancake mix, two catering companies, a Jewish Kosher deli, a food business incubator and commercial kitchen, a ramen restaurant, and a consultancy. Two of these businesses still remain open under Gabriel’s care, and all of them were invaluable experiences that he wouldn’t trade for all of the gold in the world. He’s reminded by his client’s everyday the very things he loves most about this work; the challenges that turn into problem-solving, effective communication, dreaming big, and the gusto you must have in order to succeed. Gabriel also spends time at home raising ducks and saving seed, in attempts to plant everything under the sun and fog in his Sunset neighborhood. He sits on the Advisory Board for La Cocina, Food Shift, Haymakers and the Berkeley Student Food Collective.
- Gavin Crynes - Gavin worked his way into the food world on a farm in Spoleto, Italy. At Fare Resources, he heads up project management, while simultaneously utilizing his operations and financial skill into the business development process. As his first job in the Bay Area food world, he served as the Operations Manager for a non-profit organization, Seedling Projects. In that capacity he managed the event production and initiative planning for the Good Food Awards, the first national initiative to recognize craft food producers for taste and sustainability. Everything from committee coordination to criteria formation, to entrant communication to graphic design, Gavin was at the heart of the event’s success. He is highly involved in the food world in San Francisco, acting as an event coordinator for Kitchen Table Talks, a monthly community discussion around pertinent food issues hosted by 18 Reasons. He has experience at all levels of the food service industry, garnered by working for B Bar and Restaurant, Casey's Pizza, and Capay Organic. With previous aspirations in medicine, Gavin has a degree in Neuroscience from Brown University. Gavin is a city-dweller with a love for music, a passion for endurance sports, and also runs a hobby silkscreen business out of his apartment.
- Nicole Mason - Nicole has worked in agriculture and sustainable food systems both nationally and abroad for over a decade. She began to whet her appetite for farming at Cornell University, studying International Agriculture and Development and running the on-campus student farm. Following college, she received an award to spend one year researching organic cropping systems in New Zealand. After getting in touch with the literal and figurative roots of her food, she moved to New York City and worked for Earth Pledge where she connected local farmers to markets in the five boroughs. Realizing she had to move west to deepen her knowledge of food systems, Nicole moved to San Francisco to work at Roots of Change where she directed programs aimed at transforming California’s food system to a sustainable food system by the year 2030. When she isn’t cooking, hiking, biking, eating, or collaborating with Fare Resources, Nicole spends her days managing Community Involvement and Marketing Communication efforts at Veritable Vegetable, the nation’s oldest distributor of certified organic fruits and vegetables. Nicole is also president of the board of Ag Innovations Network, the state’s premier group of facilitators focused on improving the dialogue around food and agriculture.