The Ecosystem Within: A Gathering for Rogue Valley Food Systems Practitioners

Something is shifting. New economic forces, emerging technologies, and a growing hunger for alternatives are opening a window — and the Rogue Valley is uniquely positioned to step through it.

This intimate, half-day gathering brings together 20 food systems practitioners from across the region — growers, producers, distributors, food entrepreneurs, systems thinkers, and allies with the passion and leverage to change the game. This is not a conference and not a networking event. It's a salon — a chance to experience ourselves as the ecosystem we already are.

Your Facilitator: Nikki Silvestri Nikki is the Founder and CEO of Soil and Shadow, a strategy lab that designs regenerative leadership models for an increasingly destabilized world. Her career spans executive leadership, policy innovation, and systems change, including serving as Executive Director of People's Grocery and Green for All. She came to food systems by way of climate work — and stayed because food people are ecosystem thinkers who refuse to separate themselves from the living systems they serve. Named one of The Root's 100 Most Influential African Americans, Nikki has delivered over 50 keynotes worldwide on the intersection of climate, economy, and social impact. Her work integrates ecological wisdom with executive strategy, helping institutions build resilience, adaptability, and equity into their leadership structures.

Food systems people are different. You don't get into food to make money. You get into it because you can't separate yourself from the living systems you serve. That refusal to fracture — self from service, economy from ecology — is both what makes this work hard and what makes it powerful. It's time to treat that as a superpower.

Together we'll explore what it looks like to strengthen the connective tissue of our regional food economy: the cooperative models, the mid-market infrastructure, the collective sense-making that turns individual passion into shared capability. We'll ask what the innate strengths of this region actually are — and what it takes to make them unqualified. Format: 12:30–5:00 PM. Facilitated conversation and small-group work, with beautiful snacks along the way and a shared meal to close. Because if you're going to go deep with people, bread is the binding ingredient.

Who should be here: People for whom food systems work is a primary passion — and who bring some form of leverage, whether that's funding, distribution networks, policy influence, entrepreneurial energy, or deep knowledge of how the pieces fit together. This is for the ecosystem thinkers, the octopus-armed practitioners whose service touches everything. Space is limited to ~20 participants.