Written by: Siria Contreras

2018 has been a year of adjustment, building, and continued action for the world as a whole. Our Nourish Foundation team is no exception.

For the first time in a few months, we all happened to be in the same city, our organization’s home base of Austin, TX.

As we close out this year and head into 2019, we spent some time gearing up for the new year and finalizing strategy for Q1. There are a lot of exciting initiatives in the works that we can’t wait to share with you in the new year.

In the meantime, enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at some of our time together the past couple of weeks.

DAY 1: So Happy Together

First order of business was a brunch and white-boarding catch-up session followed by a kitchen tour and event walk-thru with Co-Founder and Chef extraordinaire Olivia.

I made my way over from the Onion Creek Country Club to Olivia’s new home via a Lyft. My driver decided to test his stand-up comedy routine on me the entire way, but living in L.A. and working in entertainment has given me a higher tolerance for big personalities and overly attentive gentleman. Thankfully, traffic was light so the trip was not too long.

Onto breakfast.

Now, I must warn you that if you’re lucky enough to have Chef O invite you over for any meal you are in for a five star meal, ruining your future expectations of what tasty well-balanced meals should look like.

Instead of describing how delectably perfectly Sous Vide’d the salmon and eggs were (and did I mention that there was a cheese board as well as perfectly roasted veggies?), I’ll instead allow you feast your eyes with these photos.

We covered everything from food technology to partnerships we’ve been approached about and which to continue to move forward with as well as the core of our mission—food insecurity and workforce development, all with a soundtrack of Louis Armstrong playing in the background. A lot of exciting updates to come early next year. We promise that you’ll all be the first to know.

After some getting some work done, we decided to head out to see if we could accomplish every item on our day’s to-do.

First, though, we packed-up the leftovers and made a pit-stop to drop them off at the Macromoltek offices to pay a visit to CEO, Dr. Monica Berrondo (honorary Nourish Foundation adviser) and CTO, Susana Kaufmann— who you may know as one of our founding Nourish team and board member.

Macromoltek is revolutionizing the world of antibody design by shortening the antibody discovery process from months to years to just a few weeks. This is huge for the medical industry. Learn more about them here.

On to the next stop. We got back in Olivia’s i3 and blues and jazz continued as our soundtrack.

Our next stops were at a commercial kitchen that I hadn’t yet seen that is needed for some of our endeavors, followed by a walk-thru for a New Year’s Eve party for our Deloitte friends, where the infamous Queso Fountain will make an appearance.

A minor emergency of sorts and Austin traffic prevented us from doing any more “women-about-town” business, so instead we got Jaya, our uber-talented fourth co-founder and board member, to meet us for dinner a little earlier than planned at Lin Asian Bar + Dim Sum on 6th Street.

We all talked more 2019 plans and made plans to meet for a follow-up planning session at Jaya’s new house in Zilker a couple of days later.

Day 2: Plan, Plan, Plan

After touring Jaya’s beautiful new home we knocked out the remaining outstanding items in our Nourish Foundation strategy session for 2019 Q1 over delicious braised short ribs a la Chef Olivia and Jaya’s amazing southern hash-brown casserole recipe and copious amounts of rosé. After that power-planning session we all agreed we needed major naps. Suffice to say that 2019 is going to be a very busy year. See you again very soon Austin.