MICHELE KAUFMAN

Director of Programming & Events | she/her

Michele has a knack for organizing, from complex, multi-day events to local politics. Fortunately for her colleagues at Brooklyn Grange, she has less of a knack for farming. But, after spending the summer of 2011 as part of the farm crew, Michele found that the start-up rooftop farming business had a gravitational pull from which she didn’t want to tear herself away. So, upon returning to New York City with a degree in Environmental Studies from Pitzer College in 2012, she emailed the business to see if she might be able to help out in the office. 

That first summer, Michele and Anastasia worked together to seed Brooklyn Grange’s Programming and Events Department. What began as a handful of dinners and workshops around a makeshift table at the Long Island City farm, with guests seated on office chairs salvaged from the dumpster downstairs, quickly caught the attention of New Yorkers looking for a new and different venue. Michele’s problem solving skills were well-matched to what was then a blank slate, with plenty of quirks and close to zero infrastructure; her ability to instinctively understand the experience people were seeking, and work tirelessly to facilitate it, quickly endeared her to every client who booked the space. By her second season in the position, Michele’s talent, skill, and entrepreneurship, earned her the role of Director of Programming and Events. 

Over the next eight years, Michele grew the department into a critical component of the business, hosting at its (pre-Covid) peak over 7,000 people in a single season at almost-daily events. After facilitating the farm’s first weddings in 2013, there was no event that daunted Michele. She figured out how to leverage the farms’ unique activities for corporate retreats; as a stunning location for media launches and shoots, and as an adult classroom for courses and workshops. Perhaps one of Michele’s proudest achievements is the farm’s mission-driven ticketed dinner series, bringing together community around values such as reducing food waste (Compost Dinner) and celebrating plants as food (Veggiepalooza). 

Michele’s creativity and can-do approach to reimagining the farm’s capacities allowed her to grow her department’s revenue 16x since 2012. But it’s the meaningful partnerships and relationships with chefs, event professionals, and those spearheading sustainable practices in the industry that she counts as her greatest successes. Michele’s fierce dedication to environmental sustainability comes to bear on the business’ newest venue, a 6,000 square foot four-season events hall at Brooklyn Grange’s Sunset Park farm. There, she continues to develop new strategies, leveraging every tool at her disposal to meaningfully engage the community around food, farming, and sustainability. 

When Michele isn’t producing simultaneous events at multiple locations, she’s usually organizing around local political issues in her neighborhood. She serves as a County Committee member and Judicial Delegate in her district in East Williamsburg, and is an active member of the New Kings Democrats. She helps take care of the Navy Yard’s feral cat colony, making her the defacto queen of that feline army, and is beloved by every baby and small child who meets her.