Why you need to feel LOST before finding your Purpose with Jean-Philippe

An important message that I want to transmit is that our foodways, the way we cook food in West Africa, the way we cook food in Haiti, the way we cook food in Jamaica, has nothing to envy to any other culture, whether they are Italian, they are Chinese, they are Indian. They have the same quality, the same kind of complexity. Having those thoughts about ourselves that because we are Black, we're less intelligent or less pretty than other people, we cannot succeed or cannot attain the prosperity and the abundance that other people can have. And if you have that, still chains for your brains, like we don't have the chains of the past, like, say, we could see in slavery, but now the chains that are very impacting ourselves are the ones that are around our mind.

Bonjour Philippe, I'm so excited to welcome you to Driving Impact. At Driving Impact, we speak with the leading experts about the most pressing topics of our time. It was so good to meet you in Congo-Brazzaville at the Youth International Forum, BELIEF, in Congo. And for me, it was my first time in Africa, but for you, it was not your first. And we'll talk a little bit more about what you do in sustainable agriculture, but also in sustainable development. And I thought that the quality of the conversation, but also your unique work at the intersection of sustainable agriculture, social justice, but also your involvement with Afro-descendant people and in agriculture, but also with entrepreneurs, I think it's important. So I wanted to invite you. To tell us a bit more about what you do, but through the lens of something that's important for us is to talk about purpose, passion, and impact. So welcome Jean-Philippe Vézina to Driving Impact.

Katheline Jean-Pierre, it's my pleasure. Looking forward for this discussion with you and to share with your audience about some of my passions and topics that are dear to me.

And we're going to jump right into the topic. And the first question I have for you is, so you were born in Haiti, you were also adopted as a kid, and it brought you— fast forward to now, you're a social entrepreneur, you're interested in social justice, and you do sustainable agriculture. I think that the crux of one of the important questions I wanted to hear a bit more from you is how did you get to become a social entrepreneur, but really to like to work in the field of sustainable agriculture today? What was your path that brought you to that?

For me, I really think it was a life journey. You mentioned it before in the introduction. I was born in Haiti, but at an early age I was adopted by a French-Canadian family. This is how I ended up living in Montreal. And although this opportunity I had to, uh, to leave the country because I, my first years of life were in an orphanage, I ended up in a family that was, uh, yeah, pretty well off. So it gave me a lot of opportunities for education, for safety, and for access to things that often, uh, that Black youths even here in Canada don't have access to, but it didn't really prepare me for a life as a Black man in a majority white community. So, in Quebec, during my teenage years, it was really becoming important to actually to find myself and my identity as someone who was born in Haiti, who has an African and an Asian background, and to learn about myself through that journey. So, I had different milestones, I could say, through that journey. It started with music at first. I was really involved into hip-hop culture as a DJ and as an event promoter. So that was a first way for me to discover more about the Black culture, not only here in North America, but hip-hop gave me the opportunity to explore different Black culture and other culture all around the world, whether in Latin America and Europe. In Africa, even in Asia with different contacts. And later on, it was really through my involvement in community work, especially here in Montreal with the, the Montreal Black community, both francophone and anglophone. And it's really during that path that I got way more aware about some of the issues that our communities were facing, some issues around giving opportunity for youths to have better role models, to understand a bit more about some issues that some Black families are facing and some of the trauma that we still need to heal. And as well as the issue around access to culturally relevant food and food that's going to keep us healthy, both in terms of our health and our, I could say, our soul as well. So this is kind of the pathway that brought me eventually to agriculture. I could talk a bit more about specifically how I ended up farming, but it came a bit later in my journey. It's a project that I started 6 years ago, and it was following a trip that I made to my home country, Haiti, in 2017 to visit the farm of one of my good friends who started a project when she really wants to bring forward the concept of the lakou garden, which in Creole we'll say the jadin lakou. And it's really an aspect of the society in Haiti that pretty much started during the War of Independence that ended in 1804, where there were communities of Africans because a lot of Africans were brought to work on plantation as slaves. But once they were able to kick out the French army, they wanted to find a way to reconnect with each other, reconnect with their spiritual spirituality, and reconnect also with their traditional way of cultivating the land and living together. So this is pretty much where the concept of Jardin Lacoût is coming from. And I wanted to bring back a bit of this here in Quebec where I live and to share not only some of that knowledge, but also my other life passions that I want to integrate into some kind of a whole project that is Le Jardin Lakou.

And Jardin Lakou, like it's in Creole, in Haitian Creole. And what does it mean exactly? It sounds like it means like in the garden in your backyard.

Exactly. "Jardin" is the Creole word for garden. And "lakou" kind of means, yeah, the backyard. But a lakou is way more than just a backyard. It's a community because we can talk about the Jardin Lakou and we can talk about the lakou, which is a form of communal way of living that includes not only family connections, whether it's the direct family and the cousins and the uncles and things like this, and also a way to steward a piece of land for the whole benefit of the community.

Are you saying that like when people were able to liberate themselves, they started growing gardens as a community?

Yeah, for them after the revolution, after they were able to kick out the European from the island, one of the aspects for many of those Africans who knew Africa because they were kind of freshly brought in the island of Saint-Domingue, as that was called at that time. One thing they wanted for sure is they didn't want to perpetuate that system of plantation. They wanted to actually nothing to do with it. Many of them knew how to farm, how to take care of the land, so they came up together and they started these little communal villages that we can call that eventually took the name of the Jardin à Coups or the, of the El Akou. And, uh, got it. That's pretty much how this concept came to be, especially in the Haitian community. But we could find some similar traditions in other Caribbean islands, whether it's in Jamaica, whether it's in Martinique or Guadeloupe, where they have this form of the Creole garden. And yeah, so I took inspiration from both the ones that we can find specifically in Haiti, but some of the other ones as well. And my goal really with this farm project is to locally be able to grow— some of the vegetables are coming mostly from the Caribbean or from Africa, but to be able to offer them to the communities here and they will be fresh and healthy and locally grown.

Now I think that's super interesting. I wanna come back to that a bit later, Jean-Philippe. Yes. I wanna go back, 'cause you said so many things at the beginning that I wanna unpack. 'Cause you talked about— are there some hip-hop music or songs that inspired you or groups that were important in finding or framing your identity as an adopted Asian kid of, of Québécois parents?

I could say I started listening to, well, a lot of hip-hop, especially in the end of the '80s, in the '90s. So some of the groups that had a big influence on me: Public Enemy, N.W.A., The Roots, Nas, Fugees. They had a big impact on me. I felt way more touched by hip-hop artists who also had conscious messages. That they wanted to spread through their music. I got to know also hip-hop artists outside of the US. The French hip-hop scene started to grow with groups like MC Solar, Amenélie, IAM, all of those. So they also had a big influence on me. They also helped me put some words that were closer to me because they were in French rather than just in English. And in terms of the way you can express yourself. And eventually I had my own group and my own crowd of artists that I was working with here in Montreal. I grew up in a neighborhood here in Montreal called Côte-des-Neiges, which is a very—

Yeah, Côte-des-Neiges. Yeah.

Very multicultural neighborhood. I always was surrounded with people from various cultures, not just people from the Black culture or from the Haitian culture. So hip-hop, was kind of a way for bringing us all together around a sound that we all appreciated, but we could express ourselves, especially through sampling and through the different languages that were used to rap. That really formed also my identity of being someone that not only sees himself as a Black man of Haitian origin, but also someone who is more of an internationalist And yeah, like this hybrid type of identity, right, where you have to create your own identity or identities.

I heard that MC Solar has launched a new album. I haven't inquired. I think I started listening to it, but not the full spread. So that's exciting. Similar story, I had my own hip-hop group as well in French. And you've mentioned something else as well when you said that there were some dynamics in terms of finding the right role models. And I know you, you're talking about 20, 30 years ago. So what lack did you notice in terms of Black role models when you were growing up?

As someone who grew up in, in Quebec, there were very few role models that you can look up to as a Black teenager, both on TV, in terms of profession as well. If I wanted to find some interesting role models, I had to look more down to the US by listening to a series like, uh, I was a, a very big fan of Fresh Prince. Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Also some of the movies, uh, whether they were from Spike Lee or, uh, from Denzel Washington or Morgan Freeman. So they, they were more of my male role model that I could find during that, uh, that period of my life.

I remember the movie Juice. Juice Boys in the Hood, et cetera. Yeah. No, I think I can relate. I just wanted to hear a bit from you what you meant and if there were specific problematics that you saw at the time.

So yeah, really it was not easy to see as a young Black man that I could find my place and in a certain way, my purpose in this society where there were so few people like me that I could look up to. And I think it's getting better, but I still think there's a lot of work to do on that side here in Quebec, even in 2024.

I mean, we are supposed to be the new role models, in brackets, right? But then we have to get out there and tell our stories. I'd like to double-click a bit more, Jean-Philippe, on now that you've went through your journey, You've been a social entrepreneur and a sustainable agriculture leader. I would like to understand what is your purpose, your life purpose. It's a big hairy question, but you— I feel like you're someone who spent a lot of time thinking about it.

Uh, I kind of did.

So kind of did, I kind of do, I kind of coach people doing it.

The way I see my life purpose is I see myself as a, a grower. A grower of all things, a grower of plants as a market gardener, a grower of projects and a grower of people, kind of a gardener for the soul.

I'm gonna say om. As you were looking for your purpose, 'cause it's been a journey and I'm guessing a lot of people are looking for their purpose, like people in corporate America, corporate Canada, corporate everywhere. Entrepreneurs, human beings, people grew up in orphanages, anyone. Did you have any glimpses of your purpose? As sometimes people are walking in darkness, how does someone find their purpose?

I think there's a— like, I can talk for myself.

I can—

I have also some examples for people that I, I had either as, uh, as coaching clients or things like this. But for many people, you start Finding your purpose when you're in a place where you find actually that you are lost. It's kind of the, the problem of feeling lost eventually bring you to the, uh, the quest of finding a solution which eventually will become your purpose. For me, definitely it was about finding and feeling lost in terms of my identity, especially during my teenage years. I was kind of finding my own paths that I knew would have to be different than the ones that my, my white parents had because I was not facing the same challenges. Definitely people were not seeing me as, I would say, as part of them, but more as the other, as the immigrant, even if I grew up in Quebec and I, uh, and I had a very French-Canadian name and all this. I kind of felt lost. During those time. I needed to find my purpose. I need to— I needed to understand a bit more what it is to be a Black man, how you find your place in the world, how you find respect for who you are and for your history. And I had some mentors to help me throughout my journeys, people that I met both professionally, both in terms of friendship, and both people that I hired as coaches. To help me find my purpose. All in all, I could say sometimes it comes from a place where you feel that you're not too sure where you're going. That will trigger the questions you will need in order to eventually find that purpose that is yours.

So what I'm hearing from you is that the catalyst to finding your purpose is feeling lost. So that's good. If you're feeling lost, it's good. You're gonna get there. So it's kind of like there's stones in the path, right? You're in the forest. There's like little stones sprinkled here and there. You're feeling lost, but as you're figuring out the couple of stones, those are pieces that are gonna help you find your way. You talked about mentors along your way. How do you identify the right mentors? Cuz not everybody is gonna be the right person to guide you along the way. You can't be knocking at every single door. What, what are your guiding principles to identify the right people who are gonna guide you?

There's two different steps towards that. When I was mentioning that often in terms of finding your purpose is when you find you are lost, and I, I'm, I'm someone who believes that your thought and your intention, when they are clear, they're kind of going to, uh, help you manifest what you need in your journey. Once you kind of put your thought out there that you, you would like to find some more purpose, that you would like to find maybe a guide to help you, Somehow this person is going to show up. The importance is more for you to be open when the moment is going to happen. So I could say that some of my, my mentors, especially the one I, I had early when I was not too, too aware of having a systematic way of looking for either coaches or, uh, mentors, it kind of happened through encounters. Someone introduced me to someone who started talking, a friendship developed, and it was someone that was older than me, so he had experience to pass down to me. He found me somehow interesting to talk with, and this is how the kind of the mentorship relationship kind of, uh, began. If you are purposeful in terms of looking for a mentor, once you have a clear idea of your purpose in terms of where you want to go, then you can start to look for maybe models specifically in your industry who embodies especially the values that you want to eventually embody in your, let's say, your future self, just reach out. Be clear also about what you can offer as a mentee for this mentor to make it a win-win relationship, and be willing to listen because most of your job as a mentee will be to listen and be exposed to how that person is living and managing his life. So we can be inspired by it.

That's interesting cuz like it seems that the first step is to have the intention of finding a mentor. Yeah. To be open to it, right? Having an intention, clear intention that, okay, I'm open to finding that. Yeah. Mentor, right?

That's kind of like, I don't wanna say manifesting it, but being open consciously or unconsciously, you're gonna start asking the right question to the people around you that that eventually is gonna help, you could say, attract that person that's gonna help you. And then you can do the vetting. You can have a little checklist about making sure that this is the right person. But I feel that having a clear intention that you are looking for someone to mentor you, to guide you, is gonna help you find eventually that person.

Okay, now let's talk a bit more about the crux of what you do. So I want to go deeper and talk a bit more about the work that you do with Jardin Lacou, but also about the sustainable agriculture in Africa and the diaspora, because it's a little bit— I think it's super interesting and I want to understand it a little bit more. Some of what you talked about with your mission is to inspire Canadians of African descent to reconnect with their culinary and agricultural traditions. So I want to understand, Jean-Philippe, what are the methods that you're using to entice the Black Canadians into reconnecting with their culinary and agricultural traditions?

I could say that personally, I'm— I've always been a fan of history. I did study in sociology and anthropology at the university, so I always been someone interested in learning more about our history, about the way that we think, we function as human beings, especially as Black people. To go back to how I teach that, first of all, Personally, I did gather and did a lot of my own research in terms of understanding more what has been the journey of Black people here in the Americas, what we call displaced, the New World, and how we ended up here and what, especially what we contributed to this, yeah, if you call it this New World, in terms of our expertise and in terms of how we have influenced foodways and the agricultural ways. And what I found out is that we actually did a lot, even thought we didn't get the credit because of the, I could say, the nature of the way we ended up in this continent, especially maybe not in the past 50 years, but before it was for the first 400 years of the colonial world here in the Americas, we came mostly as a slave. Yeah, property of other people, having to work the land. But there was a reason why they chose Africans to come. It was because of not only their, their strength, their health, but their knowledge in agriculture and the cultivation of various crops that were more suited for a tropical climate, which most Europeans were not familiar with. We came here bringing the knowledge about cultivating rice, cultivating tobacco, cultivating coffee, which were all crops that were either native from the Americas or coming from Africa. And we invented tools. We were the people cooking mostly for everyone. I mean, when we think about who was cooking the pots for both the slave masters but also the workers and all the other slaves, it were mostly African women, and we influenced the way the food tastes in the Americas, both in the American ways of cooking. So barbecue, stews, apple pies, all that were— macaroni and cheese, all those things that we know are typically from the Americas, the taste that we know today were mainly influenced by the fact that Black people were behind the way of doing those things. And same thing for agriculture. It became really important to me to be able to transmit those knowledge through the project that I do. And the way I do it, I give conferences, I do workshops, and for all the people who did register to my CSA program— so it's a community supported agriculture model that I had at the farm, so people were taking a subscription for the whole season and every week you were receiving baskets of vegetables, of herbs, and fruits each week. I was also sending a newsletter that was including not only recipes on how to cook, prepare, and those, those crops that some people were not too familiar with, but also I was always giving a blink of history about how they came about to be important crops or important dish— dishes in our Black communities, whether they were coming from the Americas, from the United States, the Southern or the Caribbean or Brazil and things like this. So this is how I do it.

So basically it's a community of people who want to be educated about the traditional culinary traditions from Africa and the West Indies. Yeah.

Not only that, but what was really important for me is to also bring some pride about our way of cooking things, about our culinary tradition. And for me, what is really important, both in terms of the work that I do with Jalden Akou, but the work that I do in terms of coaching and working with groups in Africa, is that I want to make sure Black people are not only proud but don't lower the quality of what we produce and what we can cook compared to other traditions all around the world. An important message that I want to transmit is that our foodways, the way we cook food in West Africa, the way we cook food in Haiti, the way we cook food in Jamaica, has nothing to envy to any other culture, whether they are Italian, they are Chinese, they are Indian. They have the same quality, the same kind of complexity. And we don't have to be ashamed of it. And I think that's often a problem that we have. We think that things that come from our own countries, whether it's from Africa or the Caribbean, they are not as good as the ones from the other culture, which is absolutely not the case. And the proof is that whether it's the pharmaceutical companies, whether it's the agriculture big business, they all want to go in our continent to get our stuff and use it.

Yeah, correct me if I'm wrong, and what you teach is also sustainable and organic? Yeah. All the practices is sustainable.

I'm not a teacher, but I practice sustainable and organic. Okay.

You practice. Yeah. So sustainable and organic farming for, for Jardin Lacour.

Yeah.

And it's all, the whole process is of growing these foods. It's through a sustainable and organic way. Give me an example of some of the foods that you grow. Like what are the most popular types of food that you—

Can I give you a list of some of my specialties? Yeah.

I wanna know now I'm hungry.

Something that I always tell people is that you have to understand that I do this project in Quebec, Canada, so up north for people who are listening to the podcast who are located in LA. So yeah, the climate is way colder. It's not a tropical climate. So I have to adapt my techniques and some of the crops that I can or cannot grow in my climate. So some of the specialties that I do grow, I grow okra, which also called gumbo. I grow different varieties of African eggplants, which is a crop in the eggplant family, but is mostly consumed in West Africa.

I don't even know what it is. I don't even know.

But you can look it up. African eggplants.

Let me Google it.

Different pictures of it. I also grow different varieties of hot peppers to give some spice to our dishes. So I grow the Scotch bonnet pepper, cayenne pepper, what's a type of pepper that's come from Martinique that's called piment végétarien, and another one from Brazil called the piqui. I also grow different varieties of leafy greens. Many are in the amaranth family. In Haiti, we call it lalo. I grow this type of leafy greens that we call also Egyptian spinach. So I grow 3 different varieties of those, and I'll grow different varieties of squashes, and among them the, the giromont squash that is used traditionally to make the jumu recipes for the the 1st of January, the independence, to celebrate the independence of Haiti.

So good.

And also fresh herbs, aromatic herbs that I include with that.

I think it's amazing because I feel like there's so many vegetables that other people across the world could discover, right? I was talking about being in Bali and eating all that charcoal, and the first thing I did when I came back to LA, and I was like, can you— I went to a smoothie shop, like, that's all organic and stuff. I was like, please, charcoal smoothie. It's like, we don't have that here. And I was like, Right. And it's just like, just discovering different, like, how do we get— but I know there's a charcoal place in LA, but it's like, how do we get access to different things that are good for us in different places? And I think it's so interesting to hear you talk about all these vegetables that we might not have access to, but like you get access to, and then you get to cultivate. And then for us to discover these things in these also these vegetables that we can consume if we go somewhere else. I mean, you have them in Quebec. If we visit other places and we can consume them as well.

I know there are some, uh, some place, some, some farm that are Black-owned in the US that also do cultivate some of those crops. That's part of the thing that is interesting for me and that I also strive toward, is to be, to make more connection with other communities, other organizations who are kind of in the same, same mission as the one I'm in. I visited some projects on the East Coast, United States, especially I visited a farm called Soul Fire Farm that is in New York State close to Albany. I went up west close to Seattle also for a Black conference on Black farming. And, um, I'm still connected with some groups in the Caribbean and in West Africa as well.

Yeah, we can link to some of them such that if people who listen to the episode are interested in visiting or ordering from these, then it's easy, it's closer to home and they get, get access. So I wanna shift to, uh, another portion of the episode, which is around what you do with Afro entrepreneurs, which I think is very important. Because I'm one of those people. So you're a coach for Afro entrepreneurs, and I wanted to hear a little bit more about what's your motivation before your coaching initiative, which is called Muvaz Coaching, and what impact are you bringing to Afro entrepreneurs who are part of the diaspora, the African diaspora in the world?

8 years ago, I took a certificate at Concordia University to become a life coach, and at that time I was working mostly with the leaders in the nonprofit sector. When I started the project, the project Les Jardins Lacou, and I started to meet with chefs, with entrepreneurs in the agribusiness sector, I realized that there were two things I felt I could maybe give some support. There was one aspect that was around strictly marketing, be able to better present and market our, our produce, our foodways, our talents in, in this sector, and to be able to give better tools for people to, to be able to promote themselves. But what I realized also, even if I was giving or making available all those information and all this knowledge around marketing, one of the big blocks that people had— and I could talk especially about people in the Black community, but it could happen to any entrepreneurs— it's really the limiting beliefs that you are, you could say, entertaining in your, your mindset, in your subconscious mind, that will have the biggest impact on your capacity to move forward or to be able to take actions on the things you really want in your life. And especially like, in terms of limiting beliefs.

Yeah, I want to hear them.

Yeah, you can have, there are many different types, but I could say some of the ones that we find the most among entrepreneurs, there's the fear of not being enough. There's the fear of financial insecurity. There's the fear of what we call the imposter syndrome, feeling that you're not in your place. There's the limiting beliefs that are specifically around money that you can have, what we call different types of money blocks, that will have an impact on your capacity to prosper and to seize opportunity when you see them. Like a limiting belief, like money is the root of all evil.

But is this specific to Black people?

If I talk about things that are specific to Black people and that are really present, especially in communities that, that through their history at some point were impacted by colonialism and by racism, it's really the feeling of feeling inferior, the inferiority syndrome. In the sense that if you look at the root of what racism is, racism, it's most of all, it's a, it's a relation of power, but it's also a way to categorize people and give different level of value to different races. This is how this racist system was placing pretty much the white men at the top and the Black communities at the bottom. And through that system, it created a lot of different narrative with the purpose of bringing Black people down in terms of their value, in terms of their culture, in terms of the fact that they can belong in certain spaces. And all those things were pretty much incorporated in our unconscious mind. In form of limiting beliefs about what we could do as Black people, and it still impacts us up to this day in terms of having those thoughts about ourselves that because we are Black, we're less intelligent, we're less pretty than other people, we cannot succeed, or we cannot attain the prosperity and the abundance that other people can have. And if you have that still, I could say, yes, still chains for your brains that we don't have the chains of the past, like I could say, we could see in slavery, but now the chains that are very impacting ourselves are the ones that are around our mind. And my goal as a coach is really to help people liberate themselves from those chains and be able to fulfill their true value and especially to be able to bring through my coaching practice strong references that are from Black and African people in terms of philosophies, in terms of role models. So we can not only go away from always citing great, I could say, white thinkers, but we could start to give roots to our purposes and our capacity to grow within our, our, the Black wisdom of our communities.

I think it's so interesting what you're saying, cuz I coach so many in corporate, so many Black people who, who were like strong-minded. I mean, I think they were excellent. People created a narrative. They thought they were excellent, right? They were like, I did this, I did that. And they were like, uh, I'm all for like flapping your chest if you did the work and whatnot. And I'm like, let's go, right? Especially in sales. I'm a sales leader. And the other people around them were so busy bringing them down, so busy bringing them down. And it was just horrible. People were so busy destroying them, right? And that's the racist. It was not even systemic racist. It was just outward racist. And they were just saying, no, this person didn't do that. No. And then you're sitting there and you're just like, it's exhausting, right? You have this excellent Black person, excellent Black woman, and then you're like, oh my gosh, I'm so excited. This Black woman is excellent. No, Kath, this person didn't do this. And then this whole narrative comes in. It's like, where is this coming from? And it's not that this Black person doesn't think that they're good. No, it's the opposite. The Black person is like, no, Kath, I did this. I'm doing, I'm great. And then you have this other person who's like, no, she didn't do it. No, she didn't. And it's heartbreaking because it's not that the Black person doesn't think they're great, it's the Black person is being bullied by the other people who don't think they're great and who are very busy telling you that they haven't done the job. And then you're like sitting there and you're like, what do I do with this? It's a whole different phenomenon. It's not what you're saying that they don't think that they can do the jobs. Like the few that did the job are being bullied by the others who are making sure that they're I'm gonna bring you down. I will bring you down because you didn't do the job, or I'm— I don't believe you did the job, or you didn't deserve. And that happened to me as well, right? That, oh, she didn't do the job, right? Then I'm gonna make sure that she goes down. So it's just this weird dynamic that if the few of them can do the job, who've done an amazing job, they don't want them to succeed. Because that's also something else, because there's some that don't have the confidence And some that have the confidence did the job and they're being brought down. They're very silent about that, doing the job because they don't wanna be brought down. So they're hiding about, they did. Yeah. So it's just this, the whole dynamic of like, how do you succeed as a somebody from Afro-descendant? And it's, it's not that obvious or, or easy either, but you can do it.

You can do it. We spoke earlier about, uh, some of the concepts I have in my coaching practice. One is the concept of Ikanga, which is the whole journey of finding your true purpose. But I have another one in French, it's called Ton Chemin vers une Mentalité de Marron. So in English, it will be something like Your Pathways Toward Having a Maroon Mentality. So the Maroons, as we think about in English, we'll speak about the Jamaican Maroons, So, historically, a Maroon is someone of African descent who decided to flee the plantation and to access liberty. It was the same thing in the United States. If we think about the Underground Railroad, this is a Maroon way of living. So, it's someone who refused to be a slave, who refused slavery in any of its forms, who refused to be less than a man or a woman, and who refused to have someone else dictate its own value. Through my coaching program that's called Having a Maroon Mentality, the idea is really that how can I support people of African descent to embody this philosophy of being not only proud of their specific own identity as an individual, but the identity that they carry through their cultural background. and also who are firmly determined to be the master of their own destiny and not let anyone else determine their value, both in terms of if you're a professional, in terms of how you value yourself on your market, but also your, your value as a human being, saying that my life worth as much as anyone else, and I won't let anyone do it for others as well as for myself. So when we're talking about people who are bringing other people down, how you create that strength within yourself so you can not only survive but thrive.

I love it. Thank you. Thank you for doing what you do. So I wanna make sure that we have time to ask you some rapid-fire questions. So what are your top 3 career tips for people, let's say from African descent who wanna drive the most impact in their career?

Be mindful of your— actually, your, your— the trauma, the, the anxiety that you carry, and the, uh, maybe some of the limiting beliefs. These are things that can put blocks in your capacity to grow, and being mindful of them, being able to identify it, will definitely help you in your journey. The second tip will be grow and develop systems in your business, systems that will eventually give you the freedom that you want by being able to delegate aspects of your business to others so you can do more and grow faster in terms of what you're doing. And the other one is to always look for expansion and learning in terms of your mind, your spirituality, your friendship, uh, and all of that. So awesome. Create more for yourself and more for the people around you because this is how we, uh, we grow rich.

Now I wanna ask you a couple of questions about the future. At Driving Impact, we talk a lot about the planet. We know that the planet is gonna survive no matter what. So we think about mankind cuz the planet, whatever happens with plastic, with coal, with water, The planet's going to be here. It's more about mankind. Will we sustain mankind? So my question to you is, as you're focusing on sustainable agriculture, do you believe we can save mankind from climate change?

Like you said, it's not planet Earth that is in danger. Mother Earth is a very, very old and resilient lady, and she will survive us. She did it for many millions of years. Who's in real danger right now? It's our species and the species we are currently living with, like our current eras of species. If sustainable agriculture all by itself can save the planet, I wouldn't go that far as that. I think what's going to save eventually our planet is our own willingness and intention to save it, to save ourselves. And as long as it's not an urgency, I could say globally among our collective mind, things are going to keep going the way they are. What sustainable agriculture can do, it is among— if you look at the top 3 industries that are emitting the most carbon in our atmosphere, you will find that agriculture, depending on the study, they will take either the first place or the second place. And it's mostly because of deforestation. When we clear lands for for growing cash crops, for animal grazing and things like this. These are huge impacts. And also agriculture has a huge impact. When you till the soil, you send out a lot of dust, CO2, in the atmosphere. So by adopting more sustainable ways of cultivating the land, that will reduce tillage as one part. That will sequestrate carbon in the same way by keeping it in the soil and also by limiting the amount of land that is necessary to produce the crop that are going to nourish us has a potential to have a huge impact on limiting our carbon footprints and the emission of green gases. But it will all depend of our collective intention to to do something globally about that issue. I, I'm pretty sure I'm someone who's optimistic that it's going to happen. I'm a bit of shame for our current generation who will dump all those problems on the next one because we're not willing now to do the work that is necessary. But, um, I have faith in mankind. We are extremely resilient. We can find a way to collectively mobilize ourselves when it's necessary, but it would be better if we could do it now before the consequences become really dire for a lot of people.

I think it's time for the collective psyche to move towards immediate action. Do you think, in terms of food sovereignty, will we ever achieve food sovereignty and create a sustainable food chain in the world?

My fight, I could say, is really about helping and supporting Black communities to achieve food sovereignty. In terms, for me, food sovereignty means being able to have more control in terms of the foods that enters our body, both and throughout the whole food chain, from the farmers who are cultivating the land to the ones who are involved in the logistics of moving the food around the world, to the ones who are the owners of the grocery stores, the restaurants, and the shops that sell our food so that we can create more collective wealth around those businesses and that we can have more control on it and being less dependent on the other nation to feed our communities. Ours, with an S, in terms of whether we are in Africa, whether we are in Caribbean, or we are small communities spread out around the Western world, whether here in Canada or in the US. So this, I think it's important. I think it's necessary. We don't have much time, but another one of the topics that are dear to me, it's how to reduce the wealth gap between the population of African descent and the rest of the world. And we are— it's a battle that we are currently losing, and it's a important that we become aware of it and that we collectively grow generational wealth, not just individual wealth, but we create the institution and the wealth in our families and communities that we can pass down to others, that we don't spend it on useless stuff.

Yeah, no, I, I'm with you on that. That's also important. So we know what's happening with climate change. There's a lot of things that are happening. What do you foresee is the future of food?

I think the future of food is going to be more and more localized. The food that we're going to consume are going to be produced way closer to our homes than it is currently. We won't be able to rely as much as we did in the past, I would say, 40 years on an international supply chain that can bring us stuff from everywhere around the world all the time. I think that's something that's going to change in terms of a necessity for sustainability, but also for people who want to have more of those real connections with the people who are growing the food that they are eating. I think there will still be a place for a globalized network of food. I think the African continent, is going to be the next big growing factory place of the world because of its soil and its lands that are suitable for agriculture and that are still available compared to a lot of countries when we have overused them. We have to massively decrease our consumption of meat.

So listen, I eat blueberries, but they don't taste anything. I mean, my blueberries from Chile or Peru or wherever they're coming from, they're big and they're tasteless. So it's not like when I was a kid, I used to, like, I grew up in RDP and I used to go and when it was a forest and I used to eat and it was tasty. I wrote a song about eating strawberries in Saint-Pétronille, which was in Quebec, I think. Anyway, its taste is so good. I wrote a song about it and I was 17 or something. Food used to taste so good.

What we have to understand is, especially with this globalized food distribution system we have, is that the crops that industries, that the big farm businesses choose to grow, are not the— are not crops selected for the taste, but for their capacity to be shipped on long distances.

Yes, durability. It's like plastic.

It's like, exactly.

Yeah. I was at the beach yesterday with my friends and our kids and stuff. And then she found a cheesecake that was in her bag for, for one year, one year. And then she said, look, it looks intact. And I was like, this is gross. But anyway, thank you so much, Jean-Philippe. Great discussion. I feel like we might have a part 2 in a year or something. Thank you so much for everything that you do. I'll follow up offline. And we'll be in touch.