There are three generations of one family living on the farm by the river.
The farm was bought in 2010 by Rosa Lee Harden and her husband, Kevin Jones, when both of their children, who had grown up with them mostly in Jackson, Mississippi, settled in the Asheville area.
They wanted to be around their grandchildren and their children and sold their houses in San Francisco and Sonoma and moved here, though they remained bicoastal for a few years running a conference business in San Francisco for a decade and keeping a place there for a few years. They are and remain serial entrepreneurs; successful nine times when working together. Kevin had one business failure when he did a business without her. They took over Rosa Lee’s father’s family weekly newspaper, the Itawamba County Times, after he died. Itawamba County had been the poorest county in the poorest state when Rosa Lee and her sister Rubye Del were growing up. At the Times, Rosa Lee was the publisher and business person, Kevin the editor and idea guy. They absorbed her father, Delmus Harden’s ethos that you have to build a community in which your business can survive. Rosa Lee had grown up in the paper; covering fifth grade basketball games with her twin lens roloflex camera, but Kevin had never been around a business and learned how to act in a business from Delmus. Kevin learned his method of wandering around, figuring things out and making things happen from his seven years wandering around the 20 mile square of Itawamba County, as the editor of the only newspaper in the world that cared about Itawamba County.
The family:
Their businesses since then have been based on Kevin, as a wandering journalist looking for patterns, figuring out a new market before other people, and Rosa Lee turning it into a business. they are not the experts, but they get in conversation with the experts and gather them into meaningful events that cause change. They don’t try to be the smartest people in the room, but gather smart tables.
Rosa Lee creates the experiences at the events that people like and want to come back to. While most events try to get the right people in the room, Kevin’s method is to find the valuable strangers, who would not ordinarily be in those rooms of the right people, and help them become unlikely allies. They are in the process of trying to pass their latest business to the next generation while remaining advisors and guides. Rosa Lee wants to retire, while Kevin wants to continue to bring new ideas and new groups of valuable strangers to the conference. That business, Neighborhood Economics, is an economic justice focused conference, that tries to get the money that’s needed to the people who don’t normally get it. Rosa Lee is relied on by the family to figure out what works.
The second generation on the farm are Rosa Lee and Kevin’s two children, Bradley, born in 1978 and BJ, born in 1980, both lived their first years in the house that Rosa Lee grew up in in Fulton Mississippi.
BJ and her partner, Aaron, and their son Asher, born in Rosa Lee and Kevin’s house in Sonoma, with midwives attending, live in a house they rent that Aaron, an architect and contractor built that’s next to the farm on six acres acquired after the initial 16 acres that Aaron found while scouting for a place for Rosa Lee and Kevin to live. Asher was born in 2008. BJ and Aaron have a business focused on spiritual healing and community building, that is, like most businesses these days, both physical and spiritual, called Temple of the Open Heart. https://www.totoh.org/
Asher is extremely musical and a natural drummer and plays in the Owen High School band. He is an avid video gamer.
Bradley lives on the farm, with his son Logan, 18. Bradley manages the Farm and resort facilities, an Airbnb, called the Upstairs and two glamping sites, Riverside, and the larger Bouquet..
Bradley also hosts monthly community events, and runs a non profit organization called the Food Liberation Operation. FLO propagates native perennial food plants, and distributes them to community organizations. Bradley is also growing a Tree Into Space.
Logan is senior at Owen, a trumpeter and is this year a member of the Cavaliers Drum and Bugle Corps. He is a chef with amazing flavor profiles and has been accepted at the Culinary Institute of America, the Hogwarts of cooking but is taking a gap year to work in a kitchen and raise money for CIA.
Rosa Lee and Kevin are in the process of creating a retreat business at Riparian Way, at the intersection of theology and money and land. BJ and Aaron have plans for a temple on the part of the farm that they will inherit.
Kevin is working on the Watershed Fund, an online marketplace that will offer zero interest loans to local farm to table farmers that is patient enough to let them transition to regenerative farming. It is imagined that, like in other places in the bitcoin.org network (a spinout of slowmoney.org) local farmers will meet, monthly once it gets going, to decide who gets the loans. He and members of Swan water, the Swannanoa Watershed Doughnut Economics group, plan to reach out to local restaurants for donations for the loans, which are deductible. The fund is evergreen and will recycle the money to the next farmer.
