What if the most powerful way to grow your audience wasn’t through marketing alone? Today’s audiences are overloaded with digital messaging and branding — they want more: Real connections, shared values, and authentic experiences. This session will explore how arts and culture can help organizations and businesses move beyond traditional marketing to build trust, deepen relationships, and cultivate lasting engagement within their communities. Through examples of successful collaborative projects, the Roanoke Foodshed Network will show participants how storytelling, collaboration, music, visual art, and community-centered events can strengthen brand/organization identity, amplify local voices, and create genuine connection points.
Learning Objectives:
Participants will leave with practical ideas and inspiration for integrating arts and culture into their own outreach, community engagement, and brand-building efforts in ways that feel authentic, collaborative, and impactful.
About the Speaker:
Maureen (Mo) McGonagle has spent the past 19 years living in Southwest Virginia, working across many dimensions of the regional food system. From working on a small-scale vegetable farm, to supporting nutrition incentive programs at the Blacksburg Farmers Market, running community gardens with the New River Health District, and researching community food systems through a Master’s program in Agriculture, Leadership, and Community Education at Virginia Tech, Mo loves building relationships that strengthen local and regional food systems, improve access to healthy food, and center community voices.
She is driven by the belief that resilient food systems grow from collaboration, storytelling, and a deep connection to place. In her free time you may find her working in her front yard garden, cooking up a delicious meal with friends, hiking the woods with her dog, or improv singing in the community. In addition to her work with the Roanoke Foodshed Network (RFN), Lisa is also the editor and publisher of Edible Blue Ridge Magazine, and alongside her husband, is the co-owner/founder of Fermented Fire Hot Sauce Co., and the specialty food store, Hot Stuff. Lisa believes in the power of telling stories to foster community.
You can usually find her at a farmers market learning from a local grower or maker. She holds a master’s degree in Creative Writing from Hollins University and a bachelor’s in Natural Resources & Ecology from Cornell University. Before moving to Virginia, Lisa spent over a decade in the food and beverage industry in New York. When not at work, you can find her converting her yard into a garden, or wrangling her chickens and dogs.
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