Helping local businesses develop economic resilience
Age: 37
Job Title: Founder of Grand Markets Edmonton, Wild Heart Collective and Never Better Co.
Kirsta Franke was only 24 when she organized the first 124 Grand Market in 2012. At the time she was managing a 124th Street restaurant and had become disillusioned by the lack of opportunities to build community through her education in communications and media. Franke looked at what was happening around her and saw an opportunity.
“There was this incredible community of chefs and farmers and winemakers and fellow businesses in the area,” she says. “I just took all these contacts and called everybody up.”
Less than three months, 20 vendors and over 2,500 patrons later, Franke’s first “weekly block party” was an incontrovertible success. The market has since grown into a year-round, multi-day schedule of indoor and outdoor events across different neighbourhoods in the city and province. It has been joined by a Christmas market, one-off events like Edmonton’s own Nuit Blanche and Little Beans, a free program designed to help kids answer the questions: “What’s on your plate? How does it get there?”
These questions played an important role in Franke’s own up-bringing. “My mother’s whole family are farmers out in Saskatchewan and Manitoba,” she explains. “I’ve always been very connected to farming and gardens and working with the land.”
Franke spent nine years on the Edmonton Food Council, helping shape policies like the one that allows residents to keep chickens and bees in their backyards. Now she has a new venture, Never Better Co., a consulting company that will build on her 15 years of experience to strengthen the local food industry and help female entrepreneurs learn to thrive in a challenging climate. Franke believes economic and climate resilience go hand in hand, and this conviction has only become stronger since she’s started a family of her own.
“It’s bigger than shopping local. If you look around, who’s going to be there when things get difficult?”
