Diane Hatz: The Woman behind TEDx Manhattan

But there’s more to the story than what’s seen on stage. It’s the work Diane Hatz is doing behind the scenes. Hatz is the exec­u­tive direc­tor of The Glynwood Institute for Sustainable Food and Farming, and the orig­i­na­tor of TEDx Manhattan. “I hate to use the word for­mula, but there is a for­mula behinds the talks,” Hatz told Organic Connections. “It works really well. I work very closely with all the speak­ers so they’re trained and prac­ticed, and by the time they get up on stage a lot of them give the talks of
their lives.”

A Step Ahead

Interestingly, when Hatz had the idea to use the TED con­fer­ences as a plat­form for the sus­tain­able food move­ment, no one else was quite sure it would work. “When I first intro­duced the idea, the board at Glynwood and the peo­ple in the food move­ment all just stared at me blankly, not know­ing how big this could be. I thought it would be fan­tas­tic for the food move­ment. Fortunately, I had a very open-minded group of peo­ple around me who said, ‘We don’t know what you’re talk­ing about, but just go ahead and do it.’”

It’s no sur­prise. Hatz is used to see­ing beyond the norm. “I orig­i­nally did mar­ket­ing in the music indus­try,” she said. “I’m into pop cul­ture; I’m into mar­ket­ing, basi­cally. I think that doing cam­paigns and cer­tain work is for­eign to the non­profit world. We’re just start­ing to get into a place where peo­ple are learn­ing that mar­ket­ing doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean only rais­ing money. In order to get your work out to the pub­lic, you have to mar­ket it.”

Beyond the Stage

From the begin­ning, Hatz planned it so that the inspir­ing talks given at TEDx Manhattan would receive the max­i­mum cov­er­age pos­si­ble. “The video dur­ing the actual live event is extremely impor­tant to us,” Hatz said. “There are view­ing par­ties. While we had 14,000 com­put­ers tuned in the first year, for exam­ple, we can’t say that rep­re­sents one per­son watch­ing a sin­gle com­puter, because some of the events had 450 peo­ple at them. So we had a mas­sive num­ber of people.”

As any shrewd mar­keter might do, she has found ways to obtain max­i­mum mileage out of these talks and to uti­lize them to edu­cate as many as pos­si­ble. “We’re inter­ested in get­ting to peo­ple the day of the event,” Hatz con­tin­ued. “But I look as well for ways to take these clips and actu­ally use them as edu­ca­tional tools in schools and for peo­ple who want to know more about the issue. For instance, I’ve started another project called Dinner and Some Ed. Through it, one can host a sus­tain­able din­ner and watch food and farm­ing videos. On the Dinner and Some Ed site you can click into a whole list of TED and TEDx talks; we even pulled not just TEDx Manhattan but all the best videos we could find on food and farm­ing. We also made a DVD.”

Hatz is cur­rently ramp­ing up for this com­ing year’s TEDx Manhattan, which she thinks will be the most excit­ing ever. She gave us a taste. “We have a woman who is going to be talk­ing about for­ag­ing weeds, and I’m really look­ing for­ward to her talk. She goes into her back­yard and gets dan­de­lions and things. She knows how to cook plants that we call weeds, which peo­ple in Europe call delicacies.”

The Meatrix

Followers of the sus­tain­able food move­ment first became exposed to the work of Diane Hatz when, sev­eral years back, a series of Flash-animated shorts called The Meatrix became an Internet sen­sa­tion. Hundreds of thou­sands of online view­ers have watched the “Morpheus”-like car­toon cow guid­ing farm-animal pro­tag­o­nist Leo through “The Meatrix”—and expos­ing the stark truth behind the fabled white-fence-and-red-barn vision of fac­tory farming.

Click any image to enlarge.

“I had put together infor­ma­tion on fac­tory farm­ing for Free Range Graphics, the com­pany that actu­ally phys­i­cally did the movie,” Hatz recalled. “They were read­ing it over in a con­fer­ence room, and they were just so shocked by how hor­ri­ble fac­tory farm­ing was and all the prob­lems with it, that some­body in the room said, ‘This is so much like The Matrix.’ And as soon as they said ‘The Matrix,’ the entire movie was writ­ten. We were not expect­ing the response we got to it.”

The Meatrix was part of an over­all cam­paign devel­oped by Hatz, who at the time worked at GRACE Communications Foundation. While it ended up tak­ing on a life of its own, The Meatrix was in fact part of intro­duc­ing two web­sites called Sustainable Table and the Eat Well Guide. Hatz had brought Sustainable Table about to edu­cate the pub­lic on food sys­tem issues—something that, at the time (early 2000s), was hardly being done at all. The Eat Well Guide was an addi­tional tool that allowed users to locate sources of sus­tain­able food in their own areas, another first of its kind. Both are still online and accessed daily.

It was the shock of learn­ing about the indus­trial food sys­tem that brought Hatz into the world of sus­tain­able food to begin with. “I had been work­ing in the music busi­ness before com­ing to work for GRACE,” Hatz related. “When I got there, I started on anti-factory-farm work, which I knew noth­ing about. I had had no idea there were so many prob­lems with the food sup­ply. It was such an eye-opener for me that I became extremely inter­ested in what was hap­pen­ing with food. I have a real mar­ket­ing head, so I really wanted to get the word out to other peo­ple. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”

We greatly look for­ward to more from the inno­v­a­tive mar­ket­ing mind of Diane Hatz.

To view videos of TEDx Manhattan talks, please visit www.TEDxManhattan.org.

To find out more about Dinner and Some Ed, go to dinnered.tumblr.com.

For fur­ther infor­ma­tion on The Glynwood Institute, visit www.glynwood.org/glynwood-institute/.