Author: Jennifer Senator

It’s just after 6am when 14-year-old Brianna Knight steps into a chicken coop in her backyard. Her hens are happy to see her, clucking and pecking as she works quietly, giving them food and fresh water and releasing them out into the yard for the day.

This is just the beginning of Brianna’s duties as caretaker of three flocks of laying hens on her family’s small farm, Three Creek, in Earlysville. Brianna is head of egg production and sales, an official-sounding title because this is more than a backyard hobby—last year, Brianna sold 220 dozen eggs at $4.50 each, bringing in almost $1,000 for the family.

“It’s all part of family entrepreneurship,” says her mother, Jennifer, who, along with her husband, Scott, moved to the farm in 2011 to not only teach Brianna and her two younger siblings, who are all homeschooled, the responsibility of work, but also to educate them about caring for other living things.

“Kids don’t know where their food comes from anymore, that a carrot comes from under the ground, or what grows on a tree, and it was really important for us to have that experience of being a caretaker of creation and animals,” Jennifer says.

Brianna says she decided she wanted to raise chickens after watching Food Inc. and learning more about the egg production process.

“It just horrified me that these chickens are being kept in cages, stacked on top of each other… I was very upset with how they were being treated,” she says. On her 7th birthday, Brianna got her own flock of hens.

From the beginning, Brianna had a special connection to her birds, Jennifer says. “When we first got them, they weren’t friendly with people, so Brianna would take a milk crate and go into that chicken coop and sit there until they would come and sit on her lap. They would smell her shoulder, and she would swing on the swing set with a chicken on her lap,” she recalls. “We call her the chicken whisperer.”

Brianna says paying close attention to her charges is key to their health and safety.

“Some people ask me, why don’t you listen to music or something while you’re doing your chores? But a big part of it is listening,” Brianna explains. “The chickens will come up to me and just look at me, and I can look at them and figure out if anything is wrong… I can tell if a predator has been close, or if I see a chicken with watery eyes or looking kind of droopy or not drinking then I’ll look at them, look through their feathers, in their mouth and eyes. Or if one is stuck or getting pecked on I can hear them.”

Jennifer adds, “Things that I wouldn’t see, she is very aware of. She just has an ability to see and care for animals that I feel is very unique.”

Brianna’s dedication shows in the product she sells. The family has a waiting list for their brown, white and blue-green eggs, from a variety of chickens raised on non-GMO, soy-free feed from Sunrise Farms, in Stuarts Draft. “They’re the kind of eggs we want to eat,” says Jennifer.

The hens are free-roaming and moved every four to six weeks in the mobile chicken coop Brianna and her father created out of a friend’s trailer. They produce three to four dozen eggs per day in the warmer months, but they get a break in the winter.

“Some people put a light on their chickens in winter so they keep laying,” says Brianna, “but it’s just not natural and not healthy or kind to our animals. So even though we are letting our customers down and not making as much money, we just let [the chickens] have a break.”

But it isn’t all eggs, all the time for Brianna either. In addition to her Classical Conversations schoolwork, she spends her time acting in plays at Blue Ridge School or at worship team practice at her church (she sings and plays guitar). She is interested in medicinal herbs, and loves to forage in the woods near her house for tea ingredients.

She also cares for the family’s rabbits (raised for the family’s consumption) with her 10-year-old brother, John, and is responsible for breeding them in the summer. “We get as many as 30 rabbits sometimes,” she says. Last summer, she tried her hand at dairy goats but soon realized they weren’t the docile French Alpines she was expecting, but pygmies instead. “They would jump on me and I’d fall over, so they had to go,” she laughs. But Brianna is undeterred. Grinning, she says, “Next, I want to do pigs.”

As babies, Molly Bocock and Everett Chapman played together on the floor, babbling and cooing as their mothers lovingly watched. Today the girls, now high school sophomores, design jewelry together for their own line, Osita—and their mothers are still looking on.

Bocock’s mother, Nora Brookfield, and Chapman’s mom, Shannon Worrell, are longtime friends and founders of Charlottesville-based jewelry company Mi Ossa, which partners with women-owned studios in the U.S., Haiti, El Salvador and Ethiopia to create fair trade, one-of-a-kind pieces. Mi Ossa, which loosely translates to “my bones” in Italian or “bear” in Spanish, is the parent company of Osita (“little bear”).

“I consider Mi Ossa and Osita’s styles to be very different,” says Bocock. She says Osita is more preppy and colorful in style, while Mi Ossa sticks to earth tones. Osita is also geared toward a younger clientele at a lower price point.

But that doesn’t mean only high school and college students are wearing Osita designs.

“My friends wear them out and about all the time,” laughs Brookfield. “It’s fun to see people buy their products.”

Bocock and Chapman began making jewelry as sixth-graders, using leather scraps and leftover beads from their mothers’ buying trips to exotic locales.

“We started experimenting with it for fun,” says Chapman (whose father is C-VILLE co-owner Bill Chapman). They made bracelets and necklaces for friends, posted photos of the pieces on Instagram, and gained a following. They began selling their jewelry at local craft fairs, and soon, the demand was more than they could keep up with.

Today, Bocock, who attends Charlottesville High School, and Chapman, who attends St. Anne’s-Belfield School, are placing orders in the hundreds and selling out of their products online and in local stores such as Petit Bebe and Finch.

The girls design many of the items in collaboration with the same artisans who create pieces for Mi Ossa. And just like their mothers, they try to source only from women-owned studios, many of them in El Salvador and Haiti.

“The opportunities for women there are limited,” says Bocock. “Culturally, women are subordinate.”

The girls got to see this first-hand on a recent trip to Haiti with their mothers (over Chapman’s spring break) to meet with the businesswomen and artisans and create new designs.

“The artisans need work,” Bocock explains. “We realized that the more orders we can fill, the more work we can provide, the better it is for them… they can keep making money for their family, maybe send their kids to school, maybe get better water.”

Chapman agrees, “It definitely changed my mindset and inspired me to do more.”

The trip also inspired the girls artistically.

“When some people think of Haiti they don’t think of it as a very beautiful place,” says Bocock. “And a lot of times it’s not; it’s impoverished, there is rubble everywhere.”

Chapman continues, “But everything in Haiti is so colorful —the stores, the tap taps (buses) … there’s artwork everywhere. We want to showcase the art, to show off Haiti.”

Their latest products, which they designed in and sourced from Haiti on this trip, are a result of that desire. They created two necklaces using organic Majok seeds, brass, steel and horn, which were made by Haitian artists and metalworkers as they watched. They also selected colorful bracelets and beaded wallets by “hip Haitian designers,” as Brookfield describes, to incorporate into their line.

“They have a great fashion sense,” says Brookfield. “They have a good eye for what is going to sell, which is hard to have.”

They also know how they want to help, and donated a portion of the proceeds from their May Days sale (held May 4-9 at the Mi Ossa lab downtown) to the Restavek Freedom Foundation, which works to help end child slavery in Haiti.

“It’s become more than just two girls from middle school or high school designing stuff for their parents for fun,” Bocock says. Chapman agrees. “We didn’t think about the social entrepreneurship thing back then,” she says. “It was more like, ‘Oh, these are some cool beads from Haiti,’ but now we really understand what we are doing.”

“In Haiti, they were so professional,” says Brookfield. She recounts an important meeting with the head of that country’s Artist Business Network, Nathalie Tancrede. “She’s our cornerstone person, and has ties with all the artisans we work with. She said, ‘We would really like you to come again in June,’ and she meant Molly and Ev, not Shannon and me.”

It’s late at night, and 17-year-old Saunder Boyle was supposed to be home three hours ago. But her parents aren’t worried. She isn’t out partying with friends; she’s making a movie.

“My parents get the whole long-hour shooting days,” says Boyle, a rising senior at Tandem Friends School. “Things invariably go three hours late. I guess they’re glad it’s film and not something else.”

Film has been “it” for Boyle since she was 13, when she took her first class at Light House Studio, a local nonprofit youth filmmaking center.

“It was filled with juniors and seniors in high school, and I was this little 13-year-old just kind of there, and I was so intimidated,” says Boyle. “But I was just so interested in film itself. I knew that whatever I was going to learn from the class was going to be better than how nervous I felt.” Boyle went on to take at least 15 more workshops at Light House, “more than any other student I’ve met,” says Lead Mentor Amanda Patterson. Each workshop focuses on a different aspect of filmmaking: narrative, screen-writing, music video, documentary, cinematography, animation, visual effects or commercial production. All students at Light House finish with a completed portfolio of work, which can give them an advantage when applying to film schools, says Zoe Cohen, Light House program director. In eighth grade, Boyle made her first film, The Pillow, about a walking and talking pillow looking for its purpose in life (the pillow, played by Boyle, is repeatedly rejected but finally finds its calling when it catches someone’s fall). Since then, she has made six more films, several of which have gone on to film festivals. Her most recent, The Lemonade Standoff, which she directed, has been shown at film festivals across the U.S. and was the runner-up for the ACTION! High School Director Competition at the 2014 Virginia Film Festival.

Boyle says she feels “most connected” to The Lemonade Standoff, about two siblings with competing lemonade stands, because it was the first film in which she was the lead director. “I was heavily involved in all aspects of that one—from story to script to production to editing,” she says. “I really put all of myself in it.”

It was also her most challenging film.

“On-set conditions were insane,” she says. “It was about 95 degrees in the middle of the summer and all of the scenes were outside. We all got terrible sunburns; the team was lobster-red for days.”

Another film, Breaking Character, which Boyle describes as “a mixture of a dark comedy, psychological horror and thriller,” has been shown at multiple film festivals, and in 2014, her film The Collector received the Golden Clapper Award at the Reel Riot Film Festival in Atlanta.

Patterson describes Boyle’s filmmaking style as bold. “Every step of the way, she always has her eye on the finished product, paying special attention to the important details that make her films stand out. She’s a risk-taker.” Patterson also praises Boyle’s ability to lead, an important skill since “a film cannot be made with just one person,” she says.

Boyle says she owes a lot to her mentors at Light House, many of whom are former Light House Studio students themselves. According to Cohen, the mentors’ job is to allow students to be as hands- on as possible in filmmaking. “We want to really let them take over and learn from the process of exploring,” she says.

Boyle says she finds inspiration for her films in real life. “I often just take weird things that happen to me and put them into other characters lives,” she explains. “I just wrote a script about a family who finds an urn in their vacation home, which actually happened to me last summer—it was the weirdest thing.”

Writing is Boyle’s favorite aspect of the filmmaking process. She hopes to study film after she graduates and eventually become a screenwriter and director. “I want to do the sort of movies that people like and can go back to, that they relate to.”

Her advice for aspiring young filmmakers: “Take whatever class interests you, but diving in is the best thing. There’s no time to be meek. If you’re really interested in something, you just have to go ahead and do it.”

Saunder’s flick picks

Dead Poets Society

This movie has meant a lot to me for a long time. It explores so many themes—the pur-
pose of art, the battle between tradition and innovation, trust in one’s self—through a cast of characters that are all well-rounded and developed into human beings with their fair share of very human flaws.

Birdman

Birdman is one of those movies that actually lives up to its hype. It’s incredible as far as the cinematography goes, but the quality of the story is really what made me get attached to this one.

Moonrise Kingdom

I don’t think Wes Anderson’s style always works to his movies’ benefit, but Moonrise Kingdom is an exception. The film’s visual quirks definitely work in favor of the story. I first saw this movie when I was just beginning to take film seriously, and the sheer beauty of nearly every shot made quite the impression on eighth grade me.

Good Bye, Lenin!

I actually saw this movie for the first time in my European history class last year, and I was immediately impressed. It has a fantastic mix of history, comedy and drama that struck me as being very honest—a balance I hope my future work can display.

The Blues Brothers

Apart from being funny on its own, this movie pulls off some crazy stuff while remaining cohesive. I imagine it’s not easy to weave elements like choreographed dances, ridiculous car crashes and a giant list of celebrity cameos into one movie, but somehow they did—and the movie is all the better for it.