Who’s Lisa B-K?
It’s me! I go by Lisa Bralts out in the world, but my internet handle has long been Lisa B-K. I live in Urbana, IL and have long-standing and deep interests in local food production and distribution, food systems, farmers markets, DIY, gardening, cooking, climate, environment, mutual aid, communities, neighborhoods, underground economies and scenes of all kinds, alternatives, skillsharing, solar power, punk rock, living in a world where technology is used for the common good and not primarily to fuel rampant capitalism, etc.
What’s Backyard Industry?
Backyard Industry began in 2010 as In My Backyard, a radio series about local food and communities commissioned by the fine folks at Illinois Public Media. IMBY rebranded as BYI in early 2014 and, while audio production came to an end that year, added a blog and video to its repertoire around the same time. The multimedia aspect of BYI wrapped up in 2015, and the whole experiment has more or less been on hiatus ever since.
The last 5 years + my kids growing into adults and living in the world + my intuition around and attempts to make sense of those two very important things = a desire to revisit BYI through a slightly different lens. BYI circa 2022 leans further into the original mission of encouraging people of all stripes to find some empowerment in slowing down and doing some things - even really small things - for themselves, while also pushing for big, weird ideas and experiments with small footprints. Depth over breadth. Rethinking the definition of words like “innovation” and “scale”. That kind of thing.
My plan is to send out weekly missives, available for free to all subscribers, offering garden/small house musing, some photos, tales of kitchen-related shenanigans, the return of LOTSA (Lisa’s Open Tabs, Saved Aggressively), etc.
Further down the line, paid subscribers might get a load of my lo-fi attempts at audio and video, bonus photography, additional community sharing opportunities, and (OMG, I can’t believe I’m typing this) a quarterly **analog** newsletter. Mailed to folks in the actual US Mail. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
PS: Can’t get enough? I’m also around on Facebook (infrequently), Twitter (slightly more frequently), and the ‘gram (a bit more frequently).
