Podcast
City Manager: City Marshal Regs and Policies, Pickleball Feasibility Study, Weather Preparations and More
Published
2 years agoon
What’s the function of a City Council Work Session that is open to the public? The upcoming meeting will see a discussion of proposed City Marshal regulations and policies and the presentation of the Pickleball Feasibility study. We also discussed with the city manager the construction of an innovative EV charging station and the ongoing city commitment to sustainability, public safety, and community well-being. Plus, the latest updates on infrastructure improvements, the ongoing programs to address stormwater issues and power outages, and housing initiatives.
Timestamp:
[00:00:00] – Introduction
[00:02:15] – Explanation of Work Session and Its Purpose
[00:04:18] – Parking Deck Design
[00:09:18] – City Marshal Regulations and Policies
[00:15:02] – Discussion on Pickleball Facility Feasibility Study
[00:20:10] – Preparing for Hurricane Season and Power Outages
[00:31:48] – Protecting Power Lines and Using Underground Lines
[00:34:47] – Solis Development and Its Start Date
[00:35:50] – Broadstone Development and Its Progress
[00:37:00] – Other Ongoing Construction Projects and Improvements
[00:39:48] – Trailheads and Affordable Housing
[00:43:16] – Peachtree Corners Festival and the Electrify Expo
[00:44:44] – Park Improvements and Housing Initiatives
[00:46:15] – Closing
“Where we run into a problem is when trees are into live power lines, we can’t cut those trees and remove them by blocking roads until the power company shuts off the power. So it all depends on how many crews they have out and how many trees that are still laying in live power lines is how fast we can clear the road and how fast you get power. The best way to alleviate this, they remove those limbs hanging over a power line… But it’s also controversial.”
BRian johnson
Podcast Transcript
Rico Figliolini 0:00:00
Hey everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life. I thank you for coming and joining us for Prime Lunchtime with the City Manager. Hey, Brian. How are you?
Brian Johnson 0:00:10
Good. How are you?
Rico Figliolini 0:00:11
Good seeing you again. It’s been a while. I know we’ve been sort of a week past our normal stuff, so I appreciate you making time for me. I do want to share with everyone our sponsors and thank them. So we have EV Remodeling, Inc. A company that does a lot of design and build and a lot of renovation work here in the City of Peachtree Corners and in the metro area. Eli. The owner lives here in Peachtree Corners. Great family. They do great work. You should check them out. We do appreciate the support of our podcasts and our advertising in our magazines. So go to Evremodelinginc.com and find out a little bit more about them as well. Our other lead sponsors, Clearwave Fiber, they do a lot of Internet. All of it is internet for business and residential. They do a lot of work in the City of Peachtree Corners. In fact, you’ll find some of the highlighted businesses that are clients of theirs that have taken on their service for their work and their businesses. You’ll find some of those profiles appearing in Peachtree Corners magazine over the next few months to learn a little bit more about how those companies work here in the city. You may not even realize they exist here and also see how Clearwave works for them. So check them out. Clearwave Fiber. If you Google them, Peachtree Corners, you’ll see exactly what they’re doing here. So I want to thank them also for being a sponsor of these podcasts and our magazine. OK, now that I’ve done that and thanked everyone, there’s a lot of stuff that I just want to get into. But the biggest part is the upcoming work session, Brian and people may not realize what that is, so work session is the session that’s held prior to a city council meeting which is held once a month. Both of them are held once a month. And that work session is really to work through the process and seeing proposals and presentations prior to that city council meeting. So this way the city council can probably have their questions during that session answered during that city council meeting.
Brian Johnson 0:02:15
And in addition to prepping council for what’s going to be put in front of them for formal votes, it gives council opportunities to provide input and staff has time to make adjustments from the time between when I present council stuff at the work session and then the two weeks later the city council meeting. So we make tweaks to certain things. No votes are taken at a work session. It’s kind of the sleeves rolled up type of discussion. I also put stuff in front of council that don’t actually require formal action, but I want their guidance on things or I’ll take their temperature on stuff. It’s an informal meeting, but it’s a public meeting and council is there in their capacity as members of the governing body. And they’re getting ready these issues, ready for formal action at the subsequent council meeting.
Rico Figliolini 0:03:14
So there’s no obviously this is a work session, so there’s no public comments here, but anyone’s welcome to come visit and listen into these work sessions.
Brian Johnson 0:03:23
That’s correct. They’re public meeting, there is no public comment. So there’s no interaction with council. There’s no votes taken by council.
Rico Figliolini 0:03:31
Right. And just so then people know, I think originally there were two council meetings, I think a month when the city first started or something like that.
Brian Johnson 0:03:39
No, there was still only one. But they did the work session on the same night as council meeting. They would do it persona. The problem with that is when you go a month between getting council together, it can be problematic when you sometimes need I need interaction with them. And so I split that out. And so now it’s every two weeks they get together. One is the work session and then one is the council meeting. So it makes it to where I get them in a room often enough that I can get the answers I need or get them prepared for the votes I need.
Rico Figliolini 0:04:18
Right. So this is happening September twelveTH, Tuesday, and it may happen a little earlier than normal, it sounds like, because it’s going to be a packed meeting. So that’s what I want to talk about. I want to talk about what’s going to be going on in that meeting a little bit. Let’s start with so for example, the parking deck is going to be brought up. It’s going to be the design of the parking deck is going to be presented. Talk a little bit about correct. I’m sorry, I should have been more clear. And this is the parking deck that will be built behind Belk’s, if I’m correct.
Brian Johnson 0:04:52
Right next to Belk. Yeah. That big open surface parking lot that they have there is where the parking deck will go in. And the parking deck’s purpose is to replace the parking stalls that are being removed on the main boulevard of the Forum for those public spaces and the jewel box stores that are going in, well, they’re taking up parking and we need to replace it. So the design of that parking deck and how it’ll screen itself from the neighboring residents is the last piece of the Forum’s rezoning that they needed to do. And that is council had to approve the design of the parking deck. So that’s one of the items that they’ll see, the renderings of it and they’ll make any comments.
Rico Figliolini 0:05:44
I’ve forgotten how many floors, how many spots will be roughly in that deck.
Brian Johnson 0:05:50
Think it’s going to be three floors, or call it two covered floors. And then the top floor is open to the elements.
Rico Figliolini 0:05:56
Right.
Brian Johnson 0:05:58
It’s 300 and some change spots.
Rico Figliolini 0:06:02
Yeah, that’s what I thought, because anyone that goes through the Forum now obviously can’t go through all the Forum because of near Jason’s Deli. That’s where they’re building that two story or two floors, I guess, jewel boxes back there. And hopefully that should be finished when they said that was going to be finished, but not too far into the future, I’m sure. A few more months. It looks like they’re really on their way to getting that done. And that parking deck, I think, if I remember correctly, one of the options was also talked about sealing the wall park facing Amberfield. So this way there’s no, like it’s a full solid wall on the back there versus open.
Brian Johnson 0:06:41
That is correct. It is a solid wall as it faces the neighboring residence, so there won’t be any light pollution of headlights as cars make turns inside or park. So that’s part of it.
Rico Figliolini 0:06:54
Anything special? Any special features like EV charging station? Anything special that will be done to it?
Brian Johnson 0:07:01
There are going to be EV charging stalls. It’s going to have security cameras. It has special lighting to keep the light pollution down that are built into hooded locations along the walls. So the purpose of it is just to provide a parking deck that looks good from the outside. It ties in architecturally with the rest of the form, so it’s going to look the same as the current architectural features. And it screens the neighboring residents so they don’t have to have their quality of life affected by the operations within the parking deck.
Rico Figliolini 0:07:42
Right. I would imagine there would be immediate access from that parking deck through between the buildings to get to the forum. I guess. I’m not sure how they’re adjusting that.
Brian Johnson 0:07:51
But there is there’ll be two ways to get to the parking deck. One is under the arch right there by the big fountain.
Rico Figliolini 0:07:57
Right.
Brian Johnson 0:07:58
The other would be coming around the backside by Ted’s Montana grill. That would be the other way to get to and from the parking deck. There won’t be any way to get there from the north side of the.
Rico Figliolini 0:08:14
Start. That construction is going to start probably, I guess, somewhere in first quarter.
Brian Johnson 0:08:18
Correct.
Rico Figliolini 0:08:20
Do they know how long it’ll take to finish? Any estimate?
Brian Johnson 0:08:23
Nine months.
Rico Figliolini 0:08:24
Really? Okay. All right.
Brian Johnson 0:08:26
And once it’s done, they can start removing the remainder of the parking stalls in the middle boulevard, heading down towards and finishing up in front of Belk.
Rico Figliolini 0:08:36
Right. According to the plans, it looks like that’s where an entertainment stage would be built and some of the jewel boxes and a concierge area and stuff. Cool. So anyone that wants to come see, there will be plans presented of what this is going to look like, and then it’ll be taken up at the next city council meeting. And that’s where a vote would be. That next city council meeting.
Brian Johnson 0:08:59
Correct. September 26, two weeks later is when council would formally approve that via a vote. But they’ll see the designs in case they have questions and provide input. Yeah, have questions, and there might be some tweaking. They’re like, oh, we don’t like that. We like x. We like y better, or whatever.
Rico Figliolini 0:09:18
Right? All right, cool. So the other big thing that’s going to be happening at that work session will be discussion with city marshal and the regulations they’re going to be in place. Stuff like do you do car chases? What do you use it for? A bunch of things like that. But also the design of the vehicles. The vehicle wrap is going to be presented as well. So tell us a little bit about what type of regulations are going to be discussed and is there anything surprising along the way that you found, or tell us something.
Brian Johnson 0:09:51
So our city marshals are going to be post certified law enforcement officers. So they’re going to have the exact same authority that you would have as somebody who calls themselves a police officer. But when you have that, you’ve got to have policies in place to regulate how they use that authority. That come with being post certified law enforcement officers. So, for instance, use of force, what kind of guidelines are we going to give them to, say, the escalation of force or high speed pursuit, or when are they going to be authorized to chase a vehicle at a high rate of speed, turn on their sirens, things like that? You’ve got other little things like the vehicle use policy. Where can they drive the vehicle, how far? Because we’re letting them do use them as take home vehicles, which is very common the law enforcement community, and how far out do you let them drive? And then even the design of some of their uniforms and the wrap of the vehicles will be discussed so that, you know, this is all getting them in preparation for the November council meeting. And why that’s important is by November, I will have the chief marshal in place. I just concluded my interviews. We advertised for the position, and I just concluded last week my series of interviews of candidates. And I’ll start the negotiation of our first candidate to see about all the typical stuff, money and everything like that, right. We’ll have the chief marshal in place by November, and we’ll have the policies in place by then. We can have the vehicles wrapped by then, and all those things that you need. The intergovernmental agreements with some of the surrounding law enforcement agencies. And there’s a lot of know, like, how do we tie into the radios that Gwinnett County uses? That’s really important because they’re still our primary police department getting access to and set up so that our marshals can look at the entirety of our video surveillance system that we have in the city. We have a significant amount of cameras getting all those things accessed. I will be ready by November. And so the November city council meeting, we’re going to have a formal call it swearing in ceremony, where they’ll be sworn in as marshals, which theoretically is symbolic because they already have the authority. But that’ll be when we’ll invite the media. They’ll be available for interviews, we’ll kind of talk a little bit more about it. That is when they’re ready to start going out into the community and you’ll start seeing them out there doing their thing. Prior to that, I need to again have the policies that sets their left and right limit and we’re not quite there. So council is going to be fed policies over the next three work session and city council meetings in preparation for that November. So some of the ones on the September work session are going to be some of those policies like use of force and high school.
Rico Figliolini 0:13:22
When they vote on that, that would be in November, I’m assuming. Will there be public comment at that point on the regulations? How does that work? If citizens want to review it?
Brian Johnson 0:13:36
Policy would be adopted via ordinance, which has a public hearing component. So when it is presented, the public will certainly be able to make comment on the policy.
Rico Figliolini 0:13:52
And that would happen in November, I guess the public comment as well, or private.
Brian Johnson 0:13:57
Anytime, any of these, each of these policies requires a separate vote. Okay, so like use of force as individual officers, that’s a vote because that’s a standalone policy. Body cameras, when they’re turned on, when they’re supposed to be turned on, how long you store it, all that kind of stuff, that’s another policy and that’s voted on separately. So you’re going to have a series of these policies. It’s not just one amalgamation of all of these together, it’s individual policies that.
Rico Figliolini 0:14:29
So does that happen over time until November or in November?
Brian Johnson 0:14:33
Yeah, there’ll be a few over the next three council meetings.
Rico Figliolini 0:14:39
All right. So people should be aware of that. If they want to attend or put.
Brian Johnson 0:14:43
Up public, just look at, watch the website. The agendas go out no later than noon on Friday before the following Tuesday city council meeting. And if you see one of the policies on there that they’re voting on that’s of interest to you, then you’ll know that that’s the meeting that you should show up to.
Rico Figliolini 0:15:02
Got you. Cool. And the city wrap that design, the uniform design, that’s also all coming out at that work session on September twelveTH. Yes, I guess. All right, cool. These work sessions are great, like you said, because it just allows stuff to be discussed and get information or adjustments done before the actual city council meeting and vote. So that’s good. The city is doing that. The other thing, I guess, is with the hurricane season starting well, real quick, real quick, Rico. Sure.
Brian Johnson 0:15:36
One other thing you may want to talk about before we get off of the work session is the Pickleball study.
Rico Figliolini 0:15:42
Okay. All right. You’re right. That’s actually going to be presented prior to the beginning of the first thing of the work session.
Brian Johnson 0:15:50
Yeah, I mean, it’s part of the work session. We just may start the meeting early. Because that is the one thing that even though it’s a work session, I think council is going to open up the floor to anybody who’s there about the feasibility study. Because we had a lot of stakeholders that we invited to be part of this feasibility study. And we’ve invited them back, and we want them, as it’s fresh on their mind, the mayor is going to let if any of them have any comments that they want to make on it, they’ll do it there, which doesn’t usually happen at a work session, and it’ll only be that particular thing. But they’re going to open up the floor, buddy, make comments.
Rico Figliolini 0:16:33
So they’re going to make a presentation first and they’ll open up the floor. And if I understand correctly, is there anything you could say about that study prior to that meeting?
Brian Johnson 0:16:43
Yeah, what they’re going to do is they’re going to come back and they’re going to tell us how supportive our area, whether it’s inside of our corporate limits or the greater area outside our boundaries. But this part of north metro Atlanta, how much support there is for Pickleball, how big of a facility they think that should be constructed if we want to have a facility that’s hitting the sweet spot, it’s not too big, it’s not too small. And they’ve looked at really three different sizes of facilities and they’ll come back and they’ll tell us which one they think is the one that hits, that makes that tuning fork go off when it comes to use and support for it from the local community. So that’s the conclusion of the study as to which size would be that sweet spot for us to meet demand but not overbuild and not be able to fill it or don’t underbuild. Where is that, what number is that, how many are indoor, how many are outdoor, is there a food and beverage component? All of that is part of the study.
Rico Figliolini 0:17:57
Well, true. So, I mean, obviously a smaller ten quart place would really be more of an altar size, maybe going anywhere from a 24 to a 50 court or 40 court going from a regional to a national. They’re going to discuss, like you said, what that sweet spot is going to be for the city. And the city is going to be talking also about, or at least the proposal will talk about that private public partnership, what that could look like, I guess. Does the city take on the construction of it and then the rest of it is done by private industry? Or is it built with public private cooperation? That’s all going to be part of that discussion. I guess, or presentation.
Brian Johnson 0:18:40
Yeah, we can only go so far on that because one, I’m not going to have a private partner standing next to me saying we’ve already hammered out the details, we certainly can’t talk about location yet because we don’t currently own any property in which this would go.
Rico Figliolini 0:19:00
Will they make recommendations though, in the feasibility study as far as possible areas versus exact location?
Brian Johnson 0:19:08
Probably not, just because what it does is it makes it difficult for us to acquire it if somebody is like, oh, we heard that you’re interested because if a certain area of the city is conveyed to be a good place, you and I both know that you don’t have to know. There’s a lot of people that can then say, oh, they want this area of the city. Well the only place it makes sense is and then they can zero in on and so it just makes it difficult when you do that because when people think the city is the one or a city is the one behind a purchase, they’re like, oh, deep pockets, and then they start holding out for more money. So that’s why we can’t really I don’t want to get we certainly have locations that we have our eye on that we think it would work, but just if we talked about it yet, we could actually hurt ourselves and would have to pay more money than we might have to pay if we don’t.
Rico Figliolini 0:20:10
That also, I think if I remember correctly, that happened with the roundabout at Medlock Bridge when people found out that that’s where the roundabout was going to be before the property had to be purchased or parts of properties had to be purchased. Yeah, that was a bit of a problem at the time, I think. Oh yeah.
Brian Johnson 0:20:28
We had to ultimately condemn two of the slivers of property to get them to sell because their sale price was 300% higher than the appraised value.
Rico Figliolini 0:20:41
No doubt people want to make their money when they can, I guess. All right, cool. So people should be able to come, you should be able to attend and you should attend September twelveTH to find out more about these things. It’s going to be a heavy duty work session, probably a longer one than usual, I’m sure. So let’s also get on to a little bit about like I was saying before, the hurricane season is coming in. Some of these hurricanes are possibly going to be worse than usual. Certainly the category four that hit Florida and went through Florida, missed Peachtree corners. Really, we got some heavy rains, but it wasn’t bad. It had been worse and it skirted southeast of Georgia going up. But when I saw that, I think Bush Road got hit with no power at one point, I think during that or around that time. So a section of Bush Road, that area, those communities were without power for a few hours, I think. Does the city between power outages, possible floodings? We talked about this a little before and I didn’t even know this. I’ll admit that things are built based on a 50 year floodplain, a flood zone. I just assumed it was 100 or more. I didn’t realize it was only a 50 year mark. And people don’t even know. I think if you go to certain parks, you could actually see a 500 year mark of flood, a flood mark in some of the I saw that, I think it was Tilly Mill, one of the big parks. So we’ve been hit with major floods in certain parts of Gwinnett County at one time over the last 200 and 5500 years. Not to say that that would happen again, but how does the city look at weather, power outages? I know people sometimes next door say they say we’re a smart city, why do we keep when the wind blows, the power goes out or something? That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but sometimes I feel the same way when it’s not even storming and the power is going out or flickering. So how does the city address those things?
Brian Johnson 0:22:46
Well, let me unpack this and separate two components of what we really face in Peachtree Corners when it comes to severe weather and that’s flooding and power outage. Flooding, the city has much more of a direct role in that. So I’ll start with we’re part of the National Flood Insurance program with the federal government and FEMA, and we are also part of their community rating system, which is basically like ISO for fire, which is you get graded and the better you’re prepared for, say, fire, you get a better ISO rating. And the better ISO rating you get, the lower your homeowner’s insurance is, because insurance companies say, hey, we feel like that community is less apt to have a fire event destroy the property because the fire department and the water supply and everything is good. So we voluntarily enrolled in that program and we have a rating for the first time two years ago, I think we got, and we improved it last year, which helps everybody’s flood insurance, homeowners insurance, decrease the rate. But we have a stormwater management plan within the city and we do things and the stormwater user fee that you pay on your property tax bill every year, which is a fee based on how much impervious surface that you have in the city, which is surface that doesn’t allow water to percolate into the soil. So rooftop, driveway, sidewalk, things like that. What that goes to is the program of us managing the overall drainage infrastructure for the city. And we maintain, inspect and maintain and repair as needed. A lot of underground and even open drainage facilities, detention ponds, underground drainage lines, detention vaults, stream, bank restoration, keeping erosion from and we have creeks in the city, we have lakes in the city. We’ve got all this stuff that we have to manage because everybody’s water has to flow at some point into the public system. And that public system is our responsibility. So the city uses this money to both proactively make upgrades to our public drainage system and to make repairs. The result is we don’t necessarily have a flooding problem like a wholesale one. We do have isolated locations where you can get certain structures that are below grade and water flows kind of through their property, and we address it on a case by case basis, but we’re set up pretty well. One thing people have to remember is a lot of these subdivisions and homes were only designed back in the day to a 50 year flood event. And so that’s essentially like, handle rain that you would get once every 50 years. Well, weather has changed, and now we’re getting into 150 year flood events, and the standards have gone up on new builds. But we have a lot of subdivisions that were built 25 years older. And sometimes you just get a lot of water that hits in a very short period of time. And the drainage pipes can only handle so much water, and then water backs up until it’s like traffic. Rush hour is merely an example of trying to push so many cars down a road that has so many lanes all at once, and water is the same way. And so our flooding tends to be temporary when we have it in areas, and it just has got to let the system flush it out. But that’s the drainage part, the flooding part. Yes, it can happen when you get a lot of rain in a short period of time. Or I guess if we had a long rain, like days and days and days of it, where the water gets so soaked that it does not take any more water, that can also do it. But that is one now transitioning into electricity. As we all know, you lose electricity through a number of ways. Most of the time here, it’s due to falling trees or limbs into power lines. That’s how most of it happens here. Now, rain can actually, we could have an event. In fact, the storm, we had, what, two days ago? Two nights ago, we didn’t really have any high wind, we just had a lot of rain. And we actually had a really big tree fall into the roadway just because the ground got so saturated. It had been leaning just enough, and then just the roots were in ground that had become so that is one now when it comes to high winds, that can certainly wreak havoc. And when that happens, we react by having we had this, what, a month ago? Six weeks ago, we had the big.
Rico Figliolini 0:28:11
40, 50 miles an hour gust of.
Brian Johnson 0:28:13
Wind, not for long trees down here in the city. And our public works crews came in and started cutting trees that were blocking roads. Now, where we run into a problem is when trees are into live power lines, we can’t cut those trees and remove them by blocking roads until the power company shuts off the power. So it all depends on how many crews they have out and how many trees that are still laying in live power lines is how fast we can clear the road and how fast you get power. The best way to alleviate this, there’s the more inexpensive way, and that is Georgia Power goes through sections of the city, and they basically stand under the power lines. And they look up and they look at limbs that are hanging over the power lines and maybe a few trees that they feel are and they remove those. So a limb hanging over a power line falling doesn’t cut power because they’ve cut the limb back. And so that’s one way. And they have done that. We did a lot of that about a year and a half, two years ago in the Long Spalding Drive down at Neely Farm, gun and Road. There was a lot of it. East Jones Bridge. West Jones Bridge. They’re due to do another one of those. It’s also controversial. Sometimes people don’t like that, or sometimes the limbs that have to be removed are going to kill the tree. And so the whole tree has got to go. And some of those trees are actually not they’re on private property, and so some homeowners get upset about it. So that’s not without controversy either. So that’s one way to do it. And that’s the more inexpensive way to help protect the power lines. The best way is to what they call harden. And that is basically to bury and burying power lines is always the best way to protect and harden the system. But it’s very expensive.
Rico Figliolini 0:30:27
Has that been done and where has it been done in?
Brian Johnson 0:30:30
I mean, you know, you have know, Technology Park, all the power lines are buried, but in the neighbor residential neighborhoods, you oftentimes only have it inside the neighborhood. So, for instance, I live in Riverfield, inside a neighborhood, it’s buried. But where we tie in on East Jones Bridge is not. So if East Jones Bridge gets hit by a tree, we’re out of electricity. Now, power company also tries to do loop. They try to loop the electricity. So there’s a redundant or call it a secondary method to get electricity. So if you had a circle and there was a break in one part, you still have the ability to get electricity. The other way, that’s an expansion of the system. They try to do that as well, but it just comes down to money. And where Georgia Power is looking, there are other communities that have risks that are greater than ours. So I can’t speak on their process, but I do know that they use and we’ve loaned them or helped. Supplement their technology by using LiDAR to a form of radar to actually map where limbs were creating a risk to the lines. And so they’ve used technology to identify the more higher risk areas. But that’s the flooding and the electricity part and how it happens and how we address it. We certainly as a municipality are here when trees go down or blocking roads or people are stranded. We have an emergency response plan. We can stand up certain positions within the city. Our marshals will be another resource. When they start going out and work in the community in late November, they’re going to carry things like chainsaws in the trunk of their vehicles and they’ll be able to go out and do things like that. So it’s unfortunate. We all live with it. Weather is not getting any more calm.
Rico Figliolini 0:32:39
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Since 95, I think, perceptibly I’ve seen more harsher weather happening here. Anecdotally anyway, I’ve seen it, it is not going to get better. And they’re even talking about a harsh winter maybe.
Brian Johnson 0:32:57
And then you can get ice on the power lines and they get too heavy and you get power poles that will fall because of that. Or power lines snap. Yeah. Burying it is always the best, but it’s expensive and it requires sometimes more property and people’s yards and front entrances of subdivisions. And I wish it was easy and inexpensive, but it isn’t. And so that’s where we’re at.
Rico Figliolini 0:33:27
I think people just, if they really are in need of electricity, for whatever reason, they should make sure they have a generator, a gas generator or generac, something that’s installed using gas or propane or something like that. If you really need it for some reason, that’s a good way of backing that up. I just want to go through a couple of quick things and then we could do a wrap. A couple of things I’m just curious about right at this point. Charlie Roberts, what we call the Charlie Roberts property, which is the property which is not Charlie Roberts property anymore. It was bought by a different company. I can’t pronounce the name right now. Thank you. And I could have if I had it written in front of me, maybe, but I think they’ve moved a few things. But when are they actually going to do you have any idea when they’re actually going to break ground behind Chase and HW Steakhouse there? I guess.
Brian Johnson 0:34:29
In November they’re going to start site work. The development is called solis. Solis. And they’re going to break ground in November or not break they’re going to start site work, prepping the pad for them to go vertical. But they’re going to start in November.
Rico Figliolini 0:34:47
Okay. And they’re probably going to take six to twelve months, I guess, to build it out.
Brian Johnson 0:34:51
Yeah, it’ll be a twelve month project.
Rico Figliolini 0:34:53
Yeah. So I mean, the other one that’s north of Racetrack and the wine store that Span, they’re already preselling. I don’t know if they finished any units yet. I think they might have some units finished, but they’re pre selling units there now. They’re actually doing tours. I think they actually have a complete unit or two. So they’re moving along, it sounds like.
Brian Johnson 0:35:16
Yeah, that’s broadstone. The apartment units. I do believe there’s a section that’s done, but the townhomes have gone vertical. You can see those ones closest to the liquor store there. And then they’ve got the office, the commercial building that was existing there, it’s being rebuilt. That’s going up right now, too. So I think most what they’re going vertical with has actually gone vertical.
Rico Figliolini 0:35:50
Lots of stuff going on. I think, obviously, intuitive, is further along where they want to be. Some of the building looks like it’s actually the outsides are actually a little closer to finish and they’re probably working on the inside as well. Quick trip demoing. There’s nothing that they have to they’re just going to build right on where they have it. They’re probably going to take up that same building pad, I bet, to be.
Brian Johnson 0:36:16
Okay because otherwise it’s a little bit bigger. But they’re basically building a newer store right on the very same location. But these kind of things, as you know, it’s a competition. Racetrack has their floor plan and their site plan, and QT has got to compete with it. They’ve got to have certain stations and a flow about it. So their store was showing its age. So they just said, we’re going to know it’s not uncommon. We had Chick fil A do the same thing. We had Wendy’s do the same thing, just upgrading their store. So, yeah, QTS is going down to the ground and building a brand new one on the same they do.
Rico Figliolini 0:37:00
You know, if they’re going to assuming they’re also going to take out the origin of the gas tanks underground or are they going to keep what they have there?
Brian Johnson 0:37:08
No, they’re going to keep it there. I don’t know if they may be going to more pumps, like one more additional pump on each of the islands. I don’t know that for sure. But tanks are staying underground.
Rico Figliolini 0:37:24
So they’re in good condition, I’d imagine. I just keep wondering why half the pumps are yellow bagged over there. But I guess that’s a question for them because maybe they’re not getting enough supply or something. The other building that I saw was the BB T building, which right across from CVS, part of the Forum, not part of that property, but an extension of it that they just gated that out and they’re pulling things out of it. It’s going to remain a bank, it sounds like.
Brian Johnson 0:37:55
Yeah, it’s a credit union of some sort. I don’t remember the name. I had not personally heard of this credit union, but I know they’re doing a renovation over there. I think they’re removing some of the drive in stuff. Nobody uses drive in really anymore.
Rico Figliolini 0:38:13
Right. ATM, probably.
Brian Johnson 0:38:15
Right? ATM. Or maybe they’re even removing some of the lanes completely because there’s just not enough because I think they have like four lanes that you could go into drive through.
Rico Figliolini 0:38:25
Yes.
Brian Johnson 0:38:26
So, yeah, there’s some renovation of some sort, but it is staying in the financial it’s another financial institution.
Rico Figliolini 0:38:34
Anything new going on that we should be aware of? Revitalizing wise or redevelopment wise? Anything special that pops out over the last month and a half?
Brian Johnson 0:38:44
I mean, Redevelopment Authority has got two big projects they’re working on on the south side of the city. One is some trailhead locations where you’re talking about being able to drive your car and park it there with bathrooms and playground, picnic areas and it’ll tie into the multi use trail system. And then we’ve got some housing going on down the south side as well that we’re going to help try and facilitate the construction of what is oftentimes called starter home workforce housing. But equity product. These are buildings you purchase, you don’t rent. But to try to do it in a way that it’s affordable, meaning it’s market rate. But we’re going to try to help facilitate keeping it from the owners, from maxing out the amount they can get for it because that tends to price people right out of the market.
Rico Figliolini 0:39:48
There’s no way to keep it to one purchaser, someone that buys it, that lives there, versus someone picking up ten of these properties as an investment.
Brian Johnson 0:39:59
You mean owner occupied?
Rico Figliolini 0:40:01
Correct. Thank you.
Brian Johnson 0:40:03
Well, interestingly enough, we are looking at potentially an ordinance where we are going to limit the commercial purchasing of equity products in which some company buys, say, ten townhomes, and then they turn around and rent the townhomes. And that defeats the purpose of trying to get somebody who is an owner occupied tenant of the building, which we feel increases the odds that they put roots in the community. They own something here, so they’re like, you know what, I may want to stay here a long time. I may want to get civically active and get my kids enrolled versus sometimes not all the time. There’s always exceptions to this. Sometimes renters feel that they’re much more flexible in where they live and so they don’t get as involved in the community because they’re thinking, well, I can leave very quickly and I may not stay here, so I’m not going to get involved like I would if I own. So that’s generally the debate between two products.
Rico Figliolini 0:41:12
There’s more pride, I think, when you own it and more investment also that you take care of it because you do own it. It’s an investment in what you can sell later at a better price maybe.
Brian Johnson 0:41:24
Yeah, I agree with you there’s. Again, always exceptions, but I think if you own something and if it gets damaged, it’s on you to fix it. You tend to take care of things more than if you were a renter.
Rico Figliolini 0:41:36
Yeah, and I think I’ve seen it at least in the city of Atlanta and in some parts outside, like Habitat for Humanity, is that right? Yeah. And some other organizations that actually do these types of they’ll do ten or 15 home structures like that in an area. I mean, has the city thought about working with organizations like that? Because those end up for sure in the hands of people that could use them, that are starter homes like that.
Brian Johnson 0:42:07
Oh, they will be a part of this project. We’ve already oh, yeah, absolutely.
Rico Figliolini 0:42:13
Excellent. Do you know when that’s happening or when the regulation that you talked about, the owner occupied stuff, the limitation on that? Any idea?
Brian Johnson 0:42:23
We’re internally, city attorney, community development director and I are kind of looking at case law and other precedent to see how far we can push that. We’re probably a month or two away of presenting council, something for them to consider.
Rico Figliolini 0:42:41
All right, cool. All right, great. I think we’ve covered a lot of the stuff. Peachtree Corners Festival is coming up in September. I know that the second annual Electrify Expo is that what we’re calling it? Is happening during the I think during the festival last year. The second day, maybe. Yeah. Cool. And Jim Ellis is one of several probably dealerships that bring in their cars to it, and anyone can actually register to bring their own electric cars, vehicles to this event to show off.
Brian Johnson 0:43:16
Yeah, it is an EV car show of any type, and we’ve had everything from just your run of the know, off the line electric vehicle, Tesla, whatever, to very unique retrofitted vehicles, some vintage stuff that’s been, I mean, the Batmobile, just some interesting stuff. So, yeah, if it’s EV and you want to bring it out, or you want to come and see some of the unique EV options that are out there, come to that part of the show, I mean, it’ll be in the same parking lot as the vintage car show that’s associated with okay.
Rico Figliolini 0:43:55
And I think I remembered last year, even Paul Duke Stem had their electric race team there with their car that they built.
Brian Johnson 0:44:03
Correct.
Rico Figliolini 0:44:04
And they’ve been racing around the region actually ever since then, I think, or before. So kind of kind of cool stuff. So if you have an electric vehicle that looks interesting that you put together, definitely go to the city’s website, register, and show up and show off your stuff. So that’s a good thing. Great. I think we’ve hit more than I thought we had. So it’s all good. Appreciate, Brian, that you join me every month to talk about these things. Eventually, at some point, I’d like to actually do this live. You all are watching this. If you’re watching it live, it’s actually a simulcast live stream, which means that we’ve recorded it, but we’re streaming this live on our Facebook pages and YouTube as well. But at some point we may be looking at TikTok doing some of this on there or on X or Twitter, do we call it that? I don’t know, space where we might be able to stream some stuff, take some live questions. So still working that up. Looking for a sponsor if there’s anyone out there that would like us to do that and just to share that. We’re also doing a sports podcast. So I have a former student intern that’s actually taking up and doing a sports podcast with student athletes and such. So that’ll be a video podcast, follow up with an article. We’re going to be doing that once or twice a month, so check that out when it comes out. And if you have any ideas that you’d like to share with us about coverage and stuff, certainly do that. I want to thank our sponsors again, EV Remodeling Inc. And Clearwave Fiber for stepping up, for supporting us for these podcasts as well as the publications and doing the things that we do. Journalism isn’t always easy. We try to get the facts right as best we can. This is why I do these podcasts also, and Brian does it with me to make sure that we’re putting out good, accurate information versus what you might see sometimes posted that may be totally wrong or inaccurate. So this is what we’re trying to do. And sometimes we’ll make mistakes on the print reporter side, but between me and Brian will clarify these things as we go. So thank you, Brian. Appreciate you being with us.
Brian Johnson 0:46:15
Thank you, Rico. Thanks for having me.
Rico Figliolini 0:46:17
Sure. Thanks, guys.
Related
Business
From Boardrooms to the Himalayas: Vandana’s Journey to Purpose and Growing with Intention [Podcast]
Published
1 week agoon
May 19, 2025How one family blends operational clarity, conscious leadership, and community-driven values to grow their business — together.
In this episode of UrbanEbb, host Rico Figliolini chats with Vandana Aggarwal, VP of Operations at Aggarwal Real Estate, about the winding road from global consulting to family-run commercial real estate in Norcross, Georgia. With honesty, warmth and insight, V shares how she went from working 80-hour weeks in corporate strategy to rediscovering clarity in the mountains of India — ultimately helping transform her family’s business into a community-driven real estate firm managing over 50 shopping centers.
The conversation weaves together themes of leadership, legacy, operational excellence and the transformative power of both AI and yoga. It’s a story about clarity, courage and conscious growth — both in business and in life. This is another episode you won’t want to miss.
Episode Highlights
- Why Vandana left a high-powered consulting career to join her family business
- How hiking Kilimanjaro and studying yoga in the Himalayas changed her leadership mindset
- The operational overhaul she brought to Aggarwal Real Estate to support growth
- What it’s like working side-by-side with your dad, siblings, and 700+ tenants
- How the company rebranded with intention and built a mission around “building communities as a community”
- Where AI is reshaping real estate—from lease drafting to property management—and where it still can’t compete with people
- Leadership succession planning with siblings at the helm
- The importance of clarity, calm, and conscious growth in both business and life
About Vandana Aggarwal
Vandana Aggarwal is the Vice President of Operations at Aggarwal Real Estate, her family’s commercial real estate investment and management firm. She brings a unique blend of strategic insight and operational excellence, shaped by her early career as a consultant at A.T. Kearney, where she advised Fortune 100 to 500 companies. A graduate of Georgia Tech, she also took a transformative detour from the corporate world to spend a year in India teaching yoga—an experience that continues to influence her leadership style today. At the core of her work is a deep commitment to family and a passion for building strong, connected communities.
Timestamp:
00:00:00 – Introduction and sponsors: Vox Pop Uli & EV Remodeling
00:03:12 – From Georgia Tech to global consulting
00:04:23 – Leading strategy for Fortune 500 companies
00:06:11 – The role of vision alignment at the C-suite
00:08:01 – Sabbatical becomes family business overhaul
00:09:35 – Bringing operational excellence to a growing real estate firm
00:12:02 – A year of yoga, nature, and healing in India
00:17:03 – Hiking Kilimanjaro, testing limits, and expanding self-trust
00:18:52 – Navigating family dynamics inside a business
00:21:56 – Planning for leadership transition: siblings, strategy, succession
00:24:06 – Rebranding the business: from American Management to Aggarwal Real Estate
00:26:33 – Where AI fits (and doesn’t) in real estate operations
00:30:04 – Legal, leasing, HR, and marketing efficiency with tech
00:31:01 – Community-focused retail and experiential shopping centers
00:32:00 – Reflections on AI, journalism, and digital trust
00:32:57 – Closing thoughts
Podcast Transcript
00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini
Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of UrbanEbb. This podcast comes out of the city of Peachtree Corners, and we have a special guest today. And if I don’t mess up the name, it’s Vandana Aggarwal.
00:00:15 – Vandana Aggarwal
Absolutely. You can call me V, Rico.
00:00:15 – Rico Figliolini
I’m going to call you V, trust me. And I’m Rico Figliolini, so a bit of a long name there. But V is VP of Operations of Aggarwal Real Estate here, based in Peachtree Corners? No, Norcross.
00:00:30 – Vandana Aggarwal
In Norcross, yeah. Norcross, Georgia.
00:00:32 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah, yeah. Just off 85, and?
00:00:34 – Vandana Aggarwal
Jimmy Carter.
00:00:35 – Rico Figliolini
And Jimmy Carter.
00:00:36 – Vandana Aggarwal
We’re completing each other’s sentences already.
00:00:39 – Rico Figliolini
But where are we doing this? We’re doing this from one of our great sponsors, one of our two great sponsors, Vox Pop Uli. Was this tastefully obnoxious? Let me tell you, I asked them to do a corner cut for us, and this is perfect. So they have the Moxie logo and stuff. So they’re branding, right? Same way they can brand your stuff. They’ll put your logo on anything. They’ve done, I think, 6,000 vehicle wraps. They’ve done garments, obviously. They could do one-offs or they could do 1,000. They do trade show booths, wraps, everything. So anything you need a logo on, think of what object you want it on. They’ll figure it out for you. And if you’re doing, let’s say, 5,000 mailers and you want that database customized for each postcard, they could do that also. It’s called data. I forget what it’s called, but they can do that. They can work the data into the printing as well. So all customizable. Check them out, voxpopuli.com. Now, getting to something we were talking about, hands-on stuff, which is this also. This can’t just be done by machines, right? Although machines, you still need people. But EV Remodeling Inc., they are a remodeling company. They can do design to build. They can do whole house renovation. They can create your deck, your backyard gazebo. They can put a bathroom, kitchen, anything you want. EV Remodeling Inc. is owned by Eli and his family. Lives in Peachtree Corners. It’s based out of our city. They’ve done, I think, over 250 homes recently. So check them out, evremodelinginc.com. And I want to thank both of them for being great sponsors of ours. So, it’s always a long stretch doing that, but I’m glad to have you, V.
00:02:22 – Vandana Aggarwal
I’m happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me onto your podcast. Excited to chat with you.
00:02:25 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah, no, this is cool. Well, you know, I met you, where did I meet you at? I think it was the chamber.
00:02:30 – Vandana Aggarwal
Yeah, the Southwest Gwinnett Chamber event.
00:02:32 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah, and we were talking a bit, and I was like, damn, you know, I had my father owned a business, and he wanted his kids to be in it. None of us, none of us could go into that business. It’s a little difficult, different industry. It was a hard industry, plus my father was very patriarchal, very over-demanding. God bless him. He mellowed in age. But when you were telling me about your family, I mean, your father, your mother, your sister, your brother, and you, I mean, all in it. It’s amazing.
00:02:55 – Vandana Aggarwal
We’re all together. We’re the modern-day Brady Bunch.
00:03:03 – Rico Figliolini
I love it. Yes, that’s exactly it. But, let’s start a little bit. I mean, you were telling me, I mean, you came from a consulting world. You came where you were actually being paid a lot more than you’re being paid right now, actually.
00:03:12 – Vandana Aggarwal
I told my father he couldn’t afford me when he recruited me out. So I graduated from Georgia Tech in 2007. I actually did join his company right out of college for two years, learned a lot about the company. He actually had me go through a rotation in every department of the company to learn more about what we did, how we operated. And I think very quickly, it was also 2008-9 with a recession. But I was also very interested to learn how big companies operate. How can you take a small company at that time? We were much smaller than we are today and really understand how do you go from this, which is where everyone starts, right? As a new company to get to be one of the largest in the nation, in the world and see how they operate, how they grew it from, you know, a mom and pop business to this global enterprise. Consulting was a natural transition to learn about multiple companies, multiple industries. So transitioned into AT Kearney, which has now been rebranded as Kearney, and out of their Chicago office. So I was there for seven to eight years, almost eight years.
00:04:23 – Rico Figliolini
Entry-level position you got in?
00:04:24 – Vandana Aggarwal
Yeah, I went in as an analyst. The good thing with that experience was by the time I left, I was a senior manager with Kearney. I worked across 17 different companies in those eight years. So I got to experience how CPG companies, retail companies, transportation, IT, you name it, I’ve done it. In terms of the different types of industries I got to work with, worked with a lot of Fortune 100 to 500 companies at the C-suite level. So we were coming up with all kinds of strategy projects such as new market entries, mergers and acquisitions. A lot of what I ended up specializing in in those seven years was operational efficiency and growth strategy. So it was an amazing, I’m grateful for that learning experience, the you know the caliber of minds that you work with. You also get to experience what the C-suite looks like. How does the very top operate and then it goes from the top down right? So it is very much led at this very top leadership and you see how companies change in their culture the way they operate based on how the top is designed.
00:05:38 – Rico Figliolini
So did you see good and bad at the top?
00:05:41 – Vandana Aggarwal
Absolutely. And I’m not going to name names. But you learn a lot when you see how your CEO and your C-suite right below them, the culture they’re bringing into a company and their vision and their goals if they’re aligned, unaligned. Anyone that at the very top have different viewpoints of where the company has had it is where companies start to break apart, lose revenue, lose their you know people, which is very important.
00:06:11 – Rico Figliolini
Where did you see the pain point then? What was the common denominator I guess of those?
00:06:18 – Vandana Aggarwal
There’s no one common denominator, but if I had to kind of narrow in, it comes down to what is our five-year, ten-year trajectory? Where are we headed? As large companies grow, you’re not just in one industry. You’re not just doing retail shopping centers. You’re investing in all kinds of properties just to bring it back to our company. Similarly, a CPG company can make all kinds of products, so they have to decide what it is because you have to be concentrated on the right places. If you have a leadership team that is in alignment of what that ultimate goal is, right, then you have clear strategies and, you know, metrics you’re measuring your success against. So that was a big thing that I learned. Also just, you know, seeing how great leaders operate, right? Some of the best in the nation today, I got to be in the room with them and just to see how they lead is very important.
00:07:14 – Rico Figliolini
Did you see any family dynamics in any of those businesses?
00:07:20 – Vandana Aggarwal
No. You know, there may have been like a father-son duo, but when you’re looking at the very top, I won’t say it was like all in the family, right? You know, and it also becomes the size of a company, right? You know, when you get to an international scale, you’re not always blessed that every person in your family has the right skill set and experience to fill each role on that C-suite.
00:07:46 – Rico Figliolini
I’m just thinking Trump for some reason. Every kid has a job.
00:07:51 – Vandana Aggarwal
Every kid has a job.
00:07:52 – Vandana Aggarwal
You had the accent, right?
00:07:54 – Rico Figliolini
Pretty much, I guess. So after the C-suite or expansion, you traveled a lot too, I think, right?
00:08:01 – Vandana Aggarwal
I did, yeah. So after my seven, eight years in consulting, I was reaching 30. And Shiv, my father, came to me and he said, you know, you’re doing this for a lot of outside companies. Why don’t you help us grow and bring your expertise home? And I said, look, I’ll take a sabbatical. Let me assess the company. And after that period where I took a short sabbatical to come look at how we were operating, I said, I can give you three years. I said, you can’t afford me, but I’ll give you three years of my time. And I said, I think it’ll be the right, it was the right time in the company. We were investing very heavily. We were bringing in a lot of new square footage into the company, and we weren’t designed to manage it. So we as a company, as you know, we are the investors. We have an in-house management company, an in-house leasing company. So as we acquire new properties, our team does the management for those properties in-house. We don’t provide third-party services today. And we do the leasing in-house. But at that time, when he, you know Shiv started we had one or two and now we’re at 50 shopping centers plus and other investments that we have. And there’s a very different way you operate you know and how do you how does the CEO go from being an operator to where he’s overseeing it, but he’s not into the weeds right? So he has create a system for that to happen right? You have to have standard operating processes for your property managers, your accounting team, your marketing team.
00:09:35 – Rico Figliolini
And you quite didn’t have that before.
00:09:37 – Vandana Aggarwal
We didn’t, no. And, you know, and I think that’s why he wanted to bring me in is because my strength is operations and I love it. I love going into messy places and cleaning them up.
00:09:49 – Rico Figliolini
Is that what you did when you were a consultant?
00:09:51 – Vandana Aggarwal
A lot of what I was concentrating on at the end of my consulting career, yes. So I did a lot of operational efficiency work. So we’d go in, assess the way companies were designed. And we’d interview hundreds of team members to understand what their role is. You know, what are they responsible for? How are they delivering? What are they measuring for success? And then we’d redesign the way they did that based on, again, bottom line, what are your ultimate goals for the company?
00:10:21 – Rico Figliolini
So you had to understand that before you got to that point. And you’re not making the decisions, the C-level.
00:10:29 – Vandana Aggarwal
Present, right? And similarly even with Shiv, when I first joined, I said, look, this is how I think we need to redesign the company from a bottoms-up perspective based on ultimately our goal of growth, doubling, tripling in size over the next ten years. And I think this is where the father dynamic came in. I guess he trusted me. And he said, do it. He just said, do it. And it was beautiful because right when you’re with large companies, it’s a lot of time before you get. Those decisions made and that trust, right? And so it was great. And he said, yeah, just put it into place.
00:11:07 – Rico Figliolini
See, that’s a great dad, actually. Some dads would be like, I don’t know about that daughter or son or whatever.
00:11:16 – Vandana Aggarwal
It did take time, though, like to ultimately, he was in the operation so heavily. And, you know, until today, I’m still like, step up, step up. Like, I need you to not get into the weeds. Like I think at that time we had tenants calling him, maintenance guys calling him. Like every little and big problem would go through his cell phone. I said, you’re too smart and you’re such a good investor. This is not your skill set. You shouldn’t be managing this. You need to bring people on who are expertise in this area. And I said, you need to be focused on like the larger plan.
00:11:51 – Rico Figliolini
This way you can grow it better.
00:11:51 – Vandana Aggarwal
Which I think has been very successful over the last eight years I’ve been with him now.
00:11:57 – Rico Figliolini
So before you got to him, though, you were traveling a bit internationally as well?
00:12:02 – Vandana Aggarwal
Yeah, yeah. So this is an amazing year. I was very burnt out. By the time I left consulting, I was working 70 to 80-hour weeks, traveling Monday through Thursday, if not more than that, of the week. So I told Shiv, I was like, I’m going to take a month. I’m going to go to India, get my yoga certification. No intention to teach at the time. I just said it’d be a great one-month retreat. And I was up in the mountains like Himalayas and India in a city called Dharamshala. Beautiful place. One of my favorites in the world. And I just, I think I needed it for myself emotionally, mentally to take that break. So I turned one month into one year. I didn’t know it was going to be a year.
00:12:49 – Rico Figliolini
In that same city? In that same town?
00:12:50 – Vandana Aggarwal
Yeah, so I ended up the school that I had gotten my certification with. I asked them, I was like, do you mind if I hang around for a little while? Like very casually, I’m like, you know, I’ll pay for my room and board, but I just want to be around this group and this energy. And they said, well, if you’re going to be here, why don’t you intern? And they’re like, room and board is free if you intern. I was like, sure. You know, not thinking what it was leading to. This is like that beauty of the universe coming into play. Yeah, so I started teaching, ended up loving teaching. So then I ended up teaching the 200-hour yoga training course. And I was in Dharamshala for four months. And then I moved down to Goa, their Goa campus for another six.
00:13:30 – Rico Figliolini
Where is that? Goa?
00:13:32 – Vandana Aggarwal
Goa? It’s in southern India on their west coast. It’s a beach town. Yeah. So I had the mountains and the beach. But I’m a mountain girl. I’m a hiker. But no, it was a beautiful experience. Very different from anything I’ve done with my career, right? But I became a yoga teacher for a year.
00:13:52 – Rico Figliolini
Did that clear your head? Yoga, they say, can do that, right?
00:13:53 – Vandana Aggarwal
Yeah, it’s all the tools of yoga, right? The meditation, the breath work, really getting internal, going in, right? Just going inwards, being quiet, which we don’t have. We have a lot of noise in our life today, you know? And naturally, right? Between family life, work life, social, and then just all of the noise from everything else right? Like we’re sitting here and I can hear the cars right? So you know that difference was when I was sitting there, I could hear the ocean waves and so there’s something very healing in nature naturally. So it was the tools mixed with nature and I still think nature has a very strong healing power on us. So whenever I can, I try to get out on a mountain and by the ocean. But yeah no it was it was a beautiful experience but it did bring a level of calmness into the way I approach things. It changes your perspective of you know at the end everything’s okay. No matter what you’re going through it’s temporary you’re, and everything that’s happening to us is happening to us for the good. We don’t know it, sometimes it seems like a bad situation in the moment, but ultimately you know, universe, God, whatever you believe in is at play to bring you something better in your life. And you just have to step back to understand what is it delivering us.
00:15:19 – Rico Figliolini
I like the way you think. My wife every once in a while would say, aren’t you upset about that? I’m like, I think come tomorrow, it won’t mean anything. There’s no point in, just relax. Not everything, two days later, it’s not as important as it seemed at that moment.
00:15:37 – Vandana Aggarwal
Yeah. And it’s not just that it’s not as important. It’s also like…
00:15:41 – Rico Figliolini
In perspective?
00:15:42 – Vandana Aggarwal
It’s, what am I gaining from this? Like, what can I gain from this? Oftentimes when, you know, a lot of things happen, yeah, like you get hurt or, you know, it’s like in relationships, right? Or if you have a bad business deal, right? It’s like, hey, how am I growing, right? And I think that’s what makes life very exciting, right? Otherwise, if you’re always living on a high, is it a high?
00:16:06 – Rico Figliolini
Yes. So I’m thinking you were a consultant for seven or eight years. 80 hours a week. And all of a sudden you’re doing yoga on the mountains of India. It’s just like, it’s almost like a movie. It’s almost like…
00:16:18 – Vandana Aggarwal
Eat, pray, love?
00:16:19 – Rico Figliolini
Yes.
00:16:20 – Vandana Aggarwal
It was my eat, pray, love moment for a year.
00:16:23 – Rico Figliolini
That’s amazing.
00:16:24 – Vandana Aggarwal
No, you meet amazing people, but I think we were meant to meet everyone that we come in interaction with on a daily basis. You naturally have a connection. There’s a universe at play, and we were meant to cross paths and learn something from each other, gain something from one another, give to the other person. And I think you just have to look at life that way.
00:16:48 – Rico Figliolini
I definitely think along that way. I mean, I definitely think each of us nudges each other in a crowd a little bit. That one nudge can set you off going in a different direction. So I totally believe in that. So you joined your dad. Yes. And you’re, so actually, even before we get there, so yoga, but what other interests have you been?
00:17:03 – Vandana Aggarwal
Yeah. So, I mean, I’m an avid hiker. I’ve done recently in the last few years, I’ve climbed Kilimanjaro. I did the Machu Picchu trail. I’ve done a few 14ers out in Colorado, but I like to test myself physically. You know, just, again, it comes down to how do we find that push within us past our comfort zone? So is this a physical inability or is it a mental constraint? So to get past that mental constraint of discomfort and then really push yourself to the next level and say, I can achieve something. It’s not going to be easy. So to me, if I’m on a hike and it’s not hard, I’m like, well, was it a hike? Like it didn’t test me, but no I think, you know.
00:17:55 – Rico Figliolini
You should do the Appalachian Trail. That’s like 2000 plus miles.
00:18:03 – Vandana Aggarwal
I know. And it is, you know, it’s not just like the hiking part. It is like living out in nature and, you know, sleeping in uncomfortable conditions. Yeah. Walking in the rain. It’s cold. I think the last day of our Kilimanjaro hike, it was negative 20 degrees up in the mountain and my eyelashes were frozen and I couldn’t feel any part of my body. And, you know, and it tested my breathing. And there is that element of push yourself to the point that it’s not your ego anymore. Like if your body’s saying stop, you have to stop as well and respect your body. But yeah, to really test yourself.
00:18:38 – Rico Figliolini
To circle all that back now, you’re back home. You’re working with your father and your family. A lot of businesses grow or die because of family. If it’s a family business, right?
00:18:52 – Vandana Aggarwal
Absolutely, yeah.
00:18:53 – Rico Figliolini
So you have your highs, your lows, your, sometimes you don’t get along. Sometimes decisions are split. People get upset with each other. So you’ve been at your highs and lows physically and mentally doing other things. Has that helped you in some ways? Not that you’re having a bad time with family. Because it sounds like you all fit just fine, like the Brady Bunch.
00:19:15 – Vandana Aggarwal
Let’s keep it that way. No, I mean, there’s multiple dynamics at play. It is a family business. My father is also my boss. My siblings are also my friends and my coworkers. And it’s about no matter how hard you try, you cannot separate those relationships. There is an interplay of all of it when you spend eight to nine hours a day together. But we all have, again, a common goal for the company. And then a common goal for our personal relationship. So when we sit down, we keep in mind that we like each other and we want to keep it that way. Like very simply put, that’s first and foremost for me especially. Even when Shiv had brought me in, he said, oh, can you manage everyone? And I said, I’ll manage everyone but my brother and sister. I said, you know, like I won’t jeopardize the relationship I have with them as a sibling by being their manager. Especially because I said that’s your job like good luck. But not just that it’s you know we all have different skill sets so I said how do I manage my brother who is a genius he’s a CPA by trade you know like I can’t tell him how to run the financials of this company like he’s supposed to teach me that right? And same way I teach him that. My sister has a master’s in marketing right? She is by far the most social, likable person you’re going to meet, and she knows how to work with people. I said, she needs to teach us that. So I think we’re lucky that each of us, and this is, I think, rare, where you have three kids and each one of them has their own skill set. That, I think, helps us stay in business and we see ourselves foreseeably into the long-term future being in business together is because we each bring something very unique to the table. Ultimately we value the relationships that we have on a personal level as a family above all else right? And then you know the element of like, how does the yoga experience a hiking experience teach us. That’s, it’s not specific to anyone’s situation, I think it’s a baseline of who you become right? The foundation. Like it teaches you patience, it teaches you again, everything is temporary so let’s not get overly attached emotionally or get upset or too joyful, even like, let’s just stay neutralized on any situation because it will end. And then the next one will come up and kind of flow with the ebbs and flows of the ocean. You, you flow with everything that comes with you, comes your way at work, at home. But yeah, I mean, we do sit down as a leadership team. I, my father and my siblings and I, and we talk about, hey, we separately do the exercise. Where are we going to be in five years? What role do we play in that journey? And thankfully, all of ours are very similar in what our goals are. And then we have different skill sets that we bring. So even as we design the future of the company in a moment where my father is not at the head of the table, we’re working on that redesign work. But it’s very conscious. It’s very intentional. Again, we all step back and say, hey, look, how do we maintain, how do we solve problems? Because like, you know, we were talking about how tomorrow we may not agree on something, a big decision. What are we investing in? Come back to, you know, right now Shiv gets to make an ultimate decision because he’s the one leader at the top. Tomorrow it’s going to be three people at the top. How do you deal?
00:23:04 – Rico Figliolini
So is there an exit plan for your dad? Well, not an exit plan.
00:23:09 – Vandana Aggarwal
Not an exit plan. He already has. I think he, you know, he’s gone from, he’s the hardest working person I know. I get that from him. We’re addicted to work.
00:23:18 – Rico Figliolini
80 hours a week.
00:23:21 – Vandana Aggarwal
We love working. You know, this company is his baby. I think I’ve adopted it at this point and we all have. But, to stay mentally sharp, to stay alive, you have to keep working. You have to keep doing something. You have to be working towards something that brings you joy and purpose. And I think, you know, he stepped back to take time towards a lot of his nonprofit work, community work that he’s very much engaged with. But he’s still at the top. He’s still running, you know, his, you know, he’s, you know, not slowing down. You know, we’re constantly growing. We’re growing this year in a large scale, which is amazing, and he’s leading that charge.
00:23:59 – Rico Figliolini
How many properties do you own?
00:24:02 – Vandana Aggarwall
Today we have 50 shopping centers and then a few other assets.
00:24:06 – Rico Figliolini
Is that like 3 million square feet or something? 4 million?
00:24:10 – Vandana Aggarwal
Yeah, over 700 tenants. But, you know, when we sat down a few years ago, we rebranded. Aggarwal Real Estate didn’t exist until two years ago. It was American Management Services. And we had a rebranding effort because we said we want the company’s name and the brand to represent who we are.
00:24:33 – Rico Figliolini
I like that, by the way.
00:24:35 – Vandana Aggarwal
Yeah, it needs to mean something. And we were also proud of what our father has achieved, right? He’s given us this beautiful life that we get to help grow upon. So we said it needs to pay homage to him. So we said, let’s make it Aggarwal Real Estate, ARE. And then as we were deciding what that vision is, we’re a family. In the company, we are a family, not just the four of us, but all of our staff, our team. We don’t, you know, we don’t look at them separate from who we are. And so we said our mission as a company is building communities as a community. And it talks about, hey, in all of the real estate work we’re doing, we try to make sure all of our properties are beautiful. Our tenants are happy. They have direct access to each of us in the company. And on top of that, as a company, we are a community within ourselves because we can’t create them until we are one. So it was very intentional to who we already were, but putting it into brand terms.
00:25:37 – Rico Figliolini
It’s amazing. All that property, tenants. Can’t imagine father tech can send text messages on all their problems, if they have any.
00:25:45 – Vandana Aggarwal
He’s a brilliant man.
00:25:45 – Rico Figliolini
You could be too possessed on that stuff. We want to be cognizant of our time together.
00:25:55 – Vandana Aggarwal
Absolutely.
00:25:57 – Rico Figliolini
So the next subject really was going to be about also AI, because everyone’s talking about AI. We were talking about that before the show started, before we started recording, which was kind of funny because V was asking me if we edit anything. And I was like, no, straight through.
00:26:11 – Vandana Aggarwal
I wanted to see if I could say a few things and then have it taken out of this conversation.
00:26:13 – Rico Figliolini
Nope. Nope. Doesn’t work that way. So, but ChatGPT, AI, that’s all. I mean, you know, could I create a bot to edit this? Probably. But there’s so many things we use in our lives. And you’ve been talking about how it would affect your business. Nevermind the consulting work you did.
00:26:33 – Vandana Aggarwal
Yeah. I mean, the consulting world is, I mean, it depends on the industry, the type of work you’re doing. In real estate, I’ve put a lot of thought behind this. There’s a lot of conversations happening across every industry, every sector, whether it’s education, automotives, real estate, et cetera. Everything’s being discussed. How is that changing the future? How do we incorporate it to be more efficient, right? Be the best in the industry that we can be or operate better. And so for me it’s again comes down to that operations element that I think about like, how do I incorporate it for a company that’s a medium-sized real estate firm today as we become a large company, a bigger player in the market. And people are very important in real estate right?
00:27:17 – Rico Figliolini
Talk about editing?
00:27:20 – Vandana Aggarwal
I was telling you, we should bring them into the podcast.
00:27:27 – Rico Figliolini
We’re going to run a little longer on this.
00:27:36 – Vandana Aggarwal
But let’s take retail shopping centers. This is brick and mortar. I did a paper actually for a large mall retailer back in my consulting days on how the title of the paper was, is brick and mortar dead? And, you know, full circle, I am fully dedicated to brick and mortar, retail, office, multifamily now. But you still need people to clean up your properties, fix your maintenance issues. We were talking about roofing, plumbing, electrical. That is hands-on work. You know, today there is, it’s going to be a long time before there’s a robot that comes in to do that. There will be. I don’t know. I do not see that in 10 years to say we’ve got roofers that are robotic drones that are going to come fix my roof problems.
00:28:24 – Rico Figliolini
Zumbas, they’re going to run around the roof or something.
00:28:26 – Vandana Aggarwal
That’s actually genius. A Zumba for my roof.
00:28:31 – Rico Figliolini
Why not? Attach it to the right thing.
00:28:33 – Vandana Aggarwal
But so those are very people-oriented roles today. Technology will advance how quickly it’s done or how well it’s done. But you’ll still need someone to operate the machinery of it and everything.
00:28:49 – Rico Figliolini
Just not as many.
00:28:50 – Vandana Aggarwal
Yeah. Construction, similarly, right?
00:28:54 – Rico Figliolini
Unless you 3D print a house. I’m sorry.
00:28:56 – Vandana Aggarwal
No, it’s true. It’s true. There’s so many options. I’m thinking 10 years now. I’m not going to have a 3D printer making the metal framing for my new construction project. You know, or installing the sheetrock, it does probably speed up the process, right? There will be machinery to help with that, a lot of AI development in that way. It’s a lot at an office administrative level, right? The speed in which you’re processing invoices, the speed in which you are, you know, getting payments taken in. Today, I would say as far back as right before COVID, we were still accepting checks for money. Now it’s all online. Like we do not accept money coming into the office, or it’s very limited to what we do, right? So that’s AI, if you think about it, right? The ability to pay online.
00:29:42 – Rico Figliolini
QuickBooks Online uses AI now, you can enable it.
00:29:47 – Vandana Aggarwal
So we’ve been using it for many years. The advancement of it has been a little bit slower, and now it’s sped up. Marketing, we were just talking about how you created a flyer on ChatGPT, was it?
00:30:00 – Rico Figliolini
I won’t talk about the student that’s helping us out here and how they use AI.
00:30:04 – Vandana Aggarwal
No, AI in school, right? But yeah, it’s an AI processor for my HR roles, right? Instead of reading 100 resumes, it’s going through the system to filter them out. Whether it’s writing contracts, I won’t lie. Legal jargon is coming out of ChatGPT today. And so it’s speeding up the way we’re doing work. But my legal team probably, and they won’t say it, should be using AI if they’re not. To help create some of this work right? So it’s like these companies are still going to be needed, but the way that they’re able to respond to us at a quicker, everything would just happen faster right? From typewriters to computers, everything.
00:30:49 – Rico Figliolini
Especially if they know that they just did a lease from you for this property in Texas, that we need three more leases done for three other places, it’s not going to be that much different, right? It’s a template.
00:31:01 – Vandana Aggarwal
It’s coming out a lot faster. Yeah, I mean the negotiations, that’s a people-to-people thing right? So I think thankfully in the real estate world we’re still going to need people. We’re still going to need buildings right? The way built, we were just talking about how a retail shopping center is no longer just for shopping. It has to be for entertainment. It has to be for bringing families in and giving them more than just, hey, go into a TJ Maxx and buy something, right? It’s like, what else are you getting when you’re at that center? Whether it’s a play space or events, we’re starting to do more events at our shopping centers. So it’s, again, serving the community.
00:31:39 – Rico Figliolini
We’re seeing that more. More of that happening. We could go on and on here.
00:31:46 – Vandana Aggarwal
Chatting with you.
00:31:46 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah, and we should probably do one on either AI in the marketplace. Or maybe a panel discussion on something similar.
00:31:51 – Vandana Aggarwal
Yeah, overall, yeah. That would be exciting.
00:31:55 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah, I think that would be cool.
00:31:56 – Vandana Aggarwal
I think it’s interesting to learn about kind of where every industry is heading. It impacts all of us.
00:32:00 – Rico Figliolini
For sure. I mean, the magazine business, I mean, it’s all like we have certain, we have AI rules. But, you know, AI is still being used to degree to research things. And to do certain things like that. You know, hopefully journalism isn’t just handed over. They do say 40% of the internet is AI written. So, which is kind of incestuous almost because it’ll just feed on itself at some point.
00:32:27 – Vandana Aggarwal
There’s a whole discussion about the validity and the trust behind digital content. In the next few years. I think it’s going to diminish.
00:32:35 – Rico Figliolini
Oh, yeah. I mean, I’m seeing videos now and it’s just like, it just looks so real. And you could not tell the difference, even voice-wise.
00:32:42 – Vandana Aggarwal
And that’s scary to think. It’s like, how do you trust what you see?
00:32:47 – Rico Figliolini
So on that note, and since this is not edited, so this is right from the beginning. So this is all true. But I want to thank everyone. I want to thank you, V, for being with me.
00:32:57 – Vandana Aggarwal
Thank you so much for having me. This was a great conversation.
00:33:01 – Rico Figliolini
It went by way faster than some of these go. So this is a great discussion. Thank you, everyone. I appreciate you for joining us. Thank you for Vox Pop Uli for the studio look and for letting us do it here, for being a sponsor and for EV Remodeling. Also, I want to thank Jeremy Pruitt behind the camera who has taken care. He’s a Paul Duke student. And it wasn’t him that I was talking about before, by the way. But all the work he’s done on the back end on this. So thank you, Jeremy. So thank you all. Thanks for being with us.
Related
Podcast
World Blood Donor Day Starts Here: Theo’s Miracle, Katherine’s Mission [Podcast]
Published
3 weeks agoon
May 4, 2025The life-threatening diagnosis that changed everything
In this deeply moving episode of UrbanEbb, host Rico Figliolini sits down with Katherine Lafourcade, executive director of the French-American Chamber of Commerce Atlanta, to talk about life, leadership and the power of giving back.
Katherine shares her unexpected journey from Europe to Georgia, her role in connecting French businesses to Atlanta’s thriving innovation scene and a powerful personal story of her son Theo’s battle with leukemia that inspired her mission to promote blood donation.
With candor, insight and heart, this conversation reminds us of the value of community — and how even a small act, like donating blood, can change lives.
Resources:
- French-American Chamber of Commerce – Atlanta: https://www.facc-atlanta.com
- Blood Drive Registration (June 14, 2025): https://www.facc-atlanta.com/events/upcoming-events/e/event/blood-drive-june.html
- American Red Cross: https://www.redcrossblood.org
Takeaways:
- Why the French-American Chamber of Commerce relocated to Curiosity Lab in Peachtree Corners
- How Katherine transitioned from a global business background to nonprofit leadership
- The life-threatening diagnosis that changed everything for her family
- How her son Theo’s recovery from leukemia — and over 50 blood transfusions — inspired her to launch a community blood drive initiative
- Why World Blood Donor Day (June 14, 2025) is a meaningful opportunity for new and returning donors
- What it takes to host a Red Cross blood drive — and how you can help
- How giving blood could save up to three lives in under 15 minutes
Timestamp:
00:01:42 – Why the French-American Chamber relocated to Peachtree Corners
00:02:14 – Katherine’s transatlantic journey from England to France, Switzerland, and Georgia
00:06:02 – The chamber’s mission: helping French businesses land and grow in the U.S.
00:07:38 – Why French, British, and Irish nationals were banned from donating blood until 2023
00:10:01 – Katherine shares her son Theo’s leukemia diagnosis and critical care experience
00:13:03 – The severity of Theo’s condition and the ECMO machine that saved his life
00:16:00 – The frustration of being unable to donate blood as a parent
00:20:19 – The family’s move to the U.S. and continued treatment during COVID
00:21:44 – Theo’s dream of becoming a pediatric oncologist
00:22:21 – Launching local blood drives and how to get involved
00:24:09 – What it’s really like to donate blood: time, process, and tracking where it goes
00:28:05 – Tracking donations via the Red Cross app and building a culture of giving
00:29:19 – Where to sign up and what to expect on June 14, 2025
Podcast Transcript
00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini
Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of UrbanEbb, a podcast that we do here north of Atlanta, smart city of Peachtree Corners. And we are in Curiosity Lab with a special guest today, Katherine Lafourcade, who’s the executive director of the French-American Chamber of Commerce here in Peachtree Corners. Welcome.
00:00:18 – Katherine Lafourcade
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
00:00:21 – Rico Figliolini
No, I appreciate it. This is going to be a great conversation, I’m sure. But before we get into that, I just want to say thank you to our two sponsors, both here located in Peachtree Corners also. Vox Pop Uli is one. Do you have a brand? Do you have a business? Do you have an organization? Do you need that brand to add on something? Whether it’s clothing or vehicle wrap, and you go to a trade show, or you want your logo on that unusual object that you came up with? They can do it. They can almost do anything. So check them out at Vox Pop Uli. Also, EV Remodeling, Inc. Eli is the owner. They’re based here in Peachtree Corners. Eli lives here with his family as well. They have done, I think, over 258 home renovations from design to build, your bathroom, your kitchen. You need an extension on the house. You need to close in your deck. They could do anything. So check them out at evremodelinginc.com. And both of those sponsors are great sponsors. We appreciate them supporting these podcasts and the magazines and the journalism that we do. So thanks there. Now let’s get into the conversation because Katherine has a great story and a challenging story to a degree, right? But let’s start with first that you’re the executive director for the French American Chamber of Commerce, newly located to Peachtree Corners, right?
00:01:42 – Katherine Lafourcade
Yeah, I mean, actually since 2021. So going back a little bit, but before that it was in Buckhead in the consulate building. And there was a decision to bring us out to Peachtree Corners to be located in the heart of Curiosity Lab, which I think was an amazing decision. It makes a lot of sense for us to be here.
00:01:48 – Rico Figliolini
Sure. There’s so many, I mean, we get countries that are coming from Ukraine to visit this place, Israel and startups from all over the world.
00:02:05 – Katherine Lafourcade
There’s a lot of international partnerships, so it made a lot of sense for the Chamber to be here.
00:02:05 – Rico Figliolini
So how did you get to the Chamber? What brought you there? What brought you here?
00:02:14 – Katherine Lafourcade
So yeah, despite my very British accent, it’s one of the first questions always, but French American, you don’t sound either. The truth is I’m not either, but I have strong links to France. I started learning French as a school kid in England and we all had to learn French, French and German. And I particularly, something about the French language just clicked with me and I was like, this is it. I need to learn French. I wanted to become bilingual. I knew my life was going to be, there was going to be involvement with French on some level. And so I did a bachelor’s degree in England, international business in French. I got to do a year in Paris as an intern, which just confirmed everything. I think I already knew that I definitely wanted to do something with French in my life. And so after graduation, I moved to France, worked a bit in France, and then France became Switzerland. And then we relocated to the US six years ago now. Yeah, yeah. And then I arrived in this role, kind of in a roundabout way. When we moved here, my husband is French and we decided we wanted to connect with the French community in and around Atlanta. And we thought maybe the chamber was a good place to start. And so we joined as members. And then the end of 2021, the past executive director was leaving. And so there was an opening and had a lot of fingers pointed at me. A lot of people saying, this is a job for you. To which my response was a little bit, I don’t know. I’m not entirely sure of what Chambers of Commerce do. It’s a nonprofit organization as well. So there were a lot of questions I had, but I decided to give it a go. And so since January of 2022, I’ve been the leadership role. Thoroughly enjoy it.
00:03:57 – Rico Figliolini
Good. Well, you know, coming from Europe, I mean, I think any American that would look at that and say, oh, you know, in Europe, you’ve got like all those countries, you could go all over the place and not be hindered, really, except for maybe from Britain to Europe.
00:04:12 – Katherine Lafourcade
Yeah, a little bit different since Brexit, unfortunately, yes. But anyway, yes.
00:04:16 – Rico Figliolini
But, you know, very different culture too, very different way of looking at life. How does it feel being here in the States?
00:04:24 – Katherine Lafourcade
This is my first experience of living in the US. So I had no prior experience in anywhere else. We came to Atlanta. This is my benchmark. I didn’t know what to expect, to be perfectly honest. I wasn’t familiar with Georgia, wasn’t familiar with anything to what we were getting into and the proof is six years on we absolutely love it here. There’s something about the people, there’s something just about the the environment here. There’s such a vibrant international community. There’s a, I don’t know there’s just a very welcoming feeling. And we really are surprised I think on some level I think we don’t mind saying that. I think we’ve really felt like this is a new home for us. We came here with kids as well and they’re also doing well. But yeah I think people are a bit like but why would you have moved here from from Switzerland which is actually where we were and the answer is there’s a big wide world out there and sometimes it’s good to see something different and you don’t know until you’ve tried it so.
00:05:24 – Rico Figliolini
And I’m thinking she came to the south, which is good because this is like America light in a way. Because if you went to the northeast where I came from, Brooklyn, New York, or up in New York, you might have a different feel for it.
00:05:37 – Katherine Lafourcade
I think so. Southern hospitality does seem like it’s a thing. I mean, I don’t know. There’s good and bad everywhere. That’s the bottom line. You can choose the bits you want to see, and there’s always going to be things that are less good. But honestly, yeah, you’ve got to make the best of where you’re living, and that’s the way we see it.
00:05:53 – Rico Figliolini
For sure. So you’ve been here six years, working in the chamber and stuff. Do you find working businesses locally? You’re trying to bring business from France to the states.
00:06:02 – Katherine Lafourcade
Yeah, yeah. That’s part of the mission. So we kind of have a twofold mission. It is to bring French companies over. If they’re thinking about starting up business in Georgia, we are very much there to help them with that. We have a wonderful network of members, have all sorts of skills, all sorts of different sectors of activity. So, you know, if somebody just rolls up and says, I want to start my business here. We can help them with every aspect, legally, financially, recruiting, all of those things. So it’s a nice soft landing. We’ve got a lot of people that speak French. That will also help them because most of them might speak English, but sometimes it’s nice to speak your mother tongue language. And then the second fold is those who are already here to help them develop. So they might have already started their activity, but they do want to expand. They want to get a better network. They want to connect with people, partners, collaborators.
00:06:49 – Rico Figliolini
What type of businesses are you seeing wanting to come here?
00:06:52 – Katherine Lafourcade
It’s a bit of everything. It’s not, we don’t have one sector that really dominates. I mean, we have a lot of businesses, we have some manufacturing, all sorts of sectors. I mean, it’s good and it’s difficult because then we can’t say, well, you know, we’re particularly good at this one thing. So we’re kind of a bit of everything. So everyone has a space really.
00:07:15 – Rico Figliolini
So, dealing with businesses but you’re also dealing with the community and outreach and stuff. So you started, I believe a blood drive some time ago. And part of it came out of, I guess during COVID the banning of, we were talking about this before, of blood from any French, UK or Irish person. Tell us a little bit about that because I didn’t even realize that.
00:07:38 – Katherine Lafourcade
And that wasn’t even just because of COVID. That was a blanket exclusion that was in place for many, many years. So anybody that had lived in France, the UK or Ireland during, I think it was the late 90s at the time of what was called the mad cow epidemic. It was an unfortunate time where cattle got sick and there was some question over the fact that it could go into people as well. So by default, people who had been in those countries were not allowed to give blood. So I was excluded in Switzerland. I wasn’t allowed to give blood there. And then arriving in the US, same exclusion. It was not possible just by default to give blood. And those rules changed in 2023. I think they decided maybe there’s a lack of donors, always. And so maybe opening up to another category, they still screen the blood. I mean, there’s no safety issues, but it’s just making it less strict. And the epidemic was over 30 years ago at this point. Anything that was going to happen would have happened, I think, in that time frame.
00:08:39 – Rico Figliolini
I think so. I remember the craze about that. It’s all about, oh, my God, if you eat the wrong meat, you can catch, you know, mad cow disease.
00:08:46 – Katherine Lafourcade
I don’t know how many people actually ever got infected. I don’t know. I mean, personally, it was something that happened, and then it kind of was no longer a thing. But, you know, for whatever reasons, out of an abundance of precaution, they wanted to keep it under control.
00:09:01 – Rico Figliolini
And most people, I don’t think, know that blood isn’t, when blood’s donated, it’s sort of remanufactured into other, I mean, there’s multiple blood donations within even one pack.
00:09:12 – Katherine Lafourcade
Yes, absolutely. So there’s whole blood, which is, you know, just giving the whole blood, you can donate plasma, you can donate platelets as well. Different blood groups are in more or less demand because there’s a universal donor. So if you’re a group O negative, that’s the golden, that’s everyone wants that blood because everyone can receive that blood. They want all the blood groups, obviously. But there’s always a lack of donors, always, because people don’t think about donating. It’s not something that’s in your everyday life, unless you’ve had a personal reason to get involved. Quite often it’s something that, you know, you might know someone who does it, but it’s never necessarily number one on your to-do list.
00:09:56 – Rico Figliolini
So let’s go there for a minute.
00:09:58 – Katherine Lafourcade
So yeah, that’s.
00:09:59 – Rico Figliolini
You had a real personal reason.
00:10:01 – Katherine Lafourcade
I did. Absolutely. So after, so even before we moved to the US, my son at the age of 12 and a half got very, very sick. He was diagnosed with leukemia and it came out of the blue. We were in Switzerland at the time. He was a healthy, happy kid. Nothing predisposed this happening. You know, there were no forewarnings. It just was a shock out of the blue. Leukemia starts in the bone marrow. It’s a white blood cell that mutates and becomes cancerous. And that’s kind of it. It then snowballs into a pretty devastating diagnosis. Leukemia is not like a lot of other cancers. There’s no tumor. You can’t have radiotherapy. It’s in the bloodstream, so it’s everywhere. And it’s treated with a very, very, very large number of chemotherapy doses intravenously. So within the first year alone, he had over 100 intravenous injections of chemotherapy.So some days some weeks it was four days out of five at the hospital. Sometimes he was in overnight we had to pre-hydrate and post-hydrate because of toxicity. He had a chest port because they can’t go in regular veins. Yeah it’s too toxic, so you had a chest port that stays in place. I mean it’s brutal. It’s very, very devastating you know you imagine a child a 12 year old not understanding why this is happening, all the horrific side effects from the chemo you know hair loss, nausea. It’s just shocking. He missed a lot of school a lot of time in hospital. And so we plowed through all of that and normally at the end of nine months of treatment we’d get to a different phase of the the protocol which would have been slightly easier, a bit less chemo, a bit less time in hospital called the maintenance phase. And very unfortunately for poor Theo when we were ending the intensive phase and getting towards this part that should be better, everything took a turn for the worse. We didn’t know why again, there was a lot of confusion, a lot of unknown. He had contracted an intestinal parasite.
00:12:00 – Rico Figliolini
At the hospital?
00:12:01 – Katherine Lafourcade
At home or at the hospital, we don’t know where. I mean we weren’t going anywhere or doing anything, so it’s very improbable that would even happen but his immune system which was pretty much non-existent at that point. This thing had obviously got in there and any normal person you’d get rid of it, but his body wasn’t able to do that and it set up a horrible situation. He was losing weight almost by the day. When they found this parasite, they treated it, couldn’t get rid of it, and things just kept going downhill. And we ended up with an absolutely critical situation just before Christmas 2017. It was an emergency situation. Everything was crashing. It turned into septicemia, so septic shock, an infection everywhere in his body, which can kill in a matter of hours so it was a case of emergency surgery. They had to operate on him in his hospital bed, they didn’t even have time to get him to the operating block. And they put him on a machine called ecmo, which was actually used during COVID. COVID patients.
00:13:03 – Rico Figliolini
Was that the ventilation?
00:13:04 – Katherine Lafourcade
So kind of. It’s not actually ventilation it does the job of the heart and lungs outside of the body.
00:13:10 – Rico Figliolini
Yes, that’s right. I think it was misnamed ventilation when it really wasn’t.
00:13:15 – Katherine Lafourcade
And his lungs were what got completely infected. So there was no oxygen exchange between his blood and the lungs that were just not functioning. So they had to put him on this machine which in itself is brutal surgery. It’s open heart surgery. And it’s two big tubes that are fixed onto the body that come out. The machine’s on the floor next to the bed. It takes out the carbon dioxide. It puts back in the oxygen. And he was on dialysis because his kidneys weren’t doing well as well. He was on a ventilator to breathe.
00:13:42 – Rico Figliolini
He was 12 years old at the time?
00:13:44 – Katherine Lafourcade
He was, yes, 12, 13. Sorry, he had turned 13. Yeah.
00:13:46 – Rico Figliolini
How was he?
00:13:50 – Katherine Lafourcade
He was in an artificially induced coma at that point because he just needed to be on life support. He was totally unaware of what was going on. We were watching him, we had no concept of what was happening. It was so beyond the realms of anything you’ve ever seen or take a moment because it was a lot. It was very, very, very difficult.
00:14:11 – Rico Figliolini
And he has siblings too right?
00:14:13 – Katherine Lafourcade
He has an older sister, yeah and she…
00:14:15 – Rico Figliolini
How’d she take that?
00:14:17 – Katherine Lafourcade
She just watched him like we did, you know, in a coma with his body attached to tubes and, you know, with the machine breathing for him. And it was just a case of hoping. And sometimes it was minute by minute. It was very much, you know, there is nothing but what’s happening right now. You know, and you look at the doctors, a bit like the movies, and you just say to them, do everything you can. But you can see that they’re not sure. You know, there was…
00:14:41 – Rico Figliolini
Which, do you mind me asking which hospital this was?
00:14:44 – Katherine Lafourcade
It was in Lausanne. It was near to the, it was the hospital, the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Lausanne, which is the hospital, the University Hospital of Lausanne. Luckily, they’re super well equipped. They have staff that are amazing. And without a shadow of a doubt, those people saved his life. He’s still in contact with some of them. I’m still in contact with some of them. Yes. I mean, there’s a bond there that goes beyond sort of parent, sorry the patient caregiver.
00:15:05 – Rico Figliolini
It’s almost like savior or something.
00:15:12 – Katherine Lafourcade
Oh yeah. I mean, I clearly and we’re still in contact because, so I mean his story was, I mean it’s difficult to do it chronologically. But he was in a very, very bad space. He received a ton of blood transfusions. That surgery in itself he hemorrhaged. There were times when he was on the machine, the machine kind of, it keeps you alive but it also destroys the blood. Blood doesn’t like going into anything sort of machine based. So he was, one time he was lacking so much in volume that they pressed the panic switch. The alarms were blaring and everybody rushed in and they were, they got syringes of blood that were this fat and they were pushing it into his system to try and get the volume of his blood up. I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, it really felt like it was an out of body experience.
00:15:58 – Rico Figliolini
Well, you were learning also quite a bit.
00:16:00 – Katherine Lafourcade
Learning a lot about what happens behind the scenes, you know, most people never get, and I’m glad most people will never see that. But honestly, the perspective, I was just, I was sad at that point because all I wanted to do was give blood, not to my son directly, but my husband and I, we thought, let’s do something to help someone else who might be in this situation. And we couldn’t. So it felt, it felt rough. You’re already helpless. Then the one thing you think that you might be able to do, you can’t just because of these rules that are in place. So it was frustrating. He, by some miracle or other, came through. We stopped treating the leukemia. I mean, we were just kind of getting him through the infection.
00:16:36 – Rico Figliolini
How old was he at that point?
00:16:38 – Katherine Lafourcade
So he was in the coma for, I think, just over a month. He missed Christmas, New Year, woke up in January the next year, had a tracheotomy at that point, so he didn’t have a voice, woke up not knowing what had happened during this whole blacked out period. So I’d taken photos which was weird but then it was actually good to be able to show him what he’d been through. You know that whole blank space. For me also I think I needed to somehow document what was going on, make sense of it. And then he had to start with physical therapy because he was just a skinny body. The muscle wastage is crazy, in a matter of weeks he was just a tiny little frail thing and he could just sit up. And then he had to learn how to stand up again and then he had to learn how to walk again and get some muscle strength and very, very long process, but he came through it. And again, it was down to his willpower because as a parent, the one thing you want to do is take all of that. Even the cancer, I said to him, you know, I want to do, I would do this for you. There’s not a part of me that doesn’t want to swap places right now, but I can’t. Unfortunately, you’ve got to do this and we’re a team and I will help you in any way I can, but the strength has got to come from inside of you. So he’s, he’s.
00:17:48 – Rico Figliolini
So you were there quite a bit of time.
00:17:50 – Katherine Lafourcade
I didn’t leave the hospital for lots and lots of months. I slept upstairs in a consultation room because I just couldn’t bear to not be there. And when they’re in the ICU, there’s no space for a parent to have a bed there. It’s not made for that. So I would just go upstairs, my little suitcase and come back. I used to read to him when he was in the coma, just read because I didn’t know what to do. And apparently people can hear you when they’re in a coma. So I don’t know. Sometimes his blood rate, his heart rate would go up a little bit. And when I would read, it would go back down. And the nurses said, it’s because your voice is calming. He’s heard it from before he was born. And I was like, I don’t know, but I’m going to go with that because I felt like I was doing something, you know, and at that time that was all I could do, so.
00:18:31 – Rico Figliolini
Did you, you had people supporting you too?
00:18:33 – Katherine Lafourcade
Yes, I was, yeah. I mean, I didn’t, my family came over from England because all my family was in England, but. We had friends, we had people in the community that helped. And the staff at the hospital are also, you know, they’re the angels because they do this for a living. And I was lucky my employer, even at the time I didn’t lose my employment, they were just more concerned about me and my son. So, and, you know, it just, my husband and I, it just really sort of soldered us together and in an even tighter bond to have to go through something as quite as crazy as that.
00:19:03 – Rico Figliolini
And I would imagine European healthcare is a little different.
00:19:06 – Katherine Lafourcade
It is different, yes. And I think had it have happened here, I’m not quite sure the costs that would have been involved because this healthcare system is quite different. Switzerland’s also private, but a lot of it was taken care of. There were some financial burdens, but there are also charities that try and help with that kind of thing because it’s a lot for families to have to go through.
00:19:24 – Rico Figliolini
So once he came out of the coma, once he came into remission. He’s been in remission for five years?
00:19:29 – Katherine Lafourcade
He’s been in remission for five years, yeah.
00:19:31 – Rico Figliolini
That’s a key mark.
00:19:32 – Katherine Lafourcade
It is. Absolutely. So after he came out of the coma, that was when we were entertaining the coming to the US and we had to make sure that was all going to be okay that the treatment, because the treatment was going to continue. So we did. We went through all the stages. Were the doctors okay with us moving here? The answer was yes. Did the insurance cover the move here? The answer was yes. So then we had the, do we do it or do we not do it? And when we asked both children. Theo was absolutely, yes, I want to go there right now. He needed to kind of turn the page. And I think the move here was so great for all of us, actually. And we didn’t know at the time. It was kind of a leap of faith because we didn’t know what we were getting into. It was a big change at quite a critical time. But we decided to make it happen. And he was still having treatments that when we got here, still having chemotherapy.
00:20:19 – Rico Figliolini
Do you, which, if you don’t mind me asking again, which hospital are you doing?
00:20:22 – Katherine Lafourcade
So it was the Children’s Right. Yeah. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Scottish Right Hospital. Amazing.
00:20:30 – Rico Figliolini
You felt really good with them too?
00:20:32 – Katherine Lafourcade
They were phenomenal. They’d read his file that was not a normal file and they knew things that were so, such detail. I was like, these people have read everything. So I trusted them blindly. There were no complications in the last part of his treatment. He did, he was still having treatment though when COVID hit. So that was scary.
00:20:53 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah, I would imagine infection or something like that.
00:20:54 – Katherine Lafourcade
Exactly. Lungs, I was just, I had visions of the ECMO and the coma and I was like, I just, I don’t know if I can, I don’t know if I can cope going back there. He had the vaccine very early. He caught COVID, but a long time afterwards and it was fine. And so in May of 2020, you were referring to the milestone. So he finished his treatment, May 2020. Had lots of checkups. It’s not something you just finish and you’re good. They still want to make sure that you’re okay. And they get less and less frequent. And then May of 2025, so next month, the biggest milestone yet, five years. Five years after the last chemo, five years of remission, still doing well. Now at college. So he did his high school. He arrived here as a freshman at high school. He did his four years. And now he’s a freshman at college at UGA.
00:21:42 – Rico Figliolini
What does he want to be?
00:21:44 – Katherine Lafourcade
He wants to be a pediatric oncologist.
00:21:47 – Rico Figliolini
Inspiration from the weirdest places.
00:21:49 – Katherine Lafourcade
Yes, yeah. I mean, clearly it changed him fundamentally. It changed all of us. I mean, there’s no way that life is the same.
00:21:56 – Rico Figliolini
I can’t even imagine that. I can’t imagine a child. I mean, I have three kids. I cannot imagine what you went through.
00:22:03 – Katherine Lafourcade
Yeah, it was a lot. And it’s still just under the surface, even if it’s five years. And the diagnosis was even before that. But some of it is just so, yeah, it will never not be an emotional subject. And that’s why I want to do things to give back, things to help. And that’s where we get back into the blood drive.
00:22:21 – Rico Figliolini
That’s right. So you started wanting to do that through the chamber.
00:22:25 – Katherine Lafourcade
Exactly. 2023, we realize we can give blood. My husband and I are like, this is amazing. We have wanted to do this since 2017. We finally can. We both give blood. And then I’m like, you know what? I think that most people in the French, also British and Irish, I’m working for the French chamber. I am convinced that most people don’t know the rules have changed. There will be people that have given blood in France or given blood in various parts of their lives, but feel that, well, have been told that they can’t. This is huge. We need to get the message out.
00:22:55 – Rico Figliolini
So that’s what you’re doing.
00:22:56 – Katherine Lafourcade
So I’m like, now I can use my professional role as the executive director of the chamber. I can talk to the French population of Atlanta with the consulate, the consul general of France, with all the other French entities and just get the word out there. You guys can give blood. I think blood donating also dipped during COVID. Obviously it was a very strange world. And I think maybe people that used to give haven’t got back into it. I have seen firsthand blood donating saves lives. My son would not be here today without people, strangers that gave their blood that he got. Now I can’t find them personally, a lot of blood. I mean, I think he had over 50 transfusions. And I’m throwing that number out there a little bit randomly because I can’t remember, but a lot of transfusions. So for me personally, this is huge. And I just want to inspire people to think about it. Think if you’ve never given, give it a go. If you have given and it’s been a long time, revisit it. One blood donation can save up to three lives, which is, you know.
00:24:00 – Rico Figliolini
So tell people, because some people that don’t know what it takes to donate blood. How long does it take? How much are they donating?
00:24:09 – Katherine Lafourcade
Yeah, it’s really not hard. So the blood drives that we do here at the Curiosity Lab, they’re run by the Red Cross, the American Red Cross. So I offered myself up as a blood leader. So I put together the place, the location, we figure out all the logistics and I invite everyone. And then the blood cross come with all of their staff, with the beds, all the material they set up here. I just basically get as many appointments as I can because we have a goal of units that we want to collect during the drive. The regular blood donating is pretty quick. Funny things, it depends on how quickly it drips out. Some people it’s super fast. Some people it’s a bit slower. It’s going to be like 10, 15 minutes around that. Nothing more. It’s not long, no. And it’s no worse than just having the needle stick that you have when you go to the doctor once a year. Realistically, I know the needle stays in there, but it’s the. It’s not worse. You know, you’re just sitting there and then afterwards you get snacks, you get drinks, you get, we get, we have a company that sponsor Werfen give us donuts to eat afterwards. So, and it’s a real sense of community. And I know a lot of people don’t like needles. A lot of people, it’s like a horrible idea to have this thing in your arm and see blood. I would advise just don’t look. I used to hate blood, but honestly, after I went, what I went through with my son. You kind of just get hardened to it. And you know what you think to yourself? I don’t like this, but what if I’m saving someone’s life?
00:25:35 – Rico Figliolini
For sure.
00:25:36 – Katherine Lafourcade
What if it was my child? What if it was my parent? What if it was someone in my family? Wouldn’t I just hope that other people have gone beyond to give it the best shot they can to donate? So this is, you know.
00:25:49 – Rico Figliolini
So for those, I’m bad about it. I mean, I’m just, I can faint after a needle unfortunately. They have to put a butterfly needle, I think it’s called and maybe because it’s just smaller and easier. But you’ve just gotta fast the night before, this is the normal thing the blood test that you have at your normal physical but otherwise you don’t have to fast.
00:26:09 – Katherine Lafourcade
No, no fasting at all. No you need to eat well, drink well. There’s lots of advice that they will give you beforehand to set yourself up for success.
00:26:16 – Rico Figliolini
For the ones that don’t want to roll up their sleeves and donate blood, what can they do?
00:26:21 – Katherine Lafourcade
They can spread the word. They can talk to their colleagues, their family, their neighbors, their communities, their clubs, whatever it is. Spreading the word is the hardest thing. We don’t have big means to go publicly telling everybody about this blood drive, but it’s going to be on World Blood Donor Day, the next one, June 14th, exactly. It’s a Saturday, 11:30 to 4:30. You can book your slot.
00:26:46 – Rico Figliolini
It’s going to be here?
00:26:47 – Katherine Lafourcade
It’s going to be here, in this room, yeah. You can book your appointment. They will take walk-ins, but if you want to be taken at a specific time, better to take that appointment option because then you’ll have more of a chance of knowing when you’re going to be taken. If you don’t know your blood group, you’ll find out.
00:27:01 – Rico Figliolini
Will they tell you on the spot?
00:27:02 – Katherine Lafourcade
Not on the spot. Afterwards, they will tell you what blood group you are, which could be useful.
00:27:06 – Rico Figliolini
It’s kind of funny because most people might not know that. Because when you do your blood test at the hospitals, they don’t do that. Unless you ask them specifically to test for it.
00:27:10 – Katherine Lafourcade
Yeah, exactly. A lot of people won’t ever know their blood group. They will also do screening for pre-diabetes at the moment for free. So that’s also an additional thing, which is kind of cool. You know, you can figure out if you’re maybe heading towards something a bit less healthy and you can maybe take, you know the steps to correct it.And they have an app, you will know which hospital your blood was used at. Yes, they track it and you get a little alert and then you get a little heart. And I have a map where all the, and I, so I tend to give platelets but that’s a, we’re not going to get into. That it’s a bit more, it’s longer, a bit more complicated but similar process. My platelets have gone to Savannah. They’ve gone down to Mobile, Alabama, to Birmingham, to all kinds of places. And you can track that on a map.
00:28:05 – Rico Figliolini
It’s almost like you’re gamifying the whole thing.
00:28:07 – Katherine Lafourcade
Well, I mean, a little bit, but isn’t it nice to know that someone in that hospital has received something that I gave? You know, that’s the whole point. It makes it more real.
00:28:16 – Rico Figliolini
Yes, it does.
00:28:16 – Katherine Lafourcade
I know where it’s gone. Yeah. Exactly. It’s just gone into the ether and you don’t know. Whereas I think to have that follow up and then there’s points and they’ve kind of really, sometimes they give you t-shirts. I should have been wearing a t-shirt today. I didn’t think about it. I went with the French shirt, the French logo. But no, there’s little giveaways and it’s just about community. And it’s about, you know, what you can do on a very personal, small level to help somebody that’s in need. Because if you’re getting a blood transfusion. There’s something not great. Surgery, childbirth, accidents, cancer patients. You know, there’s a whole host of people that need blood. And honestly, if they need blood, they’re not in a great way. So we all rely on other people, strangers, to help in that scenario.
00:29:01 – Rico Figliolini
And there’s not enough blood out there.
00:29:02 – Katherine Lafourcade
Never enough. No, there’s always a shortage. Bad weather can affect it. You know, environments, holidays, all sorts of things can really affect the supply. And they need a, you know, a flow of donors and people to give regularly.
00:29:17 – Rico Figliolini
So where can they go to?
00:29:19 – Katherine Lafourcade
They can basically, I’m trying to think the easiest way would be to look on the events page of our website.
00:29:25 – Rico Figliolini
Of the chamber website?
00:29:27 – Katherine Lafourcade
Yes. So our website is FACC. So French American Chamber of Commerce. The letters FACC-Atlanta.com. And then there’s an events section. And in that event section, there is a link to the blood drive.
00:29:41 – Rico Figliolini
Excellent. And we’ll have the link in the podcast notes as well. So they should do it as soon as possible.
00:29:47 – Katherine Lafourcade
Yes. Yes. Enrollment is from now. I’m just going to be pushing it out. And, you know, yeah, just spread the word. That’s my ask.
00:29:53 – Rico Figliolini
And I almost don’t want to say this, but there’s also another date a little further away.
00:29:57 – Katherine Lafourcade
Yes, in September.
00:29:58 – Rico Figliolini
In September. So if you’re on vacation. You could do the September date.
00:29:59 – Katherine Lafourcade
We’re doing three this year. We set the target of three drives this year. We might do it quarterly next year. But yeah, that’s the aim is just to keep spreading the word.
00:30:09 – Rico Figliolini
Right. And it’s going to be done here at Curiosity Lab. And the 14th is what? What day is it?
00:30:15 – Katherine Lafourcade
Saturday.
00:30:15 – Rico Figliolini
It’s Saturday. There’s no excuse.
00:30:15 – Katherine Lafourcade
Exactly. Yes.
00:30:18 – Rico Figliolini
Okay. Eat your fill. Eat a good breakfast. Come on down and give some blood.
00:30:22 – Katherine Lafourcade
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Make a difference.
00:30:24 – Rico Figliolini
Yes, for sure. So we’ve been here talking with Katherine Lafourcade, if I’m pronouncing that. Thanks. My last name’s Figliolini, and I mess that up sometimes. But I appreciate you spending time with me and talking about your son, Theo, and the experience that you went through.
00:30:41 – Katherine Lafourcade
You’re welcome.
00:30:41 – Rico Figliolini
Thank you, guys.
00:30:42 – Katherine Lafourcade
Thanks for having me.
00:30:43 – Rico Figliolini
No, no. Thanks, Katherine. Thank you, everyone.
Related
Arts & Literature
From Food Creations to Handmade Jewelry: Wesleyan Kids Prep for Artist Market 2025 [Podcast]
Published
2 months agoon
April 7, 2025In this episode of Peachtree Corners Life, host Rico Figliolini spotlights three remarkable student artists featured in this year’s Wesleyan Artist Market. Eighth graders Kimberly Wang and Nika Jensen, along with sixth grader Carter Jensen, share their creative journeys—ranging from edible art like fruit jellies and peppermint bark to handmade jewelry and custom-designed bags.
Kimberly talks about her love for food art and balancing sweetness with fruity freshness, while Nika and Carter discuss building a jewelry business that also gives back—donating proceeds to families in the Philippines. This isn’t just an artist market; it’s a showcase of purpose-driven, globally inspired young talent. The event runs April 25–26 at Wesleyan School and is open to the public.
Podcast Takeaways:
- Kimberly Wang creates handmade edible treats, balancing flavor and freshness for the show.
- Nika and Carter Jensen co-run a jewelry and fashion accessory business, inspired by global travel and cultural experiences.
- Nika donates part of her proceeds to support families in the Philippines.
- All three students are deeply involved in extracurriculars—from musicals, marching band, math club, and academic bowl.
- The Wesleyan Artist Market features 24 student artists and over 70 professionals—open to the public April 25–26.
Timestamp:
00:02:19 – Student intros and extracurricularsÂ
00:03:06 – First-time participants and motivations for joiningÂ
00:04:13 – Kimberly’s edible art and recipe testing processÂ
00:05:16 – Nika and Carter’s jewelry and bag design businessÂ
00:07:06 – The reward of watching people enjoy your creationsÂ
00:08:20 – Donating art profits to support families in the PhilippinesÂ
00:10:39 – Future aspirations in medicine and law, with art as a passionÂ
00:12:06 – Behind-the-scenes logistics of preparing for the marketÂ
00:13:25 – Global travel inspiration: 73 countries and counting
00:17:19 – Where the students draw artistic inspirationÂ
00:20:04 – Custom requests: From peppermint bark to Lego earringsÂ
00:21:16 – Anticipation and excitement for this year’s marketÂ
00:22:29 – Reflections on Wesleyan and the artist experienceÂ
Transcript:
00:00:01 – Rico Figliolini
Hey, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life. We have a great set of guests today. Because of the upcoming Wesleyan Artist Market, we thought we’d do some interviews with student artists. Three of the 24 that are going to be at Wesleyan Artist Market. So they’re with me here today. So we’re going to get right into that shortly. I just want to say thank you to our corporate sponsors. So I want to say thank you to EV Remodeling, Inc., based here in Peachtree Corners. The owner is Eli. Him and his family live here. They’re great. They do a lot of design work, design your space. Essentially, any home remodeling you need from whether it’s your kitchen, your bathroom, or a whole house remodel, or even an addition to your home, think about it, whatever you need, Eli can handle. So check them out. Go to evremodelinginc.com and find out how they can design your space and your life. Our next sponsor just came on, and they’re Vox Pop Uli. I want to thank them for joining us as well. They deal with all sorts of things you can imagine putting your logo on, similar to a little bit about what these kids do, right? They’re creating artwork. They’re creating a brand for themselves. And so this is what Vox Pop Uli does, right? They’ll take your brand and bring it to life. Essentially, anything that you can think of that would go on apparel, whether it’s sweaters or T-shirts or wherever you want to put your brand engraving, your logo, what object you want to put it on, even vehicle wraps. So if you’ve got a truck, you want to put a whole wrap around it, check them out because they can do that. They’re here in Peachtree Corners and they’re called Vox Pop Uli. So visit their website. I’ll have the links in the show notes as well. So thank you guys. I appreciate your support. So now let’s get right into it. Let me introduce our three artists, great Wesleyan students. Can’t wait to start talking to them. We have Kimberly Wang first on your left, on my left, and Nika and her brother Carter Jensen, who work together creating the artwork they do. So I’m going to ask you guys just to, you know, give me a little background. Tell me who you are, your grade, what you do, extracurricular, stuff like that. This way our audience can get to know a little bit more about you. So let’s start with Kimberly Wang. Hey, Kimberly.
00:02:19 – Kimberly Wang
My name is Kimberly Wang. I’m in eighth grade this year, and outside of Artist Market, I do marching band, and I also do the musical production this year, which is Matilda.
00:02:31 – Rico Figliolini
Excellent. What about Nika? How about you?
00:02:34 – Nika Jensen
I’m also in eighth grade. My name is Nika Jensen, and apart from doing the Artist Market, I do cross country. I’m also in Matilda this year, and I also do math counts, which is a math club.
00:02:47 – Rico Figliolini
Okay, cool. And Carter?
00:02:49 – Carter Jensen
Hello, my name is Carter Jensen. I’m in the sixth grade. And outside of the artist market, I do academic pool and I also do basketball.
00:03:00 – Rico Figliolini
Excellent. Alright, cool. So have you guys ever done the artist market before? Is this the first time?
00:03:06 – Kimberly Wang
This is my second year doing it this year.
00:03:08 – Rico Figliolini
Second?
00:03:10 – Nika Jensen
Yeah, this is our first year because we’re new students this year.
00:03:13 – Rico Figliolini
Alright, cool. What inspired you to get into it, Nika?
00:03:17 – Kimberly Wang
Well, I had my own business before we came to Wesleyan and so I thought that the artist market is a good way to like show my business to other people in our community. So yeah.
00:03:30 – Rico Figliolini
And you brought in your brother Carter to help you with?
00:03:35 – Nika Jensen
Yes, sir. He’s also part of the business.
00:03:39 – Rico Figliolini
Alright cool. Okay so, Kimberly. Food. Food is art, right? I’m sure your mom would probably say, it’s food, just eat it. But you’re playing with your food, essentially. What they used to tell you not to do, right? So when you create your food art, what do you think about? How do you go through this? How do you choose what you do and what do you exactly do?
00:04:13 – Kimberly Wang
So this year, I am making fruit jellies and peppermint bark. And when I think about what creations I want to make for the artist market, I go online and I look through like, what are some popular desserts that a lot of people like? And once I like choose my items, then I go through
the recipe and then I do a lot of trial and errors to make sure that like the products are like healthy and they taste well.
00:04:42 – Rico Figliolini
So they have to be edible, right? Because this is edible art?
00:04:45 – Kimberly Wang
Definitely, yes.
00:04:46 – Rico Figliolini
So are you eating a lot of the edible art before you get to what you need?
00:04:50 – Kimberly Wang
Not really. I don’t usually taste a lot of the food. I let my family taste it.
00:04:56 – Rico Figliolini
Ah, good. I like that. Yes. Get them to participate. Cool. So edible art, that’s one way of doing it. Jewelry, that’s something else, right? Wearable. How do you guys, Nika, Carter, how do you get to the place of what you do?
00:05:16 – Nika Jensen
So I started my business when I was 11 years old and it started like I got my first jewelry making kit and I kind of just expanded from there. So like I usually use Amazon to search and find like the prettiest designs like of earrings and pendants and get opinions from other people like my mom and my family to see like if they think it’s like wearable and if they like it. So I browse on Amazon for a while and I find like the best and high quality products and then I hand make them at home usually like every day after I come home from school so and my brother he does something else and he can tell you about that.
00:06:01 – Carter Jensen
I, my sister, she got a Cricut machine for, like, her 12th birthday, I think. And started making these, like, iron-on bags with the Cricut machine and, like, making them based on, like, Georgia and, like, Wesleyan and designing it based on fashion.
00:06:19 – Rico Figliolini
Alright. Cool. So let’s get back to Kimberly. The food that you do. Do you have particular flavors you like? Do you have particular areas that you stay in?
00:06:33 – Kimberly Wang
So this year I’m trying out like something more sweet with chocolate. But last year I definitely went for more of like the fruity side. And I think I like to keep it like a balance. So that way one is not overpowering the other. My personal favorite will probably be fruit because it’s healthy. And I mean, it just tastes good in general.
00:06:56 – Rico Figliolini
Okay. Alright cool. What’s the most rewarding part that you can think of, of making edible art?
00:07:06 – Kimberly Wang
Well, I mean definitely like you said before you get to eat a lot of food. I mean, I did say before that I don’t eat a lot of the creations I make, but sometimes I still do eat it. And so I think it’s also really rewarding to see like people try out your creations and see like their reactions to what they think of it.
00:07:27 – Rico Figliolini
So when, I know I’ve spoken to other artists when they sell their artwork like paintings or stuff like that they get a chance to see it sometimes when the fan that bought it if you will, would send them a picture of where they hung it right? Yours disappears right?
00:07:45 – Kimberly Wang
Yeah, exactly.
00:07:47 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah I guess, there’s no way to, short of doing a selfie with it or taking pictures of it, there’s no there’s no permanency to it so how does that feel?
00:07:57 – Kimberly Wang
I mean well as long as the people enjoy it that’s good. And I mean I think mainly it’s about like the memory that you have of having the food and if you like it then it stays as a good memory for you and if you don’t then I mean you can always try out different things.
00:08:20 – Rico Figliolini
Okay. Nika, Carter, as far as the jewelry goes the, you’ve used it to raise money to support children in the philippines? yes
00:08:29 – Nika Jensen
Yes sir.
00:08:31 – Rico Figliolini
Is that, is that how you started this when you were 11? Is that the reason?
00:08:35 – Kimberly Wang
No, so I was like 11 during the pandemic. So I was always looking for a way to express my creativity. And so that’s how I started my own business. And so I was selling at my uncle’s pharmacy and I was saving up the money to use for like college or for like other events later on in my life. But this last year and a half before this school year, we were living in the Philippines. And so I was really touched by all of the families there. And we even did something similar where we gave out food and canned goods over Christmas to poor families there. So that just
really touched me. And so ever since we got back to America, I’ve been donating part of my profits to other families in the Philippines.
00:09:24 – Rico Figliolini
Carter, did you end up going on that trip as well?
00:09:28 – Carter Jensen
Yeah, I was with her. We stayed there for about a year and a half. We also did schooling there.
00:09:36 – Rico Figliolini
It’s interesting brothers and sisters, I have three kids and you know growing up brothers and sisters always there could be dynamics there. So how do you get along? Do you ever say to your sister, I don’t know about that. You know that might not look as good, that might not sell. Do you give good feedback? I mean how do you praise her or how do you work together?
00:09:58 – Carter Jensen
She’s more of the leader of the business so like I usually just like try to like agree with her and like yeah.
00:10:12 – Rico Figliolini
Alright that’s cool well you need a leader of the pack sometimes right? So Nika the artwork that you do, you know this is part of what you do you’ve mentioned other things you do right? I know you’re young, you all are, you know you’re not old enough to really think well maybe you are to really think what you want to do with your life right? Is art something that you want to keep as part of what you’re doing in your life?
00:10:39 – Nika Jensen
It’s definitely something that’s of great value to me, but I kind of want to pursue the medical field, but art is also really important to me.
00:10:49 – Rico Figliolini
Okay. Sounds good. Same question to Kimberly. What about you? How do you feel about the work you do?
00:10:57 – Kimberly Wang
I definitely enjoy making food, but like Nika said, I was also really interested in the medical field. And so like I’m not really sure if I’m going to continue pursuing this. But I mean it’s definitely brought me a lot of joy while doing food art.
00:11:15 – Rico Figliolini
Okay. Medical field both of you, that’s cool. What about Carter? How about you? 00:11:19 – Carter Jensen
I kind of like, I like doing art it’s one way to like express your creativity as my sister said. But I also kind of, I’m not really sure what I want to do when I grow up, maybe be a lawyer.
00:11:33 – Rico Figliolini
Okay. Well, artwork gives you a chance, right, to play a little bit, to be able to also see how people, like Kimberly, like you said about how when people see your food or taste your food and your food art, if you will, and it gives you a chance to see how people appreciate what you’re doing, I think, right? The challenges of making food art and keeping it fresh and making sure you’re going to deliver it on the right way I guess at the Wesleyan artist market, how do you how do you handle that part of it?
00:12:06 – Kimberly Wang
So for me the night before each day of the selling I would stay up really late and I make all my products so they’re all fresh and they’re all new. Because I want the best for the people that are eating the food because I don’t want anything to go bad overnight and so I make sure that it’s always new products and I make it, yeah.
00:12:32 – Rico Figliolini
We don’t have the same issue with the jewelry that you do, Nika. So that could last forever, right? But putting it together, sourcing the supplies, right, of what you do, the logistics of it, I guess. How do you handle that? Like getting all the materials together? Do you order it all on Amazon?
00:12:52 – Nika Jensen
Yeah, I order like 99% of all of my things from Amazon. And then since I already have the materials shipped to me, then all I have to do is just create them from my house. So it’s easier for me than having to go out and buy supplies at stores.
00:13:11 – Rico Figliolini
Sounds good. What inspires you as far as jewelry goes? I know that you said you look online to see other things and what the trend is. So where do you find most of your trends? Is it just on Amazon or is it social media, other places?
00:13:25 – Nika Jensen
I kind of observe other people and like what they wear and also social media. And I get a lot of inspiration also from like nature and from like my travels. We’ve been to a lot of countries in the past five years, 173 countries.
00:13:44 – Rico Figliolini
How many?
00:13:45 – Nika Jensen
I’m sorry, not 173, 73 countries.
00:13:49 – Rico Figliolini
73 countries?
00:13:50 – Nika Jensen
Yes, sir.
00:13:51 – Rico Figliolini
That you’ve been to in how many years? I can’t even wrap my head around that. How did you even do that? Teleport? I mean, how did you do that? Wow. What is your heritage, if you don’t mind me asking?
00:14:12 – Nika Jensen
I’m half Filipino. My brother and I are half Filipino. And then my father is part Danish and then also American.
00:14:21 – Rico Figliolini
Do you speak any languages?
00:14:23 – Nika Jensen
I speak the language of the Philippines called Tagalog and then English. And I’m learning Spanish.
00:14:30 – Rico Figliolini
Really? Okay. Kimberly, how about you?
00:14:33 – Kimberly Wang
So my mom is Taiwanese and my dad is Chinese. So I speak Chinese, English. I’m learning French and I’m learning Korean.
00:14:43 – Rico Figliolini
Really? Wow. Okay. Speak Mandarin, is it? Okay. My son was learning that for a year and he was, it’s a tough language to learn. But I’m sure being able to travel for example Nika, to be able to see other other countries and inspiration from those countries. What of the 73, 75 countries you visited what would you say the top five would be for that type of inspiration? Can you pick that up?
00:15:16 – Nika Jensen
I think so. I really like Argentina just because it’s so unique and the culture is just so strong there. Like you really feel so immersed just when you like step into the country. I like Italy, not only because of the food, but that’s also where I got a lot of inspiration for my jewelry. Just like the glass in Venice, like the Murano glass, like that’s also a really big inspiration. In Turkey, that’s when I first like found my interest in jewelry because there was, we went to this bead store and there was like thousands of different beads and I got to like choose different charms and like experiment with creating jewelry. So Turkey, Argentina, Italy, and then I have to give it to the
Philippines, obviously, because we lived there for so long. And then that’s hard. What do you think, Carter?
00:16:12 – Carter Jensen
I like India because I really like butter chicken. Also like Italy because I like pizza and pasta.
00:16:27 – Rico Figliolini
Yes, can’t get any better pizza than Italy, that’s for sure.
00:16:30 – Carter Jensen
Yeah, it’s really good there. And I also like Japan because it’s very futuristic and it’s like…
00:16:38 – Rico Figliolini
Is it?
00:16:39 – Carter Jensen
Yeah, it’s like a new environment and it’s like…
00:16:45 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah, cool. I can’t wait I think where, I think we may be heading there in July so that would be fun. I’ve never been so that would be interesting. Cool so with the artwork, with the inspiration, with the journey that you guys have been on, do you think that, are there any artists it’s hard and food maybe unless it’s Gordon Ramsay or something, but do you draw any inspiration? Who do you draw inspiration from for the work for what you do? Let’s start with Kimberly.
00:17:19 – Kimberly Wang
I don’t really have a specific artist that I look up to but I do watch some cooking shows and some like dessert making shows and they always really inspire me so I feel like that’s what really led me into like starting food art. And so I was like, whoa, this is really cool. And so I was like, okay, let me try this. And so now I’m here and then I’m like, this is pretty fun.
00:17:49 – Rico Figliolini
Oh, okay. Carter, I know you’re not the main person doing the artwork, but what do you see when you’re working with your sister? How does that feel working with her, doing the stuff with her, the artwork? Whatever you’re doing with her, how you know what’s that journey feel like for a brother and his sister?
00:18:13 – Carter Jensen
It’s kind of relaxing doing artwork and like peeling off like the stickers on the bags
00:18:26 – Rico Figliolini
Okay, alright, that’s cool. Sister, how do you feel?
00:18:30 – Nika Jensen
Yeah I just enjoy anytime I’m like I get to make jewelry because I feel like it’s such like an important thing to me. And it also like my brother said it’s really relaxing and just like sitting in our home and just like making jewelry it’s like, it’s really fun for me.
00:18:48 – Rico Figliolini
Do you wear? I’m assuming you wear some of the stuff you make?
00:18:51 – Nika Jensen
No actually I don’t have my ears pierced. And so I just like making it and seeing my creations on other people.
00:19:00 – Rico Figliolini
Okay, cool. Kimberly, do you ever decide, I’ve got to make something, I want to eat something, do you ever decide to do that, or is it always just for the art?
00:19:10 – Kimberly Wang
I think mainly just for the art. Because, I mean, I do piano outside of school, and so most of my time is sucked into that. But, I mean, sometimes if I do want to make something, yeah, I’ll go for it. And I’ll try my best, but it might not be successful.
00:19:31 – Rico Figliolini
Have you ever been, have you ever designed anything custom design? Because someone requested it from you? Like has anyone ever asked Kimberly, has any anyone ever asked yeah can you make that for me? Like aside from the artwork you sell.
00:19:50 – Kimberly Wang
I don’t think so. I did get one request by a high schooler to make peppermint bark for him for his art and science class. But like other than that, no.
00:20:00 – Rico Figliolini
Okay. How about Nika? Have you ever had a request for jewelry?
00:20:04 – Nika Jensen
Yes, I have. So my mom was posting some of my creations on social media and someone reached out to me and she wanted lego earrings like so little like lego figurines as earrings. So I used some of my own legos and then we also bought some but I drilled a hole on top of their head and I had to stick a screw inside. I had to mail it to them. And then they sent me a picture of them wearing it.
00:20:42 – Rico Figliolini
It’s just the way you were describing it, drilling the hole in the head. It’s like, all right, well, that’s good. So there’s the art. You do anything for art, I guess. That’s good. Great. We’ve been showcasing and talking a lot about art here and food and stuff. What are you looking forward to this year’s Wesleyan Artist Market? What is it that’s looking forward? I mean, you have there’s
three of you out of 24 other students. Have you seen or talked to other students and what they’re doing for the show, for the market? What are you looking forward to?
00:21:16 – Nika Jensen
To me?
00:21:17 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah, sure. Let’s go with it.
00:21:18 – Nika Jensen
Okay. Yes. Kimberly and I are actually really good friends so we’ve been like talking with our other friends that are doing the artist market and we’re like you know what they’re selling and yeah. I’m just really excited because we’ve never my brother and I have never done something like this before so I think it’ll be a really good opportunity and it’ll be fun so.
00:21:39 – Rico Figliolini
Something wholly new. That’s good, a good experience. How about you Kimberly?
00:21:45 – Kimberly Wang
Ever since last year, I was really astonished by everything I saw, even if it was like the adult artists, but like the student artists, they were all so talented. I know like a few other people are making food art and people like Nika are making jewelry. And so I’m honestly really inspired and just really blown away by all the effort that everyone puts in.
00:22:13 – Rico Figliolini
Cool. Anything that I’ve not touched on, guys, that you want to share about, individually about what it takes to do what you’re doing or your experience at Wesleyan? Why don’t we start with Kimberly?
00:22:29 – Kimberly Wang
I don’t really have much. I feel like this was a really nice opportunity to be able to share what Wesleyan Artist Market is about and how students have been able to participate in it.
00:22:42 – Rico Figliolini
Cool. Nika?
00:22:43 – Nika Jensen
Yeah so my mom printed out pictures of our time in the philippines so this first one it’s all the bags of food that my old school donated to families in the philippines.
00:23:01 – Rico Figliolini
Excellent. Glad you printed those out.
00:23:03 – Nika Jensen
This is my old class. This was this year when I sent my profits back to the Philippines. And those are all the boxes of food and clothes that they get with that money.
00:23:16 – Rico Figliolini
Wow, you really did make a lot of money.
00:23:18 – Nika Jensen
Yes, sir.
00:23:19 – Rico Figliolini
That’s good. That’s great. And maybe at some point I’ll ask Camille on this, getting some pictures from you all of some of the artwork that you’ve done. I’d love to include that when we post the podcast as well. And if you have any social media where you post your artwork on, if it’s public, feel free. We’re going to be sharing this and we’ll be taking you all as well. I think we got everything covered. I mean, you’re all just unbelievable kids. You’re just doing great work. And I’m just like, it’s always great to talk to you, to Wesleyan students, just like, or to students that are motivated, put it that way, to do things. So glad to see that you’re doing all sorts of things and I still can’t wrap my head around 75 countries, I’m just still trying to think that just like in five years, I can’t even see doing that. But I want to thank you all for for joining me so this is Wesleyan Artist Market you all will be at and that’s April Friday the 25th from 10:00 – 7:00 pm and Saturday April 26 from 10:00 to 3:00 pm. We’ve been talking with Kimberly Wang, who does food art, edible food art, and Nika and her brother Carter Jensen, who do jewelry. Appreciate you guys being with me and being so talkative and just being good guests. So thank you all. Hang in there with me for a second. Everyone else, I want to say thank you again for joining us. You can find out more about Wesleyan Artist Market from just going to wesleyanschool.org or just Googling Wesleyan Artist Market it’ll pop up for you. And it’s open to the public, Friday and Saturday in April. So check them out. Visit the 24 students that are displaying their artwork as well, along with the over, I think it’s over 70 professional artists there. And thank you all from, I guess you’re in Wesleyan Wolf TV station too. So appreciate you doing that with me. So thank you everyone. Stay well.
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