“This wire mill was in operation from 1848 to 1998,” Greenspan said in a November TEDxYouth talk she gave in Brookline, Massachusetts. The company that owned the site, Gilbert & Bennett Manufacturing, was innovative in its day. “They invented wire mesh there,” she said, which “allowed people to open up their windows with their new screens and enjoy the warm summer air without letting mosquitoes and other bugs inside their homes.”

Today, alas, the mill “lies derelict” and is classified as a brownfield site, contaminated by decades of metal manufacturing. “We’re not creating jobs, we’re not generating tax revenue, and we’ve really lost our heritage of the industrious working spirit that once existed there,” she said.

But where others see decay and waste, Greenspan sees potential.

A Sustainable Approach to Redevelopment

Five years ago, she and several other students responded to a call from local artist Jane Philbrick to examine ways to clean up and redevelop the site. What began as a high-school internship has become a vocation for Greenspan. With Philbrick, she is now a co-founder of TILL, a community-based real estate development company that is looking to transform the old site into a live-work space that would be anchored by artists and include commercial businesses, such as an indoor farm. And they’re aiming to do it in a way that can be applied to other brownfield sites throughout the country.

In addition to her usual coursework as a full-time economics major at Fordham, Greenspan spends hours each week studying real estate law, urban farming, phytoremediation, carbon storage, and other subjects with practical applications in an environmentally challenged world. “I find it very purposeful to work on this,” she says.

She points out that the built environment is “the largest contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions”—which is why she and members of her TILL team plan to use solar panels and heat pumps as part of their development model. But they aren’t letting carbon emissions embodied in the built environment off the hook, either.

“The steel and concrete we manufacture to pave over surfaces and build buildings emit many tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year,” she said. “So the central question for our team became: Wouldn’t it be great if we could turn large-scale real estate development into sites for CO2 storage, as opposed to the carbon factories they currently are?”

She said they’re proposing to use plants to “capture excess carbon in our atmosphere,” and to build new structures with cross-laminated timber, a type of engineered wood that, like all wood products, can store atmospheric carbon.

A Campus Thought Leader

At Fordham, Greenspan is president and co-manager of St. Rose’s Garden, a community plot near Faculty Memorial Hall, and she’s a student leader in the Social Innovation Collaboratory, a group of faculty, students, and administrators who promote social entrepreneurship.

Carey Weiss, the director of sustainability initiatives at Fordham, describes Greenspan as “an outstanding student thought leader,” someone who “leverages her coursework and outside interests to continually seek new ideas and methodologies for creating a better society.”

Greenspan is grateful for the “supportive network of thoughtful, interdisciplinary thinkers” at Fordham. Studying economics has aided her immensely in her work with both TILL and the collaboratory, she said.

“I am not naturally inclined to think about economic policy. But my classes have forced me to consider other perspectives, to view a problem from many different angles.”

Looking beyond graduation, Greenspan’s heart—and head—are with TILL.

“What began as a problem specific to my community in Connecticut has transformed into a solution that can be applied globally to slow down climate change,” she said in her TEDxYouth talk. “There are 2 to 3 million brownfields in the U.S. alone. What if we turned every one of these brownfields into economically productive carbon storage sites? That is a world I want to live in.”

—Maureen Mackey, FCRH ’81

Watch Olivia Greenspan’s TEDxYouth talk

Masterson, a sophomore marketing major at the Gabelli School of Business, is the creator and owner of SNOX, a company that sells non-slip, non-skid grip socks and donates 100 percent of profits to charity.

“The socks are similar to what they have in hospitals, but it’s also a product everyone can use,” said Masterson, a Rhode Island native. “They’re great for yoga or Pilates, wearing around the house, or just using as regular socks.”

The idea for SNOX came when at the age of 14 Masterson developed a four-inch blood clot in her arm. She was admitted to the hematology floor of the Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), California, where most of the other patients were battling blood cancers.

She vowed that when she got better she would find a way to give back to the hospital and its young patients.

With the encouragement of her parents, who are both entrepreneurs, Masterson opted to launch a company so that she could donate on a regular basis. She thought back to the non-slip (“really unattractive”) socks that the hospital issued to all of its patients, and decided to make a more child- and teenage-friendly version.

“My parents raised me to be socially conscious, and we always did a lot of volunteer work,” she said. “At the time, I didn’t need an income for myself—I babysat, and it’s not as though I needed for anything—so I decided to give 100 percent of the profits away.”

Since launching SNOX (the combination of “sneaker” and “sock”), Masterson has donated nearly $9,000 to charities including CHOC, Teach For America, Water Aid, Rotary International, Action Against Hunger, and Hope For the Warriors. She uses the website Charity Navigator to ensure that she donates to only the most reputable organizations.

Last year she was one of 15 freshmen fellows in Fordham’s chapter of Social Impact 360 (formerly the Compass Fellowship). She participated in the fellowship’s national competition in Washington, D.C. and won a national Kenneth Cole Foundation grant. The $2,500 grant has helped her boost her inventory for the upcoming Christmas season.

This year, she is mentoring younger Social Impact 360 fellows and was also accepted to the Fordham Foundry, where she will continue to learn about growing her company.

“Currently, the socks are made overseas and then shipped through Amazon, since I can’t really be shipping out of my dorm room,” she said. “But I would love to start manufacturing in the United States, which I couldn’t do at first because it would have spiked the cost of my socks. I would also like to come out with more styles.”

She is particularly looking forward to using what she’ll learn in her businesses classes this year to help expand SNOX further.

“I’m taking financial accounting, marketing, business communications—all of the basics,” she said. “I love the mentorship and my professors are amazing. I’m really excited to start this year off well.”

But having a bulky contraption attached to her hip was cumbersome for an athlete like Logan. So, she did what any innovator would do: she made her own solution.

Logan, a rising junior at the Gabelli School of Business, is the founder of Pumpstash, LLC, a company that creates spandex shorts for women and girls with Type 1 diabetes who use an insulin pump and a continuous glucose monitor.

The shorts are fitted with pockets that keep the pump securely in place so that athletic apparel or skirts and dresses can be worn unimpeded.

The idea came to Logan while playing for her high school lacrosse team. During games and practice, her insulin pump would frequently get loose and bounce around.

“There were some options keep it attached, such as fanny packs or arm or thigh pouches—but nothing that would either stay in place or that me as a 16-year-old girl would be caught dead in,” said Logan, a business administration major with a minor in sustainable business. “I started to take it off during practice and games, but that wasn’t good for my numbers.”

Inspired by a pair of running pants that had a pocket to store keys, Logan wondered whether she could combine the sturdiness of her spandex lacrosse shorts with the convenience of a pocket.

She and her mom produced some sketches and took their design to a seamstress, who created the prototype. The Pumpstash shorts were born.

Logan is raising money through a Kickstarter campaign to fund the manufacturing process and get Pumpstash shorts onto the market.

“The Foundry has been a huge help and support system,” she said. “It’s a great community, because everyone has their own thing and their own expertise, so we’re not competing against one another. Everyone wants everyone else to succeed.”

The shorts are 79 percent polyester and 21 percent spandex and are made with antibacterial and wicking properties. A pocket in the back—which is made from a stronger material, 80 percent nylon and 20 percent spandex—keeps the pump secure, while a pocket in the front provides storage for ordinary objects such as keys or a cell phone. Ten percent of the profits from each pair sold is donated to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

It is important to continue funding research toward an eventual cure, Logan said. In the meantime, there are steps that can be taken to improve the quality of life for diabetics.

“Depending on how you look at it, I’m lucky or unlucky because I’ve never known life without it. It’s basically second nature to me,” she said. “But it can be really frustrating, especially if you’re in a situation that’s not a daily routine.”

Having that insider’s view of living with diabetes is at the heart of Pumpstash, Logan said, and is what drives her business model.

“It was important to me that this project be in the hands of someone dealing with [diabetes], rather than a bigger company. A big company isn’t necessarily thinking of little inconveniences that aren’t medically problematic but which could be fixed to make day-to-day life easier.”

Were you always a smart girl?

My parents raised my sister and me to have a strong work ethic. I definitely did well in school, but more than that, I was a really hard worker and passionate about learning. Smart isn’t a one-size-fits-all thing. What makes a smart girl smart is recognizing her passions and seeing the world for what it could be and not for what it is.

Why the need for Smart Girls Group?

Being smart isn’t as celebrated or valued for young women. If you’re smart, you’re considered power hungry or unfriendly or mean. The media doesn’t spotlight smart women enough. Even questions I get as a young woman starting a business are ones my guy entrepreneur friends would never be asked. I’ve been asked if I have a boyfriend, how I stay in shape—you would never ask a guy this! It has nothing to do with Smart Girls Group.

So I won’t ask you if you have a boyfriend, but do you find some guys feel threatened by you being a social entrepreneur at age 20?

It can be hard for men in general to understand Smart Girls Group, but they’re not the target market. I find time and again, people who are entrepreneurs, regardless of gender, are very supportive of me. I hope I pay it forward, too.

So is Smart Girls Group like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In but for millennials?

Lean In talks about what needs to happen for women in the work world as the end goal. Smart Girls Group has taken it one step further—not just leaning in to your work life, but stepping up for life, into whoever it is you want to be.

As a smart girl, you probably had your pick of colleges. Why Fordham?

A huge draw was being in New York and having access to whatever resources I could find here. I also needed a home where there was going to be strong female leadership. We have a female dean of the Gabelli School of Business, Donna Rapaccioli, which is so cool, and she has been unbelievably supportive, as have so many others. The Fordham Foundry (the University’s small-business incubator) has given me mentorship and helped me network and find funding. Fordham has invested in me. And the social aspect of Smart Girls, to help young women find their inner trailblazer, is very Jesuit-based. I think that’s also why Fordham is such a good fit for me.

You’re a marketing major with a concentration in communications and media management. Has that helped you in growing Smart Girls?

The best class I’ve ever taken has been my accounting class. Once you understand how money works, you can do anything. Another great course I took is Consumer Behavior, taught by Lerzan Aksoy, on how we perceive our customers, both our target audience and our advertisers.

What do you do for fun?

I’m here on a merit scholarship, so I have to keep my grades up, and Smart Girls takes up a lot of time, which I don’t mind—it’s my personal playground. My family lives 20 steps from the beach, so when I go home, I love to sail. On my bucket list is to take out a rowboat in Central Park.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Donna Cornachio.

A batch of basil is ready for harvest at a hydroponic greenhouse run by BrightFarms, a company with an innovative business model and a plan to bring urban agriculture to the supermarket.

Read “Fresh and Local,” David McKay Wilson’s feature story about BrightFarms and its CEO, Fordham alumnus Paul Lightfoot, LAW ’96.

One June morning at the sprawling BrightFarms greenhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Paul Lightfoot, LAW ’96, pulls a Styrofoam board bursting with arugula from its hydroponic home. Just three weeks after seeds for the popular salad green were germinated in the grooves of the board, the crop is ready for harvest. A day later, the arugula will be on sale in one of more than 100 A&P-brand supermarkets in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. It’s part of Lightfoot’s bold initiative to grow vegetables locally that need less water, require no pesticides, and have a carbon footprint considerably smaller than those greens raised by agribusiness giants out West.

Dressed in a striped oxford shirt and a floppy beige hat, Lightfoot beams when talking about growing 125 tons of produce a year with the latest in hydroculture technology.

“We’ve shown that we can grow produce on a commercial scale year-round,” he says, noting that the greenhouse turned a profit in its first year in operation. “Americans are making the connection between what they eat and their health. And locally grown has trumped organic in the marketplace. Consumers want to know where their food comes from.”

The 1.3-acre greenhouse in Lower Makefield Township, just west of the Delaware River on the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border, was built in a corner of the municipality’s 234-acre Patterson Farm. It’s the prototype for facilities the company wants to erect in urban areas throughout the country. Some, like the one in Lower Makefield, will be built on the ground, with a 15-inch-deep pool of nutrient-rich water set on an impermeable membrane and sided with cement walls. Others are designed for rooftops.

In June, BrightFarms signed a lease agreement with the District of Columbia, where the company plans to finance, build, and maintain a 120,000-square-foot greenhouse near the impoverished Anacostia neighborhood. The company has partnered with the supermarket chain Giant Food, which will distribute what’s grown to its 50 stores in the capital region. Lightfoot believes the site will become one of the world’s most productive urban farms.

BrightFarms is also working with the New York City Economic Development Corporation in the hopes of finding a suitable location to build, possibly in the South Bronx.

“We’ve found that every city has tons of space, once you leave the most sought-after neighborhoods,” Lightfoot says. “There are great opportunities if you are willing to go there.”

An Innovative Business Model

The BrightFarms concept builds on the increasing clout of the local-food movement, as consumers seek produce grown close to home and raised in an environmentally friendly manner. Locally grown food can also be tastier and more nutritious because growers don’t have to limit themselves to producing varieties hardy enough to survive a transcontinental journey. Lightfoot notes that 90 percent of America’s lettuce comes from California and Arizona, and gets trucked thousands of miles across the country to East Coast supermarkets.

“It’s no surprise that lettuce is prone to rotting before it’s purchased or right when people bring it home,” he said in January 2012 talk at a TEDx Manhattan event called Changing the Way We Eat. “This causes huge losses for supermarkets, and it makes my wife, who loves fresh baby spinach, unhappy. Which makes me unhappy.”

Shrinking the supply chain is one of the central benefits of the BrightFarms concept, with monetary and environmental costs of cross-country trucking significantly reduced.

“We need a revolution in the produce supply chain,” Lightfoot says. “More than half the cost of lettuce today is in the supply chain.”

The current system is also “industrialized and centralized to the point that it’s an enormous consumer of land, of water, of crude oil, and of natural gas,” he adds, noting that the extended drought in the Southwest underscores the need for change. “The growers out West have structural problems, with the water table there dropping fast. Their costs are skyrocketing, which makes us more competitive.”

BrightFarms was founded in 2006 by Ted Caplow, an environmental engineer who designed the Science Barge, which uses hydroponic methods to grow food on a vessel docked on the Hudson River in downtown Yonkers, New York. For nearly a decade, he’s been a leading advocate for the use of hydroponic methods to spur the growth of the urban agriculture movement. In 2010, he turned to Lightfoot to develop a strategy to help make his dream a reality.

Before joining BrightFarms, Lightfoot led two software companies, Mincron and Al Systems, that helped retailers move merchandise more efficiently from distribution centers to stores. At BrightFarms he decided to implement a business model popularized by the solar-power industry, in which solar firms negotiate long-term contracts with commercial electricity users to buy power the firms generate. The deals are called Power Purchase Agreements, or PPAs. Lightfoot wanted the supermarket industry to ink long-term contracts for produce.

He had some convincing to do. The industry had little experience with long-term fixed-price contracts. Venture capital firms, meanwhile, were leery because Lightfoot’s model lacked a track record. If BrightFarms succeeded, these investors would make money and their equity stake in the company would grow in value. But Lightfoot had to prove that his large-scale greenhouse project could turn a profit.

The Next Big Thing

By mid-2014, BrightFarms had produce purchase agreements valued at more than $100 million. These commitments have provided the financial stability to attract nearly $20 million in capital from investors betting that sustainable, locally sourced produce grown in high-tech greenhouses is the food industry’s next big thing.

Fast Company has recognized BrightFarms’ promise, naming it one of “The World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Food” for two years running. In March 2014, the magazine praised BrightFarms for “pulling gas-belching 18-wheelers off the road … cutting transportation costs and waste, lowering prices, and adding days to the shelf life of perishable foods.”

Caplow, who chairs BrightFarms’ board of directors, credits Lightfoot for his creativity, skill, and persistence in “unlocking a door for us in the supermarket industry.”

“Startups are not easy, and our business is not always simple,” he says, “but Paul has completely embraced the cause, constantly learning and correcting as we have grown, never giving up or taking ‘no’ for an answer.”

Colin Cathcart, associate professor of architecture at Fordham, has served as a consultant to BrightFarms. He says the company’s concept, with its large-scale urban greenhouses and long-term produce agreements, is attractive to consumers, retailers, and investors. “You can expect that others will copy his model,” he says. “They will have competitors.”

Better Food for Our Families

Developing urban agriculture wasn’t on Lightfoot’s radar screen when he arrived at Fordham Law School in 1993, after earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Lehigh University. He was the latest in a long line of family members who’ve matriculated at Fordham, including his father, an uncle, a grandfather, and his sister. He also met his wife, Karen Milhoua Lightfoot, LAW ’95, in the Law School library. They were married in 2001 at the University Church on the Rose Hill campus and now live in Briarcliff Manor, New York, with their three children: Amelia, Charley, and Annalise.

Lightfoot says law school taught him to consider every side of a difficult issue, a crucial skill for a social entrepreneur bent on creating new ways to develop a profitable business.

After law school, he was an associate at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. But two years later, as his interest waned in the practice of law and his father’s health deteriorated, he took a leave of absence to spend time with his dad in his dying days. He never returned to Cadwalader.

Instead, he began his life as an entrepreneur as CEO of Foodline, an online restaurant reservation platform that was introduced in 23 urban markets with the aid of $13 million Lightfoot raised in venture capital from such partners as American Express and Ticketmaster. When the 2001 dot-com bust dried up Foodline’s funding, Lightfoot discovered the field of supply-chain management. For the next decade, he built a business that devised strategies and software to improve the flow of merchandise from distribution centers to stores.

At the same time, he became increasingly focused on having his family eat healthier, moving “away from processed food,” he recalls, “into a more organic diet.” After connecting with Caplow, he decided to follow his passion. He began BrightFarms’ transformation into a leader in the sustainable-food movement inspired by the most local unit of all: his family.

“[My daughter] Amelia and I like to discuss how the most important ingredient in food is love,” he told attendees at the 2012 TEDx event, “and how you find love in the food someone grows or prepares for someone they care about personally.”

At the BrightFarms facility in Pennsylvania, Lightfoot takes a visitor for a tour through the climate-controlled greenhouse, which cost $2.8 million to build in 2013. The air temperature stays in the range of 68 to 72 degrees, with a Dutch computer system running the greenhouse’s fans, chillers, and heaters. On the roof a rainfall collection system conserves water for the 15-inch-deep hydroponic pool, which is controlled for acidity and infused with fertilizers, iron, and dissolved oxygen.

Growing there are arugula, basil, kale, and seven varieties of lettuce for BrightFarms’ Spring Mix and Asian Mix. Seeds are germinated over two days in the furrows of Styrofoam boards using a system developed in northern Italy. The boards are then placed in a line on the far side of the pool, which is divided into seven ponds. Farmers move the seedling-filled boards toward the near side of the ponds over three weeks.

Boards at the front are harvested at 6 a.m. six days a week, with the produce fed into a machine that cuts the stems and packages the lettuces and herbs in containers labeled “locally grown.” The packages are stored at 34 degrees as they await a truck to bring them short distances to regional supermarkets.

“We’re producing large quantities of food, which is good quality, and at low prices. We’re improving the supply chain.

“I’ve got three young children,” Lightfoot says, “and I want to leave them a better planet.”

—David McKay Wilson, a columnist for The Journal News, is a frequent contributor to FORDHAM magazine.