Joy Pierson and Bart Potenza, owners of New York City-based Candle Café, Candle 79 and Candle Café West. Potenza has 30 years of experience in New York’s health-focused food industry, and he met Pierson, a nutritionist, when she was a daily customer at his former 500-square-foot New York restaurant. When Pierson’s health dramatically changed for the better once she began eating Potenza’s food, it was only a matter of time until their small empire took form.

“People love the quality [of our food] and the flavor profiles,” Pierson explains. “It’s organic; it’s picked within 24 hours; we’ve got great farmers we’ve been working with for a long time. People know good food.”

Karen Hobbs, Senior Policy Analyst at the NRDC Water Program, has dedicated her work toward studying the health of our waterways and the role that plays in beermaking, particularly as it relates to the growing craft brewing trend in the U.S. This focus birthed the Brewers for Clean Water campaign, which challenges breweries to pledge to use clean water in accordance with the Clean Water Act.

“You can bring a lot of people together over a beer in a way that you just can’t do from a strictly policy sense,” Hobbs admits. “One of the strengths of NRDC is meeting people where they are. We wanted to work with craft brewers because they are so connected to their communities. If change occurs in a water body that they are dependent upon to make their product, they feel that almost immediately.”

Chicago’s Half Acre Beer Company joined the NRDC’s Brewers for Clean Water campaign, and co-owner and head brewer Matt Gallagher speaks to the importance of quality, consistent water sources needed to make great beer. Half Acre would not be the success story it is if it did not have access to its Lake Michigan water source.

“Water is vitally important to beer quality,” Gallagher says. “That is why, historically, you see a lot of breweries located on great water sources. It’s becoming a lot more important for more small breweries to be thinking about [water quality].”

Andrea Jones is the Coastal Programs Director with the National Audubon Society, but her journey toward studying birds and their habitats actually began as a child on the East Coast, where she grew quite a passion for backpacking and camping. Always the outdoor enthusiast, Jones describes the “sky highways” that birds take above North America this time of year. We may take the presence of birds for granted during spring and summer, but in truth, they are constantly travelling in search of proper seasonal habitats.

“Birds are part of our lives, whether we think about them all the time or not,” Jones explains. “If we wake up in the morning and it’s quiet outside, you’d know something is terribly wrong.”