Congratulations to Will Allen, whose work with the urban farming organization Growing Power has just won him a no-strings-attached $500,000 award from the MacArthur Foundation.
One of 25 MacArthur Fellows for 2008, Allen will receive the $500,000 over the next five years. The financial award is designed to give Fellows a level of financial independence so they can “accelerate their current activities or take their work in new directions,” according to the MacArthur Foundation.
“Our goal, each year, is to surprise ourselves and others by the creativity, distinctiveness, and reach of those we identify and support,” said Daniel J. Socolow, director of the MacArthur Fellows program. “We have surprised ourselves again this year. As a group, this new class of Fellows takes one’s breath away. Each is an original, and each confirms that the creative individual is alive and well, at the cutting edge, and at work to make our world a better place.”
And making his world a better place is something Allen has been very good at. A former professional basketball player and corporate marketer, Allen founded the Milwaukee-based Growing Power in 1995. The organization’s goal is, as its Website says, a simple one: “to grow food, to grow minds and to grow community.”
And how does it do that? Headquartered on a two-acre plot on Silver Spring Drive, Growing Power has created an urban farm of incredible productivity. The small site, which has the distinction of being “the last remaining farm and greenhouse operation in the city of Milwaukee,” holds six greenhouses, an apiary, three poultry houses, pens for goats, rabbits and turkeys, a small store and an anaerobic digester that generates energy from food waste.
That farm, along with satellite farms and training centers in other parts of the U.S., is aimed at providing low-income urban residents with safe, affordable, fresh and healthful foods.
“If people can grow safe, healthy, affordable food, if they have access to land and clean water, this is transformative on every level in a community,” Allen says. “I believe we cannot have healthy communities without a healthy food system.”
If that philosophy, with the success behind it, isn’t worth a half-million bucks (or much, much more), I don’t know what is. Way to go, Will Allen, and best of luck to you to do even better, grander things with your MacArthur grant.
Click here to learn more about Growing Power. To find out more about the MacArthur Fellows program, visit the MacArthur Foundation’s Website.
