[OKC] good food

[Alig, Jennifer L.]

Jennifer Alig

**My email has changed to Jennifer.Alig at deq.ok.gov.  Please update your
address book.**

 

 

Urban Ag Revolution

Will Allen talks about growing the 'Good Food' movement 

This weekend I caught up with Will Allen who was keynoting the always
excellent Northeast Organic Farming Association's Annual Conference
<http://www.nofasummerconference.org/>  in Amherst, MA. He's founder and
CEO of Growing Power, <http://growingpower.org/>  the country's premier
grassroots urban gardening program, and also a MacArthur Genius Award
Winner and former pro-basketball player.

Growing Power demonstrates growing methods through on-site workshops and
hands-on demonstrations, and has farms in Milwaukee and Merton,
Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois, where they grow vegetables, fish,
bees, livestock, worms, and more. They have also established satellite
training sites in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and
Mississippi.

Erik Hoffner: What's the youth component's importance to Growing Power?

Will Allen: We started out as a youth serving organization. If there
wasn't a youth program from the beginning, I probably wouldn't be doing
this work now. But I quickly realized that we needed to also get adults
involved, that it had to be a multi-generational effort at engaging the
community. The fastest way to do that, though is through the youth, and
they bring in the adults. A program like ours can then be quickly
regarded as an asset by everybody in a community if it anchors people,
and is a preferred place for their kids to be.

EH: What's the gender breakdown of the young people involved in your
programs?

WA:  This new kind of agriculture is a majority women's movement. I look
around when I'm at events like this one this weekend, and by and large,
it's women.

EH: What do the kids go on to do after they work in Growing Power's
'youth corps' apprentice program?

WA: We work with some of these kids from the ages of 8 until they go to
college, and many do go to college, and part of their success could be
because we focus on academics for 2 hours every day. We require the kids
to write and read about the hands on stuff they've done that day. It
spurs them on to learn more, dig deeper. They might get curious about
microorganisms, for example, and go learn about them. They get excited
about it. I think that's what we do best, both the kids and the adults,
we inspire people to want to go do something, start a project, not just
sit on a couch.

EH: Have Growing Power participants gone on to start gardens of their
own?

WA: Yes, but better yet, more than half of our employees are former
Youth Corps or Interns. Some others of our staff come from among the
2,000 volunteers we have.

EH: Where else have Growing Power alums gone to grow?

WA: We've trained thousands of people, and they started hundreds of
programs around the country. Many more are now coming to us 3 days a
month for our Commercial Urban Ag Training program
<http://growingpower.org/workshops.htm> . It's 5 months, half of it
hands-on, the other half's classroom on how to start a small scale
farming operation.

EH: On what economic model?

WA: Non-profits and for-profits both. Since we started this 3 years ago,
we've seen a lot of non-profits, in part because today, non-profits need
ways to make money. A program like this earns a lot more revenue than
traditional youth development programs.

EH: Where are your alums growing, in urban settings only, or are they
going rural too?

WA: Both. Suburban too. Many African Americans who said they'd never
farm again are going back to the land, even to their ancestral rural
lands in the South. Ten years ago, they would never have come on board
with this revolution. They'd say, "that's 'slaves' work." So it's very
satisfying, and it's important, to see this change because they often
represent the most food insecure communities.

So we're starting to see this as a multi-cultural, multi-generational
grassroots 'revolution' - even the top-down types, the corporations and
politicians and universities want to get on board, after fighting small
scale farming for so long, and that's fine, we need everyone. We need
millions of new farmers doing small-scale agriculture.

EH: What's the deal with land tenure?

WA: Tenure is so important. It's why when we incorporated Growing Power,
we became a land trust, because we wanted long-term tenure. In order to
grow good food we have restore the land, which has been so contaminated.
That means building soil, and it takes time. I wouldn't start a project
on rented land unless I could get a 10 year lease.

But renting is viable. Land is expensive, and if you wait around to buy
land, the community's going to starve.

EH: If you could change one thing about how cities are run, what would
it be?

WA: All city planners should be required to incorporate green space and
food growing into their urban plans. The American Planning Association's
magazine <http://www.planning.org/planning/>  new issue, it's all about
food. Ten years ago, that topic was unheard of. So that's progress.

EH: How important is networking to Growing Power's work?

WA: Very important. We share everything we learn, pass it on, and hope
they'll pass it on to others. That's how change happens, and a
revolution comes about. I'm calling it that now, the Good Food
revolution, because that's exactly what it is.

Visit Growing Power here <http://growingpower.org/> . Also, enjoy an
audio interview with Will Allen from this weekend at Sea Change Radio
<http://www.cchange.net/2009/08/12/growing-food-growing-community/> .

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sustainableokc.org/pipermail/okc-sustainableokc.org/attachments/20091112/988cb325/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 18516 bytes
Desc: image001.jpg
URL: <http://lists.sustainableokc.org/pipermail/okc-sustainableokc.org/attachments/20091112/988cb325/attachment.jpeg>