Will Allen

Beautiful struggle: Martin Luther King and the fight for the environment

On the anniversary of King's birthday, we search for common ground between those who fight to save wild places, and those fighting for their lives in the cold city streets.

Haute cuisine gone green: James Beard Foundation focuses on sustainability

Do the James Beard Foundation's new sustainability awards signal a change for the better in the culinary world, a new form of food greenwashing, or something in between?

FoodCorps will teach kids, link farms and schools

FoodCorps puts young workers into communities to deliver nutrition education, build and tend school gardens, and implement farm-to-school programs.

The history of urban agriculture should inspire its future

Urban agriculture seems new and exotic, but it's been the norm for cities since the dawn of farming 10,000 years ago.

Valerie Martinez

Art: Nat Damm Valerie Martinez Executive Director, Indigenous People’s Green Jobs Coalition Minneapolis, Minn. Valerie Martinez, a 31-year-old Mexican/Cree/Apache/Ojibwe woman, spreads the benefits of the green economy to American-Indian communities in Minnesota through the Indigenous People’s Green Jobs Coalition. She’s also working with urban-ag pioneer Will Allen to bring small-scale sustainable food production to Little […]

Erika Allen

Art: Nat Damm Erika Allen Projects Manager, Growing Power Chicago, Ill. Erika Allen grew up on a farm in Rockville, Md., working in the fields with her father. “We didn’t have a TV and we relied on a wood stove, but we were known as the ‘food family’ because we had so much food. We […]

Under the Clinton Global Initiative, Growing Power takes its grassroots-agriculture model to Africa

Will Allen: Growing power–and gaining influence in development circles, too. At the Clinton Global Initiative wrap-up on Friday, ex-President Clinton made waves in the sustainable-ag world by declaring Will Allen of Milwaukee/Chicago-based based Growing Power his “hero.” The real news was buried in the press release, though. Toward the bottom of a listing of verbal “commitments” […]

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 in Amherst, MA. He’s founder and CEO of Growing Power, 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 […]

Must-read: urban farmer Will Allen in the NYT Magazine

Will makes soil–and you can, too.Source: The New York TimesAnyone who wants to understand the paradoxes and promise of urban agriculture must read the luminous profile of Growing Power’s Will Allen by Elizabeth Royte, online now and forthcoming in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. I could gush about the elegance of Allen’s farming system or […]