Will Allen

Last week Cole and I went to hear Will Allen, CEO of an urban agriculture initiative, Growing Power, speak at the Croatian Cultural Centre on Commercial Drive. Will Allen is an urban farmer and community activist, dedicated to supporting low income and small family farmers and bringing healthy, affordable food to urban areas. Seven hundred people showed up to his talk and I’m quite certain that no one regretted attending. He had such a presence, was really funny and seemed so nice and also brilliant. And the work he has done is amazing!

Will Allen started Growing Power in 1998, which now runs the last functional farm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Growing Power also runs farms in Chicago and elsewhere. Most of the Growing Power farms are built in areas where you would never imagine a farm could be built, for example in derelict buildings, abandoned nurseries and even old parking lots. Growing Power facilities include greenhouses, kitchens, indoor and outdoor training gardens, aquaculture system and a food distribution facility. Fish, worms, bees, goats, chickens, turkeys, and ducks are also raised on the various farms. In his presentation he showed hundreds of images of the different components of the Growing Power projects, which also told the story of the organization's growth.

Will Allen is sixty-one now but was a star basketball player in his youth. According to Wikipedia when he started high school he was already 6’7 and 230 lbs. He grew up on a farm and built his own makeshift basketball court. He received a basketball scholarship to the University of Miami, and later was drafted to the NBA. Although he never actually played in an NBA game he did play in the ABA and then in Belgium for a few years. Throughout his basketball career (and his later career in marketing and sales, working for Proctor and Gamble) he always thought about farming. While playing basketball in Belgium he grew a huge garden and had his teammates over for big meals. I’m sure they missed him when he moved back to the US!

His work is relevant to my interest in the revival of traditional food skills because he has a real interest in not only providing urban communities with fresh healthy foods, but with teaching people how to develop food skills. Growing Power conducts workshops and demonstrations in aquaculture, aquaponics, vermiculture, horticulture, small or large-scale composting, soil reclamation, food distribution, beekeeping, canning and preserving food and marketing. Currently, Growing Power is building a new farm and teaching facility adjacent to a school and the whole idea is to enrich student learning by blending the practical with theoretical.

Another aspect of Growing Power that is really interesting is Allen’s focus on attracting racialized youth to the project and his promotion of the message that growing food is a respectful and legitimate occupation for all people. In his talk Allen alluded to the need for destigmatizing food production work in light of the history of slavery and sharecropping and the widespread feeling within the Black community that farming is degrading and the worst type of work. About his deliberate attempts to engage the Black community he says, “African-Americans need more help, and they’re often harder to work with because they’ve been abused and so forth, but I can break through a lot of that very quickly because a lot of people of color are so proud, so happy to see me leading this kind of movement” (New York Times, 2009).

I haven’t even scratched the surface of what Will Allen and Growing Power stand for in this post, but a New York Times article about him helps to shed some light on this amazing man and Growing Power has a blog that also provides more information. Please see the links below.

http://www.growingpower.org/blog/>

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05allen-t.html