Racial Legacies: Speaker Will Allen, CEO of Growing Power
When: Tuesday: 5 p.m. wine reception; 5:30 p.m. dinner; 7 p.m. Where: Miami Hamilton at the Harry T. Wilks Conference Center
When: Wednesday: 12:30 p.m.
Where: Miami Middletown at 142 Johnston Hall
MILWAUKEE, WI — Blocks away from the largest public housing project in Wisconsin, an urban farmers market is selling fresh food in an area that lacks it and gaining international acclaim in the process.
Growing Power Inc., a nonprofit organization that sits on three acres in Milwaukee, is not only a farmers market, but a farmers co-op and an outreach training center for urban youth who live several miles away from a grocery store with fresh fruit and vegetables.
It’s founder and CEO, Will Allen, a 62-year-old, 6-foot-7 former professional basketball player, is spearheading a “good food revolution” and is bringing his campaign to Butler County March 15 and 16.
“We have a severe problem and it’s attacking a lot of the poor people who are living in areas that are virtual food deserts,” Allen said. “Everybody should have access to the same quality food.”
Allen’s visit is part of the area’s 25th annual Racial Legacies & Learning speakers series sponsored by Miami University and the cities of Hamilton and Middletown.
For years, the series has brought provocative topics of diversity and current events to the fore, event coordinator Jimmie Jones said.
Allen will discuss food security and rebuilding the nation’s inner-cities one urban garden at a time.
He was introduced to farming by his father, O.W. Allen, a sharecropper from South Carolina, when the family moved to Rockville, Md. in the 1940s.
The family grew about 95 percent of its food on the farm and Allen and his brother were forced to abide by O.W. Allen strict rule: no sports until all farming chores were done, he recalls.
“While my generation in the 50s, 60s and 70s were out having a good time, I was working on a farm. I resented it then,” Allen said.
Allen left home at age 18 thinking basketball was his ticket away from farming.
He became the first black scholarship athlete at the University of Miami where he received a degree in education and played in both the American Basketball Association and the European League for a team in Belgium.
“I said never again will I do this hard work,” Allen remembers thinking.
But while in Belgium, he began farming again, growing food for his family and teammates.
“Once I started, I felt something was missing. I wanted to do this. I wanted to grow food. I wanted to farm.”
Growing Power was born in 1995, two years after Allen purchased a greenhouse on Milwaukee’s north side.
Today, the nonprofit has 60 employees, operates 15 farms on a budget of $4.1 million and has a surplus of $700,000 at a time when grants are scarce and many nonprofits are struggling.
Allen boasts that 50 percent of the organization’s income comes from the produce it sells.
He has been invited to the White House twice by First Lady Michelle Obama as part of her Let's Move! campaign. He has plans to create community food centers in Africa, Zimbabwe and Haiti.
Allen credits his success to the life lessons his parents taught him on that small farm in Maryland.
“When you’re young and immature, you don’t realize the gift you’re given. It was truly a gift.”
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