Allen, Will
1949-present · Contribution: 1993-2017
Founded Growing Power in 1995, pioneering low-cost urban aquaponics, vermiculture, and composting techniques that turned Milwaukee's last surviving city farm into a model replicated by urban agriculture programs nationwide
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Impact on the world
The son of South Carolina sharecroppers and a former professional basketball player, Allen used his retirement savings to buy Milwaukee's last remaining city farm in 1993 and built it into Growing Power, a nonprofit that at its peak produced an estimated 40 million pounds of food a year on a few acres using raised beds, aquaponics, vermicomposting, and compost-heated greenhouses, training roughly 1,000 people annually in low-cost urban farming techniques before the organization dissolved in 2017; his 2008 MacArthur “Genius Grant,” 2011 James Beard Award, and role in Michelle Obama's Let's Move! campaign helped make him one of the most recognized figures in the national urban agriculture and food-justice movement, and his 2012 memoir The Good Food Revolution remains a foundational text in the field.
Life & background
Born February 8, 1949, to sharecroppers from South Carolina who later bought their own farm in Maryland, Allen grew up doing farm labor he initially vowed to leave behind, becoming a high school basketball state champion and the first African American to play basketball for the University of Miami, where he was on scholarship; the Baltimore Bullets drafted him in 1971, and he played professionally in the ABA and in Belgium before retiring in 1977 and moving to his wife Cynthia's hometown of Milwaukee. After a career in corporate marketing for companies including KFC and Procter & Gamble, he began farming again in 1993 on land near a public housing project, founding Growing Power in 1995 and growing it into an internationally recognized urban farm, training center, and food-distribution network with up to 150 employees and 1,500 volunteers at its height. He received a Ford Foundation leadership grant in 2005, the MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, and a James Beard Award in 2011, was named among Time's 100 Most Influential People in 2010, and after Growing Power's 2017 dissolution amid mounting debt, continued farming in Milwaukee under the name Will's Roadside Farms & Markets while his daughter Erika Allen carries the work forward through the Urban Growers Collective.
Sources
- MacArthur Foundation; Civil Eats; Encyclopedia of Milwaukee
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