By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER
Ohio Correspondent

HAMILTON, Ohio — Will Allen, a former pro basketball player, is also a farmer and the CEO of Growing Power, Inc. It has always been his opinion that everybody should be eating the same good food; it is just a matter of how it is delivered and made accessible to everyone.

Growing Power is a nonprofit organization that helps people grow, process, market and distribute food in a sustainable manner. It was founded by Allen, the son of a South Carolina sharecropper, who grew up on a small farm in Washington, D.C. Allen recently visited Miami University in Hamilton to speak as part of the Racial Legacies series.

“My father, who had left farming for a better life in the industrial North, wanted me and my brothers to learn about where our food comes from, and for the practical reason that we didn’t have a lot of spendable income,” Allen said. “He was used to eating good food that he grew himself.”

Allen and his brother tended the farm. He didn’t discover basketball until he was 13. He became one of the top 25 high school basketball players in the nation and attended the University of Florida as the first African-American scholarship athlete.

“When I left the farm at 18 I said never again will I do this hard work,” Allen said. “I was going to go to college and get a degree and play professional basketball – those were my goals.”

Allen played professional basketball with the American Basketball Assoc. and then in Belgium. While there, through some of his teammate’s families, he reconnected with farming.

“Once I again touched the soil, it reminded me of our farm,” he said. “How they took care of the land in Belgium and Europe and all the food I was eating – fresh, local food. It just reminded me of home and I guess I had some hidden passion that I didn’t know I had.”

Urban farming

When Allen returned to the United States he started growing vegetables on 100 acres in Oak Creek belonging to his wife’s family, while holding down a full-time corporate job. Driving through Milwaukee, Wis., for that corporate job, Allen found a farm – the last one remaining in the city. He found funding to buy it.
“Now I had this place and a community that was in desperate need of healthy food,” he said. “It was a food-desert area, where there were no grocery stores but a huge population.”

Allen brought his produce there from Oak Creek to sell and began growing vegetables in the old greenhouses on the property. Two years into the project, in 1995, he helped a youth group that wanted to grow an organic garden.
“The Milwaukee Journal had a front-page story of me doing this,” Allen said. “Then, more organizations and schools started bringing the kids to my greenhouses and wanted me to work with them.”

Forming Growing Power

Allen’s friends encouraged him to form a nonprofit. He didn’t know anything about nonprofits, so they offered to serve on the board.

Now Growing Power produces food year-round and has 15 farms in or near the city, 60 employees and a budget of $4 million a year.

“At first nobody would give us funding as a nonprofit,” Allen said. “But I come from the poor profit sector where when nobody will give us money, we’ll go out and make our own by selling products and services.”

Growing Power has training sites in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Mississippi. The group educates through local, national and international outreach, runs multiple youth programs, has an active volunteer base and works on policy initiatives regarding agriculture.

Food production occurs in demonstration greenhouses in several locations. They market and distribute produce, grass-based meats and value-added products.

The only way to combat hunger in the world is through this type of small-scale sustainable agriculture, Allen said. It puts less pressure on the environment and doesn’t require large use of fossil fuels.

“My family has always fed people, so when I grow food and when people eat my food, that is very satisfying,” he said. “I like the act of being a farmer and to grow food; to see it come out of the ground, and go through all the vertical steps it takes to get it to market.

“Because I have this marketing background, we have a marketing scheme to be able to get our food to everybody. That’s where it’s at – it’s about access to healthy food.”

Allen has won many awards, including being named in 2010 by TIME magazine to its “100 World’s Most Influential People.” For more information, visit www.growingpower.org