April 28, 2006

"Will Allen of Growing Power Community Food Center and Anthony Flaccavento of Appalachian Sustainable Development"

Welcome to Leadership Dialogues with Will Allen of Growing Power Community Food Center and Anthony Flaccavento of Appalachian Sustainable Development. Questions can be submitted until April 14, 2006. A transcript of the interview will be available through our website on April 28, 2006.

Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you for joining us for today's Leadership Talks with Will Allen of Growing Power Community Food Center and Anthony Flaccavento of Appalachian Sustainable Development. For more information contact:

Will Allen
Growing Power Community Food Center
5500 W. Silver Spring Drive
Milwaukee, WI 53218
Phone: 414-527-1546
Fax: 414-527-1908
Email: will@growingpower.org
Web: www.growingpower.org

Anthony Flaccavento
Executive Director
Appalachian Sustainable Development
P.O. Box 791
Abington, VA 24212
Phone: 276-623-1121
Fax: 276-623-1353
Email: asd@eva.org
Web: www.appsusdev.org

Anthony Flaccavento

Baltimore, MD
Thank you for joining us for our first Leadership Dialogues with Will Allen of Growing Power Community Food Center and Anthony Flaccavento of Appalachian Sustainable Development.

Will, you seem to work in a more urban setting while Anthony you are more rural. What are some of the similarities and differences you see in working in these two locations but on somewhat similar or overlapping issues.

Anthony Flaccavento
MR. ALLEN: I actually work both on urban and rural issues and farms and projects, so there are some similarities, especially around soil because that's what we do. We compost on a pretty large scale. We composted a million pounds of food residue last year, and we do vermicompost with our 5000 pounds of worms to create worm castings, but regardless of whether you're in a rural setting or urban setting, fertility is key. Soil fertility is key. I think, and Anthony could chime in on this, but I think today especially around big cities where a lot of food was grown in the rural areas around big city, we're losing a lot of that farm land. It's shrinking. Sobeing able to grow more intensively becomes even more important as we have less land so we have to produce the same amount of food on less land so for soil fertility to be able to grow more per square foot and produce more per square foot is kind of what we're all about, is trying to create these systems, especially inside the cities where you have limited space in cities like New York or Chicago or Boston.

So that's what we're working on. That's where a lot of our research has been around trying to create these systems that we can grow more per square foot. And to do that you have to have tremendous fertility in the soil and we get that with vermicompost, and we get it with high quality compost from waste material that we use. Inside the city we use food waste as the nitrogen source and in rural areas you use animal waste as the nitrogen source. I don't know that that answers the question, but Anthony, you might want to chime in.

MR. FLACCAVENTO: Yeah, definitely the ditto on what Will said, soil fertility is absolutely key and even in rural areas there's tremendous problems of soil depletion. The topsoil itself in most of the country is a much thinner layer than it was when the Europeans arrived here, and even within the topsoil layer, I know in Appalachia where tobacco was the main crop for so many generations it's very similar to the Midwest where corn has been king. Both of them are big plants. They pull a lot out of the soil, and what people have been doing for the last 50, 70 years has been not much in the way of replenishment with organic matter, whether it was compost or manure or just plant residue mulches. They've been what some people, Wendell Berry and others, call "mining the soil," and whether it's acres and acres of corn or small acreage of tobacco, it's led to the same problem that Will has. So even though we have a lot more land per person, we have a similar challenge of making the soil fertile.

I would add two other things that kind of cross over. One is just making land economically valuable. I don't know the particulars of this in urban areas, although- by the way I was born in Manhattan, raised in Baltimore, so I have a little background there -- but I think in both urban and rural areas land compared to so-called development, which means condominiums or malls or big boxes or whatever, paved over spaces, is just considered to be undeveloped. I mean that's the term we use. It's undeveloped land. And whether it's in downtown Milwaukee or Chicago, or whether it's on the fringe of Richmond or Knoxville, Roanoke, or even in small towns like ours, it's amazing how disproportionately devalued agricultural land is, open space and agricultural land. So I think the other thing that Will does that we're trying to do too is as you make the soil more fertile and you yield more from it, it still, I'm sure, would not compare dollar for dollar with the condominium complex but it starts to become at least somewhat valuable in economic termsand that I think is key. It's a lot of battles in our area now around land preservation and trying to have conservation easements and government-funded land set aside. And I think those are great, but I also think we've got to make our farmland and our forest land economically competitive where you can make a decent living off of it, otherwise the logical thing to do is to turn it into buildings, and that's got a lot of negative consequences. Another thing that occurs to me on this question is infrastructure issues. We talk a lot about building an infrastructure, building an infrastructure for family farms, for sustainable agriculture (ag), for a healthy local economy, and I'm guessing that Will does a similar thing. You start with the soil, but then there's also the infrastructure in the sense of the processing, the shipping, the packing, the market relationships with buyers, whether they're school systems or big grocery chains. If you have that infrastructure, then even if you have relatively good ground that can grow valuable things there's not much you can do with it, you're at such a competitive disadvantage to the gigantic vertically integrated global food system. And so that, I think, is another thing that poor, urban, and rural communities have in common is a lack of that infrastructure and that we have found that building that up and, to put it in a nutshell, it's the infrastructure that allows a farmer, a food entrepreneur, or any small business to get the most out of their product and get it to market with the most value, is kind of it in a nutshell. It involves different things in different areas, but we've found that to be quite an important prerequisite for a healthy economy and I don't know, Will, I'm guessing, you have that issue too.

MR. ALLEN: Yeah, absolutely, and yeah, you really hit it on the head in terms of this is really a systems approach. You really have to treat the infrastructure as a system. For example, one of the things that I spend a lot of time doing is developing relationships with different organizations and folks like the health -- looking at it from a health issue as it relates to it. Anthony was talking about in terms or the value of not only doing the land, but you can look at the value of the land in different ways. If you're able to convey the idea that this land is worth something because we're growing food on it, that's going to make the community healthier because of the health issues and stuff like that and creation of jobs because we've been able to create over 20 jobs within our organization around the food system, but the idea of building the infrastructure is so important to the fact that now we have a farm co-op that addresses the issue of not only local food, but bringing in foods from other states, small farmers, mid-size farmers, to be able to deliver and have that continuous flow because that just doesn't make sense to only eat healthy food for a part of the year.

MR. FLACCAVENTO: Right.

MR. ALLEN: CSAs typically run so manyweeks during the spring, summer, and fall, but our market basket program goes every week of the year because once you start giving folks and our kids in schools this food you want to continue that flow and becompetitive, and to be competitive you've got have that infrastructure. You've got to have those farmers on board from around the country, and you've got to be able to figure out ways of growing foods locally. We grow about 19 different crops throughout the winter, and our system's here
without heat. So we're able to grow a certain amount of crop locally, but also to develop those relationships with farmers like even from Appalachia or wherever we can meet these farmers, and that's one of the reasons that I go to some of these southern conferences, where I first met Anthony years ago, was to recruit farmers that would supply us in the wintertime and build those relationships, because it takes a long time to build those relationships with producers because many of those producers have been dealing with brokers who've left them holding the bag and a lot of times they never got paid for their products, so you've got to build that trust.

MR. FLACCAVENTO: Yeah, they're very gun-shy about new things because they've been burned before. So that's all part of this.

Seattle, WA
Who have you found yourself working with that you didn't expect to be working with when starting your organizatoin(s)?

Anthony Flaccavento
MR. FLACCAVENTO: Let's see. Ihoped to work with all these people—I wasn't sure that we really could. We spend alot of time with supermarket folks. Medium to medium-large chains. Not Wal-Marts, but we deal with supermarkets ranging from 15 stores to a new one this year that has 200 stores it its chain, so fairly large. I guess you'd say local and regional supermarket chains. And they live a very different world. Basically, you deal a little bit maybe with the CEO, but mostly you deal with the senior produce buyers, the senior merchandising people. Now we're doing free-range eggs and getting to the starting grass finished beef, so we're dealing withthe respective folks there. I guess at the outset we didn't have the vision that we would be necessarily going to supermarkets, but we've been dealing with them for quite a few years now, and they're good people. I don't quite know how to say this, but their reality and their values, and how they view food, and what it is and what its value is is so fundamentally different from how we would see it. It is not, first and foremost, sustenance and nutrition, it's certainly not something that, as Wendell Berry says, "Eating is an agricultural act." It's certainly not something that first and foremost is a farm product, a thing that comes from the soil and requires nature's nurture. It's not socially embedded. It's not something that they think of in the context of the welfare of those who raised it or picked it or whatever. So basically they see it as something that looks good and doesn't cost much that you can sell the hell out of. At this level there's not a great deal of turnover. The same people tend to stay, in our experience, for a while. We talk their language more and we—I don't know about adopt their values, but adopt their priorities in terms of, if you want to play that game then you have to be able to produce beautiful-looking almost perfect uniform produce that's properly packaged and labeled and all that stuff. By the same token, we have seen these folks gradually shift a little bit in terms of what they do see food as, what they do think is important, and how much they're willing now to make the connections for their customers that food is, in fact, an agricultural thing and it comes from certain people in certain places, so that's maybe the group that I'm most pleased and surprised to be working with. The other would be cooperative extension. We, at the very outset, wanted very much to work with extension, but we were really two oddballs and I think they ranged from disliking us to just thinking we were a frou frou bunch of nothing, and now we have some fairly good to very good relationships with the agents at the local level, and if you move up the ladder the relationships get better. As you go to the state level people in extension and you go to the dean of agriculture at the schools and the top faculty extension people, they really actually think the world of ASD and what we're doing because they see that it is real, the markets are large, the farmers are tobacco and sort of traditional farmers; they're not hippie farmers for the most part. So all of this has gradually won them over and that's then the other group that I, in my fondest dreams, hoped we would be working with but wasn't sure we would ever be able to crack that nut.

MR. ALLEN: Just like Anthony, I think we want to work with everybody who's interested in eating healthy food and working with farmers. I think probably the group that has surprised me the most recently has been the government—local, regional, national government has gotten more and more interested in healthy food and smaller producers and at least they're talking the game, so I've been surprised by them. Of course we've been delivering to grocery stores and wholesalers. I think most farmers years ago were taking stuff directly to grocery stores and now it's more of a warehouse. You have to deliver it to the warehouse more now than going to those stores because they have so many rules about going to individual stores. The warehouses want to control what happens at store level, so you have to develop those relationships by the buyers and so forth, but I think the thing that's really helped is us educating folks around what we do. I think it's part of a whole thing that we constantly have to stay on top of: Educating the buyers, educating the government. We're educating consumers. We have to educate the whole vertical buying system, I would say, if we're going to make this work. And that takes a lot of energy. And the other thing, with educating folks the respect level grows for what we do.

MR. FLACCAVENTO: Right.

MR. ALLEN: Because, like Anthony said, extension has been—basically, a lotof the work we do as an organization, we probably wouldn't do if the extension was very effective. The stuff that we're doing is really extension work. When I go out and set up gardens and help farmers develop systems and so forth, those are things that we, as citizens, have paid for to make happen, but they didn't happen. So we've kind of lost a generation or several generations of this kind of extension work that the universities should have been—because they've been pretty much tied into the large chemical companies and so forth, so our type of production has been put on the back burner, and now they're starting to slowly understand, but it's been us being very proactive in pushing this. It's not been them just saying, "Here we are." If we were very passive, this wouldn't happen.

MR. FLACCAVENTO: Right.

MR. ALLEN: So I think we're involved in a very important movement. It's really a movement now because people are looking at their health. When you look at Native reservations, where people are dying of diabetes, or you look at our central cities where people, even our rural communities have been devastated because large ag has taken over. So it's really not any particular area anymore. You can't just say, "Oh, we've got these problems in central city," when I can go to rural communities and see more drug use in rural communities than I do in central cities sometimes. So some of these same issues are everywhere. So it's about us really being proactive and continuing to be proactive and building relationships with all of these folks. I think it's really having everybody at the table, and things become a little easier but it's really us educating and having nonprofit organizations like ours do that . Thank goodness for thenonprofit organizations because I don't think the universities—and I'm not trying to knock the universities, but I just don't think they were doing. I think it makes them now start being more responsive because we have a the competition for whatever little dollars there are out there, the different 2501 programs, risk management. Some of the federal dollars are open now to the nonprofits, which forces the schools to do what they should have been doing all along.

MR. FLACCAVENTO: Competition is good?

MR. ALLEN: Yes.

MR. FLACCAVENTO: In terms of that education I would agree. It has required us to do very, very different kinds of education. We're not only kind of doing education constantly, but it's very different because educating the consumers. When we do our point of sale materials or we do media work or we do in-store demonstrations, we do any of a number of other things, e-mail Listserv type things, the consumers have one set of interests and values which have probably one piece of overlap with the buyers, and that's price. That, to varying degrees, depends on the item and the customer. There is a concern, a consciousness, whatever, about price, but outside of that, the buyers, whether they're supermarkets or whether they are for Aramark and at a university, it's a completely different kind of education. So the buyers are happy for the consumer education we do, but that's not what they're looking for, and similarly, when you're working with farmers, it's one kind of education which is first and foremost demonstration. It's really not that these farmers aren't smart. Some of them go online, they're looking for research, some of them are really looking for stuff to be backed up by facts or trials, but they want to see it. They want to see it and participate in it, and whereas when you're working with extension and university, that helps, demonstration definitely helps, but they want to see numbers, and they want to see randomized trials, and that kind of thing. I agree completely with Will. We were sort of in this constant education process, but it is an education that has to be so adapted.

MR. ALLEN: Right.

MR. FLACCAVENTO: We need five or ten different kinds of education, because the audiences are so diverse. Sometimes people have said to me, "You really need to focus in," and I think if you focussed even just a little too much the whole thing would come crumbling down, because in fact every piece of this from research and extension work right on through to marketing had to be done. It wasn't being done by the people—either there was nobody there or the people, like Will said, whose job it was to do it were doing different kinds of things, so I don't know if we could really specialize or focus too much. I think, no.

MR. ALLEN: You're absolutely right, and there's one other piece that I keep hammering home, and I hope Anthony can help me with this idea, because a lot of the dollars out there from Kellogg and other places are going into policy work, and we keep talking about we need to build infrastructure, as, in our work we have to look at this more in a system not one little thing. Policy is not going to necessarily grow you some beans or corn or lettuce or whatever, but I think what we need to do is have these excellent examples, these concrete examples for policy. I've got the policy changed simply by bringing in policymakers and letting them see what we do. Having this kind of infrastructure that we've built over these years and then they go back and they say it becomes much easier for them to understand what they have to do and what they have to vote on and what they have to change, but if all we have is a bunch of lip service, I don't necessarily think that that works, so what I'm trying to do is get folks to understand that we need to put some funding into organizations, buildings, infrastructures around the country so these policymakers have something that they can see. That's so important for them to be able to see stuff and to see job creation because they're looking at things like how many jobs have you created for me lately.

MR. FLACCAVENTO: Right.

MR. ALLEN: What is the potential of this? How do these youth programs, these youth ed programs in the city, reduce crime? Why do you only have 5 kids instead of 20 kids out here farming? So you have to be able to demonstrate, and, like Anthony said before about having these kind of visual—for farmers to come here—for them it's hard to change a farmer's practice. If they've have been practicing a certain way for generations, they and their family are up against a wall and they're not making money and they have all these issues, their wife's about ready to leave them because they're not bringing in money, the kids are pissed, everybody's unhappy, you have to show them something very concrete for them to even begin to make a change. So it's so very important to have this, and the reason I'm putting a lot of emphasis on it is I just believe this so much because I've seen it happen where people come here to our facility and they see 10,000 fish swimming around, and they see a million pounds of food residue being composted, and on their farm they're sitting with all these inputs, but they'd been sitting there for years and then they go back and they say, "I can take these inputs and turn it into a value-added product from a fertility and grow some organic crops or whatever." Even if it's just taking a couple acres and doing some research on their farm for a year before they get convinced. But we need to build those kinds of hardcore concrete systems for folks to see.

LCW: Anthony, did you have anything to add?

MR. FLACCAVENTO: I was saying how important it is for farmers to see, and Will also hit it right on the money, it actually is just as true for legislators and policy people, whether they're elected or like key people at the university or key people in the bureaucracy with the state departments of ag or the federal with the departments of economic development. It really is, because I often—I think I've come to the conclusion that although there are n'er-do-wells in Congress and at the state level, and we probably have a higher percentage of them now than at any time in my life, but I think most of the people in key leadership positions are decent people. I think they lack a sense of an alternative possibility of real, viable alternatives. So they keep making similar policy whether it's about putting far too many agriculture dollars into propping up big corporate farms or whether it's reluctance about money and conservation or money into startup and limited resource farmers. Some of that is undoubtedly the influence of the big money lobbyists, no doubt. This maybe this is more true at the state level than the federal level—they just don't see another alternative. And I'll give you the easiest example with us, was tobacco. For years and years and years it was like an annual ritual when spring planting was starting. You would have people making projections about what the prices would be like for tobacco this year, and they'd quote a few farmers and then they'd quote somebody from Virginia Tech or from extension and among the things they would always say, you could count on it like death and taxes, was "Well of course there's nothing that even comes close to tobacco for profitability." Well, five years into our thing, when we had been demonstrating for years that a mix of organic fruits and vegetables could dramatically exceed tobacco for profitability, and that is since then adding some animal enterprises in as well. It just was almost impossible to shake that until we finally started getting some of these agents and some of these legislators and members of the Tobacco Commission and all this out to farms and then showed them some numbers about how much this particular farmer would make per acre with tomatoes and peppers. I think part of it was they said those same things because they believed that because they believed there was no alternative, and as a result all of the ag dollars and all of the marketing work of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Tennessee Department of Agriculture was all around tobacco, and it was almost impossible to break it. So that the policy framework was so focused on tobacco because of this basic belief that "Well, it may not be the best thing. Yeah, I guess some people are dying from it but nothing else will help a local small farmer stay on the farm because nothing comes close." We had to show them, just literally show them on the farm, and then back it up with some numbers, before we could shake that up, and now, although tobacco still gets some dollars, it's a much more open playing field in terms of resources, in terms of—it's totally different. We have people constantly calling us from the Virginia Department of Agriculture about wanting to send us to organic trade shows, wanting to take us up to a new buyer on the east coast of Virginia that's looking for organic. They're expending their resources, they're excited about it, and they had to see it.

Mississippi
The crisis is almost silent about the rural heartland of Appalachia, Rio Grande Valley, and most importantly -- the Mississippi Delta. The increasing level of poverty and adverse impacts are eroding some of America's most rich heritage and opportunity. Even across the nation in the California Valley, rural communities suffer from the same ills of souther farmers: declining personal and family income, uneducate children, bankruptcy, loss of land and aging owners. Children are fleeing rural communities for low income jobs in big cities. Family land is lost because children can't see a future in farming given the lack of understanding about production, environment, business development, new markets, community and economic development. African American, Latino, and American Indian farmers suffer the most and are the hardest hit with the greatest needs.

What lessons learned or developed by Anthony Flaccavento and Will Allen can be shared that would help advocacy, coalition, and community groups provide technical assistance to small communities? Are the models developed by Will Allen in a duplicable format? What barriers can be identified that might be avoided in other areas in the process of strategic planning? How might interested organizations learn more about both programs.

Will Allen
MR. ALLEN: Yeah, I think we can replicate because we're working in the Mississippi Delta with the groups that are funded through risk management and 2501, some of the same types of funding that are funding other organizations around the country. There is definitely a crisis in rural America, the same as in urban America, many of the same ills. As I travel the country and work in some of these communities and some of the extension stuff that we're doing, we're finding the same conditions, where most of the land is now occupied by large corporate farming entities. If you go to Mississippi you'll see lot of cotton down there, a lot of the land where vegetables used to be grown where we had many African American farmers in Mississippi. That's all over with. I think the latest statistic I heard, just from a state like Arkansas, there was only 77 African American farmers left in the state of Arkansas, when back in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, 20 percent of the farmers in the country were African American farmers in those regions. And we're less than one percent. So I know there's a huge crisis, and what we're finding is that when we do national workshops here from January through May many of the folks that come to our workshops are from the South, because there seems to be a resurgence of interest in the South, and I think Anthony and I both saw that when we were at the Southern Sustainable Working Group conference in Louisville this year where they had the largest number of farmers ever, due to a couple things: Outreach efforts and also the models that Anthony's done working with tobacco farmers, because in Kentucky a lot of the producers that I talked to - and they actually came to our workshop - were tobacco producers that had gotten a buyout that wanted to go into organic production, so I think there are these programs that we would had - things that we have on a smaller scale, because many of these farmers don't have the land, they don't have access to large parcels of land, but some of them still have some family land that they want to go back to or start operation and youth programs also, because the youth down in those areas are also in crisis, where they have drug problems. In the South they have the same kinds of issues with kids killing kids and so forth, the same thing we have here in the central cities. So when I go and I see some of the same issues in the South as I see in the large cities like New York and Baltimore and D.C. and Milwaukee and Chicago, Detroit, I go back to the fact that I keep saying that just having these done examples of infrastructure, and having the kind of organizations, these nonprofit organizations, that others can model themselves after, and they can tweak them so that they can work in their communities where people are looking for it. They're looking for ideas. I'm getting hundreds and hundreds of e-mails every day from folks that want to start farm-to-school programs, they want to start school gardens, they want to start neighborhood gardens, they want community gardens, they want to do community farms, they want to get back to the land. So there's a huge, huge interest and everybody wants to know how. How do I do it? Where do I start? We're just two organizations. There are not a lot of organizations around the country that folks can - we have to build that infrastructure of organizations that can deliver the kinds of training to help all of these folks because one or two organizations can't do it. One or two people can't do it. And we're talking about working with folks that have - you have to have some cultural sensitivity, because it's such a diverse country that we have now that you have to be able to work with folks from diverse backgrounds, so that takes some skill. You can't just take anybody and stick them into a community and say, "Go work with these folks." You have to have cultural sensitivity. I think one of the weaknesses that I keep talking about that we have to strengthen is this train the trainer. We've got to train, we've got to replicate ourselves somehow by training folks to be able to go out and do that, and we think that young people coming out of college would be able to do that, but I've found that most kids come out college are not ready to do that. They're ready to maybe go to Peace Corps or they're ready to work on a certain level, but to actually go out and train folks and be able to hang in there, because that training time or going along that continuum to develop a project and a community takes a long time. We're looking five years. The average project takes about five years and follow-up contact, so we actually go out and work with groups; it's not you start a project and you go back a year later. That's not enough. You almost have to go at three month intervals and make those kind of contacts to bring those projects along. I think first and foremost we have to have some programs to train some folks, and I think once kids go to the Peace Corps, come back, they want to stay in this work, they're probably in their early to mid-30s and they're ready, they're serious about wanting to do something. They have some responsibilities now. I think it's that generation, that group, that we have to train that are going to be the next leaders, because we've got to start thinking about these succession plans, how do we continue these organizations, and the people - the founders of these organizations like myself and Anthony, who are the next Anthony and Wills that are out there to want to do this work. So that's kind of where I'm at right now at my age is how do we develop this succession plan to keep this thing, this movement, going? We have to have those trainers to go out and work in those communities because there are tons of communities out there that want to start these projects. This farm-to-school. Otherwise we're going to be talking and pining 10 years from now talking about the same stuff. Unless we can take some really concrete action and the only way I know how to is to get out and do it, and even though a lot of times it might not be perfect but we have to go from that kind of passive stage to the active stage of getting some stuff done in these communities.

MR. FLACCAVENTO: I think getting stuff done even if it isn't perfect is what attracts people to you. When ASD was a year or so old we had a little story about us in the local paper and the reporter misquoted me slightly. He attributed to me the quote, "We don't think, we act." And I was always amused by that. I thought to myself, I believe what I said was, "We don't just think, we act," but anyway, it sort of captured it fairly well because we have a disposition for taking risks, trying things. I think Growing Power, ASD, and a few other groups around the country are this sort of new generation of entrepreneurial nonprofits that are about creating business, about inserting themselves in the marketplace and trying to change the rules of the game, and once you're in the marketplace, about starting up small enterprises and demonstration, demonstration, demonstration in the sense of showing things are possible. But I agree with Will, there are not nearly enough of these groups. I don't know, there may be - just being associated with the Kellogg network and the Ford Foundation network and some sustainable forestry networks, I'm sure I don't know them all, but I'd be surprised if there were more than two or three dozen groups of this sort, not that there aren't many other great groups, but of the sort that Will's group is and ASD is, which is kind of this catalytic entrepreneurial nonprofit that is willing to go beyond just teaching and education, beyond analysis and policy, beyond exhortation of the community to get involved, but actually doing it, actually filling the gaps, creating the infrastructure, building the relationships, the tangible relationships between farmers and suppliers, between farmers and - education between consumers and farmers. All that stuff is real, real, hands on work. The good news is I think there's more of it now and there's more knowledge about how to do it dramatically than it was just 10 or 12 years ago, so for the person asking the question, it's kind of the best of times and the worst of times really. A lot of the world is going exactly in the wrong direction in my opinion, and a lot of our policy is exactly in the wrong direction, and the resources, and of course big business agriculture is getting more powerful, not less powerful. On the other hand, there is this tiny but rapidly growing streak, this counter-streak that Will and I are a part of, and a number of other groups are and many, many individuals are, which is trying to create healthy - in the sense of healthy for people, healthy for the ecosystem - more self-reliant and sort of self-generating local economies. When Will is turning food waste by the millions of pounds into fertile soil, you couldn't have a better metaphor for what we need to be doing in one way or another in every community in the country, because that's what we've done is we have taken our waste, our animals' waste, and we've somehow made garbage out of it . Nature would always have been just returning it to the soil to feed the earth. So we've created problems where there really was no problem to begin with, and so now our job is to turn those problems into opportunities, and I think that when Will does that with compost that's it. I think what he's doing and what we're doing is very adaptable to many communities. I hesitate when people say the word replicable because that sounds like you make the same thing. I doubt it's going to be the same, but look at who we are and where we come from: Relatively poor inner city communities, relatively poor Appalachian communities. People said to us at the beginning there was no way we'd ever get tobacco farmers interested in something other than tobacco, let alone free-range chickens and organic produce. They said there was no way that we could ever sell the stuff because we weren't close to Washington or New York or San Francisco. We were out in the boonies. There was a lot of that. I'm sure Will heard that too.

MR. ALLEN: Yeah.

MR. FLACCAVENTO: So I think the point is if you can do it in relatively sparsely populated rural communities where there's this out-migration, if you can do it in downtown center cities where there's been a lot of neglect and a lot of abandonment, then you can in those places generate these sort of snowball economies that are just picking up steam, that are picking up interest and keep adding different kinds of businesses to fill other gaps. Then you can do it anywhere, I think.

MR. ALLEN: I just want to add one thing to this whole idea. I think one of the fundamental things that has to happen - it's not going to happen overnight - we've been working at this a long time. Like I said I met Anthony a few yearsago at Jekyll Island and he was working on it even before then.

MR. FLACCAVENTO: I was a lot taller then too ----

MR. ALLEN: And then when I saw him again at the Ford Foundation get together and found out that he was an awardee, I wasn't surprised, because there was one thing that really makes this stuff work - and I truly believe this - it's really passion. I felt it then when I met him, when he talked about what he was attempting to do. I wasn't surprised when I saw him years later that he had accomplished what he said he was going to do. And it was about passion. I think to develop passion is not something that happens overnight. So he already had gone through that series of time to build that passion, and I always tell everybody that we must have when we're working with these communities and we're working with individuals or our staff and we hire people, we have to have that time, that patience, for people and communities to build their passion, because that's the only thing that sustains our work is our passion. It's not about a whole lot of money or whatever. One thing going for them and that was their passion. They really enjoyed the lifestyle. They really enjoyed the work. It wasn't about money, because otherwise the money ran out, they would have ran out and chased some more money somewhere else.

MR. FLACCAVENTO: Right. So it's really about giving these communities, being patient with these communities, being patient with the people that we bring into the movement. Otherwise you're just turning people over because you have to anchor them somehow long enough for them become passionate about their work, and that's one of the sacrifices, or one of the not really sacrifices, but one of the commitments that we make as an organization with our employees, is to make sure that they get a living wage so that they're not out hunting around just to survive, for a job, and that gives them a chance - gives me a chance to work with them, so that they have that timeline to develop the passion, and then the work becomes less work but more of a lifestyle. And that's what we have to do with communities that communities need to recognize that after a while, that this is good for our communities to have healthy food, because I really don't see how we can build healthy communities without having healthy food. If people are hungry in a community why would they want to do anything in their community? If we have starvation - and I was recently in Africa, and you can see it - when people don't have food they can't create a community. There were communities being moved closer to water because of the drought in Kenya when I was there. So people were chasing their food source. They were moving closer to the food source. They were leaving their villages that they had been in for forever. So we have to be able to have healthy, safe, affordable food in communities before we can start even thinking about getting rid of the drug houses and getting rid of this problem or the sidewalks are bad, the streets are bad, and - it seems like food is the last thing we think about in terms of community development.

Jackson, MS
Thanks again for a great discussion. We have time for one more question.

What does the phrase "Think globally, act locally" mean in your work. Do you see your work tying into global issues or is your focus only on your local communities?

Will Allen
MR. ALLEN: Well, this is Will again. To me, it's really about a global movement. The same things that are happening here are happening in other countries. For example in Africa, same things. People have moved, are moving. In Kenya right now for every ten people of their population eight live in rural communities, two live in the city, but that's shifting, and they predict that that's going to be reversed in not so many years because there are no jobs in the rural communities. There are problems and there's drought. So everybody's going toward the city to look for work or whatever, and that has caused a lot of problems. That's why HIV is very high in Africa now, because of all this—the distress and so forth. Young people don't have much to live for. When they move to the city they can't find jobs. We're seeing some of the same issues. There are actually drug problems in Nairobi, in townships in Nairobi. So there are some of the same issues that you see worldwide. So I think we have to address those issues in a similar fashion, because until we can get people good water, good food, none of that's going to change. Hetra International is trying to address that issue in the project I'm working with them on in terms of enterprise development, going from a evelopment stage to more of a business enterprise stage, and their work is to address the issue around how do we employ people, how do we put money into folks' pockets in the cities, how do we grow food closer to big cities in Africa and Asia and Eastern Europe and so forth, because Asia's suffering the same thing. In China, people are moving into the big cities. So it's a worldwide issue, and I think some of the same types of things that we're doing here can be used in other countries, and we're starting to see folks from Africa coming over here, getting training, and taking that training back to those cities and so forth. As a matter of fact, we're going to be hosting some youths from Africa for a couple months here. They're going to stay at our place for a month and then they're going to go to a dairy farm, a local small dairy farm for a month to learn some of the practices that they're taught on those dairy farms so they can take it back to Kenya. So there are a lot of crossovers, a lot of similarities. You almost have to think globally in terms of being able to learn some of the things that are happening. We've learned a lot about what's going on in Cuba. Cuba has probably the most advanced sustainable ag program in the world, and many people have gone there and brought back ideas. They do vermicomposting on a huge, huge scale. Their life expectancy now is higher than the U.S. Well, that's a third world country. It's Canada, it's Cuba, and there's the U.S. And a lot of people don't know that, and it's because the change of diet, and they're eating healthier than we are. So there are some models that we need to look at from other countries. Much of the stuff around anaerobic digestion for renewable energy has been going on in third world countries for years. So there's a lot of stuff that we need to look at in terms of other countries that's not just happening in America. I felt some of the most innovative community projects that Hetra was doing in third world countries, and Kenya then, that was happening in our communities, where people are working together in cooperation with each other, where community gardeners are supporting each other and sharing resources. Just figured out ways of sharing the limited resources because we see the farmers who buy these expensive tractors and a couple years later they're out of business because they couldn't afford that $100,000 harvester or whatever instead of sharing it with 10 other farmers or something. So we need to learn from other folks around the world, and learn how to share resources and learn how to work together and take the politics out. I see working in communities a lot of times, politics and people protecting their little territories sometimes prevents projects from getting started. So we need to take the politics out of food so that we can build these systems.

MR. FLACCAVENTO: I'll just add to that, that I think, you know what, years and years ago when I was just sort of getting started in the social justice stuff we used to say that all the time, "Think globally, act locally." I'm not thrilled with that phrase because it sort of seems to say that all you can do action-wise is local, and all you can do about the global stuff is sort of ponder it. I don't like that dichotomy. When you build healthy local economies in Appalachia, in Milwaukee, in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Kenya and Malaysia a lot of things will happen. First of all, more people can better take care of their own needs. And I think one of the crying problems of modern society and young people in particular is they just don't feel needed. And in fact a lot of times that's because they aren't in their life as it's being lived. There are just a lot of young people all over the world who have a tremendous amount of idle time, and the reason for that is because in affluent societies we've created these ridiculous households which are devoid of responsibility to the larger community. We're not producing things anymore in households, we're buying stuff all over the world to take care of our needs. The infrastructure and resource base in poor communities has been so denuded. But the message is sort of the same, maybe different intensity, which is, how do people, young people and adults, meaningfully participate in making their community a better place? I think that is when you start to create these vibrant economies, based around food, encompassing things sometimes other than food, you not only trade job opportunities, you create a sense of connection and pride into that. For the global dimension of that is first of all the sharing, the knowledge that we have something to give and something to learn, like going to other communities, whether we're doing it online or doing it in person. I think there's a tremendous amount to learn from so-called undeveloped places. Part of it is we won't be so dependent on somebody else's cheap labor, on somebody else's lax environmental law, on somebody else adopting GMO crops because our own community is in such a bad way. As we take care of more of our own needs, as we become more self-reliant individually in those communities, then I think people can begin—if they are bringing things in from other parts of the world they can begin to pay the true cost of them. They no longer have to demand these cheap goods which have driven the global economy for the last century. I think that's just hugely important that our relationship to the globe is not just about thinking about them. The fact of the matter is that probably three fourths of our life is dependent upon people and places that we don't know. We just take it for granted. Our food, our fiber, certainly our energy, it's all dependent— so much of it is dependant on people far away. It's their land, their soil, their forests. As we get more self-reliant and healthy the stuff that we do need to bring from other communities, we can start paying them what it really costs to raise them and sustain them, and I think that's the key relationship, the key global relationship, absolutely.

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