“Welcome to Citiwire.net! If local agriculture is to be a pillar of sustainable cities, it will take plenty of imagination–technical and social. Will Allen’s Milwaukee-based “Growing Power,” the focus of my column this week, has the inventiveness (and soul) to be a powerful model for the new times. Reading the piece, just count the pluses–city farming, yard-round growing potentials, engagement of youth, overcoming our obesity-feeding “food deserts” –and more. … My colleague Curt Johnson’s Citiwire column on the energy and enthusiasm–youthful and mature–of the All-America Cities program is yet another sign that even in times of disheartening government deficits and cutbacks, the forces for civic progress remain vibrant.” -- Neal Peirce
Neal Peirce
For Release Sunday, July 5, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
MILWAUKEE — Will Allen has a small but remarkable farm. In greenhouses, he grows watercress, tomatoes, nasturtium, arugula, and many more vegetables. There are massive tanks of perch and tilapia. Plus a barnyard of goats, chickens, turkeys, ducks and apiaries for bees.
And red wriggler worms. Each year, tens of thousands of them eat through millions of pounds of composting materials to create what Allen claims is “the highest quality fertilizer in the world.”
But this amazing organic farm isn’t out in the sticks–it occupies three acres in a scruffy North Milwaukee neighborhood. Just possibly, it heralds a century of city farming that delivers healthy natural foods year-round and reduces reliance on thousand-mile-plus food supply lines.
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Curtis Johnson
For Release July 2, 2009
Citiwire.net
TAMPA — Meeting here in mid-June, the panel of judges for the 60th All America Cities awards–America’s premier civic recognition program–were in for a big surprise. Of 29 cities making presentations, a group of 25 teens and near-teens from Richmond, Ind., clearly stole the show.
The young people, a rainbow of races and sizes, not only made Richmond’s 10-minute case to be a winner, but arrested attention with their powerfully mature responses to questions.
The build-up had been Richmond’s effort to envision its future and prove its worth to be an All-America City. Adult civic leaders had been activist enough: reacting to a 2007 Johns Hopkins University report calling Richmond “a dropout factory,” they’d inaugurated a Third Grade Reading Academy for early intervention. Two-thirds of third graders reading below grade level had signed up, with scores shortly rising by 50 percent.
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