Will Allen is an urban farmer who is transforming the cultivation, production, and delivery of healthy foods to underserved, urban populations. After a brief career in professional basketball, and a number of years in corporate marketing at Procter & Gamble, Will returned to his roots as a farmer, using his retirement package to purchase a plot of inner city land with greenhouses where he has built the country's pre-eminent urban farm.  He is now the CEO of Growing Power (www.growingpower.org), an organization that develops community food systems. 

In 2008, Will was named a John D. and Katherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a "genius grant," only the second farmer ever to be so honored.  He is also a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, and in February 2010, he was invited to the White House to join First Lady Michelle Obama in launching, "Let's Move!" - her signature leadership program to reverse the epidemic of childhood obesity in America.  In May 2010, TIME magazine named Will to the TIME 100 World's Most Influential People.  In 2011, Allen was named one of the 7 World's Most Influential Foodies by Michael Pollan and Forbes Magazine. He was named the 2012 NCAA Theodore Roosevelt Award recipient. He lives with his wife in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and is the author of The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities.

Listen and subscribe to the Big Vision Podcast on iTunes.

Connect with me:

• Website: brittbravo.com
• Speaking & workshop calendar: brittbravo.com/speaking
• Blog: havefundogood.blogspot.com
• Facebook: facebook.com/britt.bravo
• Twitter: @Bbravo

Music: "Mango Delight," by Kenya Masala.  Connect with Kenya through CD Baby and Source Consulting Group.

Samin Nosrat creates community around food with her varied endeavors as a cook, teacher, writer, and accidental activist.  She's known for the Pop-Up General Store, Tartine Afterhours dinners, Home Ec Cooking Classes, and the nationwide Bakesale for Japan that raised $140,000.  Her newest project is organizing Chez Panisse Foundation's Eating for Education, a grassroots effort to create national awareness about school kitchen/garden programs nationwide. At the heart of all of Samin's work is the fundamental belief in the power of food to create meaningful connection.

Listen and subscribe to the Big Vision Podcast on iTunes.

Learn more about Samin:

• Website: www.ciaosamin.com
• Twitter: @ciaosamin
• Eating for Education: www.eatingforeducation.org
• Twitter: @eat4education

Connect with me

• Website: http://brittbravo.com
• Speaking & workshop calendar: http://brittbravo.com/speaking
• Blog: http://havefundogood.blogspot.com
• Twitter: @Bbravo
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/britt.bravo

Music: "Mango Delight," by Kenya Masala.  Connect with Kenya through CD Baby and Source Consulting Group.

Temra Costa is a nationally recognized sustainable food and farming advocate.  Her recent book, Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat is the product of the past seven years she has spent working to promote a more vibrant local food economy in California, and beyond. 

Farmer Jane features the stories of over 30 women and how they are changing our food systems for the better as farmers, educators, mothers, chefs, businesswomen, and policy wonks.  The book also explains how eaters, farms and businesses can get more involved in changing how our country eats and farms.

Temra works, cooks, gardens and writes in the East Bay of California.  She is a radio show co-host on Green 960 with her show the Queens of Green (which you can also download as a podcast).

To learn more about Temra's work, go to: www.farmerjane.org.

A transcript of this interview is available on my blog, Have Fun, Do Good.

Listen/subscribe on iTunes.  Intro and outro music by Kenya Masala.

Jessica Prentice is co-owner of Three Stone Hearth, a Community Supported Kitchen in Berkeley, California that uses local, sustainable ingredients to prepare nutrient-dense, traditional foods on a community scale.  She is a professional chef, passionate home cook, local foods activist, and author of Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection.  She is also the co-creator of the Local Foods Wheel, and coined the word, locavore.

A transcript of this interview is available on my blog, Have Fun, Do Good.

Listen/subscribe on iTunes.  Intro and outro music by Kenya Masala.

Author,  Anna Lappe, talks about her new book, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It.  Anna is also the co-author of Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet, and Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen.

In Diet for a Hot Planet, Anna explains the link between today's global food system and climate change, and offers ideas and inspiration for making sustainable food choices that can provide a catalyst for transforming the enviornment.  For more information about the book, go to  www.takeabite.cc

You can read a transcript of this interview on my blog, Have Fun, Do Good.

Music by Kenya Masala and Tift Merritt

Ashley Rowe and Carolynn Webb are the owners of the Fat Bottom Bakery and co-creators of the East Bay Vegan Bakesale.  In January, they raised $2200 at the first East Bay Vegan Bakesale for a school gardening program and Bad Rap Pit Bull Rescue.  The next East Bay Vegan Bakesale is in Oakland, CA on March 20, 2010.  You can find a vegan bakesale near you at www.veganbakesale.org

You can read a transcript on my blog, Have Fun Do Good.

Music by Kenya Masala and Mary Mulliken. Listen and subscribe to the Big Vision Podcast in the iTunes Music Store.

Patricia Loya is the Executive Director of La Cocina, a San Francisco Incubator Kitchen for Women.  The mission of La Cocina is to cultivate food entrepreneurs as they formalize and grow their businesses by providing affordable commercial kitchen space, industry-specific technical assistance and access to market opportunities.  They focus primarily on women from culturally diverse and immigrant communities. 

Patricia earned her undergraduate degree from the University of California at Irvine and went on to earn a Masters of Education degree from Harvard University.  In 2001, Patricia was a fellow with the Executive Program for Nonprofit Leaders through the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.  In 2003, she participated in the Hispanics in Philanthropy Leadership Institute at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Upon receiving her undergraduate degree, Patricia joined La Raza Centro Legal in San Francisco.  She later co-founded Ujima Unidos, a Saturday school for African American and Latino youth in Oakland, California.  She then went on to become the Executive Director of Centro Legal de la Raza where she worked closely with immigrant and low-income communities, assisted day laborers in forming their own worker association, and launched the flagship project, The Youth Law Academy. She became the Executive Director of La Cocina in 2009.

A transcript of this interview is available on my blog Have Fun Do Good.

Interview from February 11, 2009 with Bryant Terry, eco-chef, food justice activist, and author of Vegan Soul Kitchen: Fresh, Healthy, and Creative African-American Cuisine.

Bryant is currently a Fellow in the Food and Society Policy Fellows Program, a national project of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.  His first book, Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen, which he co-authored with Anna Lappé, won a 2007 Nautilus Award for Social Change.  He was also a co-host of the PBS series, Endless Feast.

You can read a transcript on this interview on my blog, Have Fun Do Good.

If you've been listening to the last seven shows, they were all recorded between February and June 2006 and originally hosted on Gcast.  Now I'm done with the transfer of old interviews and we're on to the new!

I'm thrilled to have had an opportunity to interview Anna Lappe, the co-author of Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen with Bryant Terry, and co-author of Hope's Edge with her mother Frances Moore Lappe.  Anna is also a co-founder, with her mother, of the Small Planet Fund, and a founding principal of the Small Planet Institute, based in Cambridge Massachusetts.

You can read a transcript of this interview on my blog, Have Fun * Do Good.

Brahm Ahmadi is the Executive Director of People's Grocery, an awesome food justice nonprofit in Oakland.

You can read a transcript of this interview on my blog, Have Fun * Do Good.