Heifer Project International - Urban Project
Alison Meares, Chicago Field Representative
Phoebe Griswold, Director of Education and Fund-Raising
1703 W. Division, No. 2
Chicago, Ill. 60622
773-395-9330
E-Mail: 105260.1711@compuserve.com

When Heifer Project International opened a Chicago office a dozen years ago, there wasn't any thought of importing the organization's program model -- giving farm animals to poor people to raise for food or commerce, with the understanding that they will "pass the gift along" by giving one of the animal's offspring to another family -- to the inner city. Rather, the purpose of the only urban office of the Arkansas-based HPI was to be education and fund-raising; its small staff was to find ways to inform the people of Chicago about world hunger issues, and raise money to support HPI's programs in rural America and around the world.

But it didn't take long, said Waiva Worthley, a veterinarian who's been a volunteer with the Chicago office since 1990, for the program's staff and volunteers to notice that the apparent need in the city's poor neighborhoods seemed just as great as that in the rural areas HPI traditionally serves.

And so, after a few years' thought and study and planning, pushed along by a South Side church's coincidental request for help starting a beekeeping program, the organization summoned participants to an Urban Agriculture workshop in 1995, and followed it up a year later by securing funding and hiring a staffer -- Alison Meares -- to create Heifer Project's first and only "urban animal agriculture" program.

Meares, a North Carolina native with a graduate degree in the sociology of agriculture and experience in sustainable-agriculture programs, has been working for almost a year with four grassroots groups (three in Chicago and one in Milwaukee), all of which are expected to receive grants of livestock and begin innovative urban-agriculture programs this autumn.

"Livestock" in the city sense doesn't mean Heifer Project's usual cattle, though! One Chicago organization, God's Gang, will be raising earthworms (for the rich organic "castings" they generate, which can be sold as expensive fertilizer) and food fish (in a small but high-tech aquaculture setup). Milwaukee's Farm-City Link greenhouse project plans a similar effort, while another Chicago group, Nobel Neighbors, a Latino organization, also plans an aquaculture project. The fourth group, Cabrini Greens, an organic market garden based in the Cabrini-Green public-housing project, hopes to raise goats for milk and cheese.

With a minimal staff and budget, HPI's Chicago office follows the parent organization's community organizing tradition of leaving decision-making and planning in the hands of the recipient groups, guiding them and providing them support but leaving the decisions up to them.

Writing in HPI's Chicago newsletter shortly after her arrival last fall, Meares said, "My hope is that together we can begin to weave a landscape of long-term social change right here in Chicago ... that we can be thoughtful together about an approach to urban development based on HPI's proven successful model in rural areas around the world."

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

Send him E-mail.

Back to the @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG Home Page