Nice Chicago NBC program on Sweet Water’s Emmanuel Pratt and the SWF’s collaboration with CCA Academy on the South Side of Chicago.
Sweet Water Foundation has been and continues to be recognized by the US Dept of Agriculture and now the US Dept of Energy for the educational/curricular/outreach work that we do with the 50+ schools we have worked with across three cities.
Sweet Water Foundation is a key partner in the ACTS Housing project currently underway in Milwaukee offering solutions to address the dire situation of foreclosure in Milwaukee.
This pilot project is being watched closely by Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and PNC bank for the potential to translate to other cities.
Sweet Water Foundation is highly recognized and respected in cities like Chicago as the work we did in Milwaukee inspired Chicago State University to appoint me as Director of the Chicago State Aquaponics Center, which also highlights the ongoing educational and outreach work Sweet Water Foundation does. The center is partially funded by both the USDA and the US Department of Education as a potential national model (also inspired by the IBM Smarter Cities Milwaukee report).
Building upon the work at the CSU Aquaponics Center, Sweet Water Foundation was just recognized for our efforts in Chicago as I was one of 5 individuals featured as one of 5 green award winners in Chicago (http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/April-2013/2013-Green-Awards-Emmanuel-Pratt/)
Sweet Water Foundation has been funded by the USDA and is being recruited by NASA for the outreach and educational work we do resulting from our Midwest Aquaponics Expertise Development.
Sweet Water Foundation’s Seed to Table Project Pilot initiative has been recognized and awarded for two years with promise of future funding by Newmans Own Foundation under our name
Tomorrow I have a conversation with several media companies interested in featuring Sweet Water Foundation as part of several national Toyota Green initiatives.
For the past three days, Sweet Water Foundation has been highlighted in the American Planning Association national conference for the educational and outreach we do ‘growing neighborhoods’. It is worth noting that city planners all seem to see the potential translation of the model we have developed on the Cobbs properties and the greater implications it presents for the entire Rust Belt but also internationally.
After being asked to be featured at the National Science Foundation funded talk regarding ‘Challenges in Vertical Farming, Sweet Water Foundation has also been featured in a Global publication as part of a series of upcoming publications along the theme of Controlled Environment Agriculture. The magazine features trends, new technologies, issues, and applications related to agricultural and biological engineering.
Tomorrow I will be leading a mobile tour of a group across our network of sites.
For the past 3 years, Sweet Water Foundation currently has had ongoing partnerships and is receiving increased interest with every major University in both Milwaukee and Chicago along with UW Madison for collaboration. All of these universities continue to get grant funding leveraging us as their partner. They also continue to publish papers in support of our work and impact. This does not include the national interest from Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth (many of which our team has either graduated from or worked with directly).
Sweet Water Foundation has been a key partner supporting the Organic Therapy Project with the Veterans in Milwaukee. Such was featured in the TEDx talk by Howard Hinterthuer of the Center for Veterans Issues (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObUoupoeJfw) as has since been discussed as a potentially national model.
Sweet Water Foundation was recently requested to be a listed partner in the USAID global submission with several partners in India and Kenya with which we have worked over the years as part of our Growing Networks initiative (http://growingnetworks.weebly.com/). Our submission was just received and we await response soon.
Sweet Water Foundations AQUAPONS program (funded and supported by MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations) will be featured in the summer launch of the Chicago Summer of Learning program as part of a national platform to introduce new models of education.
From my perspective, the recent evolution of aquaponics/urban ag is somewhere between the evolution of the car with Henry Ford meets Apple with Steve Jobs.
Sweet Water is an emergent, hybrid enterprise experiment, a social business and innovation center, advancing the commercialisation, democratisation, and globalisation of aquaponics, an eco system method of food production. But Sweet Water offers more than aquaponics produce and protein production. Sweet Water is a science lab; a school; an eco-tourist destination; an artist and tinkerer’s workshop; a community and new enterprise center. Sweet Water aspires to grow urban farmers, green tech start-up businesses, beloved communities, and… organic cities!
The Stars Aligning for Great Aquaponics Experiment
A sequence of events inspired me to team up with a web of partners to launch the Sweet Water experiment. The first happened in 2005 when young citizens at a public meeting in Riverwest Milwaukee, the most successful “integrating neighborhood” in Wisconsin, challenged the community to constructively respond to an incident of “black on white, straight on gay” violence rather than pound drums of race rage. This inspired my deciding to check out Will Allen’s Growing Power, which I had heard involved an African American ex-pro basketball player harvesting urban “waste streams” to grow rich soil for use by teams of urban youth transforming vacant lots into community gardens. I was “seized as if by a madness” by the Growing Power “magic” and decided to intensely promote Will’s teams through the MilwaukeeRenaissance.com wiki platform. My work led to a front page story about Will in the local alternative weekly, “The Shepherd Express,” and a position on the Growing Power Board.
I focused deeply on the Growing Power model, both its food production systems, especially vermiculture and aquaponics, and its methods for “growing farmers and communities” with a hybrid model, aimed both at multiple income streams through standard market sales as well as funds from workshops, tours, foundations, donors, and public private partnerships.
A number of other developments were critical in setting the stage for the Sweet Water aquaponics experiment. In the spring of 2006 Michael Macy, a State Department cultural attache and new friend through our mutual interest in the poetry of Rumi, lent great luster to Milwaukee’s urban agriculture government/industry when he orchestrated a London visit by Will Allen to address the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce as well as a visit by an eminent group of London “agrarians” in the Fall of 2007. The “London Farmers” then published a now classic report, “Edible Cities” including Growing Power projects in Milwaukee, Chicago, and New York. The Milwaukee Urban Agriculture Network(MUAN became both an inspirational/educational coalition as well as a grass roots political force. In March, 2008, MUAN organized a highly successful international urban agriculture conference at which the head of Milwaukee’s Department of City Development, Rocky Marcoux, proudly proclaimed Milwaukee as the centre of American urban agriculture. A month later urban agriculture made front page news in Milwaukee, for the first time, with a report on a partnership between Fred Binkowski of the Great Lakes Water Institute and Growing Power to raise 10,000 perch in Will’s aquaponic system. Jon Bales’ Urban Aquaculture Centre connected Will to Binkowski, as well as drumming up community awareness of urban fish farming’s possibilities. In September 2008 Will won the coveted MacArthur genius award. My daughter Rachel Godsil, a law professor and convener of the Obama Urban Policy Team, introduced me to some of that group’s leadership, increasingly intrigued, as was First Lady Michelle Obama, by the flaws of oil based, unhealthy, and polluting industrial agriculture system. My business partner Josh Fraundorf led our roof system restoration company to a $40,000 profit for Sweet Water investing. His friend and business associate offered very low rent, $15,000 in capital, and the promise of another $20,000 in sweat equity as a partner in Sweet Water. Emmanuel Pratt, a doctoral candidate in Columbia University’s Planning and Architecture Department, film maker, and close associate of Will Allen, signed on the help out with the social business,
democratizing, and globalizing vision piece; Josh and Steve to focus on the commercial upscaling.
A “grand alliance” was manifesting! The stage was surely set for an impressive commencement on December 31, 2008, when the Mayor’s City Development chief, Rocky Marcoux, along with Will Allen, pledged to provide support for what has become an audacious experiment called Sweet Water.
Sweet Water Vision Shared at Wild Flower Bakery
The group proceeded from meetings at Wild Flower bakery to the new Sweet Water site. The building felt colder than it was outside.
We believed aquaponics to be quite possibly humanity’s most earth friendly and prolific method of food production, a major response to the challenge of food security, global warming, and the transition from industrial cities of consumptive capitalism to organic cities with cultures of respect and care, for all life forms, in harmony with nature. We opened our story to the public and the media from the get go, despite the possibility of substantial mistakes. Zorba the Greek was present in my mind’s eye, as was this mantra: “You wished it stranger. You left the path of your own free will. And you are lost if you believe in danger.” The cause was important enough that it had to be tried. And, we’re still trying!
Sweet Water ReciproCity Art Science Collaboration
This from some university partners, written by Nicolas Lampert in conversation with Michael Carriere, of UWM and MSOE respectively.
Michael Carriere and I are in the early stages of housing an experimental cultural and independent media center inside Sweet Water Organics - a space for artists, designers, architects, scholars, filmmakers, scientists (natural and social), urban farmers, and others to meet, present work, collaborate on new work, and stage exhibitions. This space would be a hub space for art, ecology, and community engagement, and it would mirror the goals of the Sweet Water Foundation in teaching and exposing the ideas of urban sustainability, aquaponics, and the visionary idea of re-imagining Milwaukee as organic city – transforming the rust belt into a green belt.
Why Sweet Water? Sweet Water is an epicenter for creativity and is a visionary project that inspires people throughout the world. Sweet Water transforms the city and it transforms lives. Sweet Water is already a hub space for those interested in ecology and urban agriculture. It is not necessarily a destination site for artists, musicians, writers, historians, scholars, and others in the arts and humanities.
This is a lost opportunity.
An experimental art space that focuses on social practices inside Sweet Water would change this and would bring local, national, and international artists and scholars to Sweet Water. It would allow artists and scholars to network with the Sweet Water staff, to contribute their talents, and to tell the world about the work going on at Sweet Water and the urban agriculture movement in Milwaukee and the region. It would signify that Sweet Water supports artists and scholars, and it would signify that artists and scholars support Sweet Water.
The positive ripple effect of this type of collaboration and relationship are easy to imagine. First and foremost collaboration and the sharing of ideas would take place between artists and urban farmers. Second, artists and scholars would spread the gospel of Sweet Water and aquaponics to the world through their networks and through cultural work (i.e. writing about, visualizing, and filming this type of work). In essence, artists would be the creative PR (public relations) people for aquaponics. Artists would provide the independent media, the cultural analysis, and the creativity to imagine new possibilities.
Sweet Water has already given their blessings to having Michael and I establish an experimental art space inside their building. To move forward we need to raise funds for building materials, lights, a digital projector, and video equipment.
Harvesting Sweet Water For Milwaukee’s Nobel Prize
Methinks we are at the edge of an intense acceleration of our Urban AgAquaponics breakthrough that finds me hoping for some on-line brainstorming and conference calls with our team and a widening circle of partners including Joe Recchie, Dean Amhaus, Julia Taylor, and some of the folks perhaps listed below.
Hoping this might serve as a start for a collaboration with a variety of “partners” advancing the Sweet Water experiment and the Reid Yards/Water Technology Park.
Sweet Water/Milwaukee Global Water Technology Park Collaborator Candidates
This starting list of Milwaukee/Sweet Water “partners” are people of considerable renown and resource conduit possibility:
Dickson Despommier, vertical farm popularizer;
Dr. Nikolaus Correll, roboticist wanting to merge projects for sensor resourced miniatures for family and schools
Dr. Gene Giacomelli of NASA Controlled Environmental Agriculture(CEA) caree
Zurich’s Roman Gaus of portable container box fame;
Participants in the “Milwaukee Aquaponics R&D Consortium,” including Drs. Marklin of MU and his team, Traum, Carriere, Trussoni, Anderson, et al of MSOE, He, Keane, Unakpa, and others from UWM;
Shedd Aquarium and other Chicago partners Emmanuel can bring in;
Aquaponics Miniature trailblazers from across the planet, including the Berkeley team raising serious dollars crowd-sourcing.
Emmanuel has won the profound respect of Dickson Despommier, who orchestrated a Sweet Water presentation at a recent NSF conference. A net enhanced Sweet Water and Milwaukee would have no trouble winning Despommier’s participation in the Reid Yards unfolding. He has already committed to monthly conference calls of 20 minutes to mindstorm collaborations.
NASA’s Dr. Gene Giacomelli has invited Emmanuel to submit an action plan at a major vertical farming conference in 2013.
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