This month, the Heinz Family Foundation announced the recipients of its 17th annual Heinz Awards. Among the honorees are Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney, the co-founders of FoodCorps, highlighted by OnEarth in its fall issue.
In cased you missed the article, FoodCorps is a new program, roughly modeled after Peace Corps, that places recent college graduates in limited-resource communities for a year of public service. Working under the direction of local partner organizations, the volunteers focus on delivering hands-on nutrition education; building and tending school gardens; and bringing high-quality local food into public school cafeterias.
“Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis are catalysts for change,” said Teresa Heinz, the chairperson of the Pittsburgh-based foundation. “From their early work at Yale University with the sustainable food movement to the empathetic and warm documentary, King Corn, to their ‘truck farms,’ they have provoked and educated us with humor and storytelling. Now, with FoodCorps, they will engage children in both growing and understanding the food they eat.”
This year’s Heinz Awards, which annually recognize individuals creating and implementing solutions to the problems the world faces through invention, research, and education, are focused specifically on the environment. Among the other recipients are Richard Alley, an international leader in climate and polar ice studies; Janine Benyus, a pioneer in the field of biomimicry engineering; Joan Kleypas, a researcher specializing in the impacts of climate change on coral reefs; and Nancy Rabalais, who has conducted intensive research on the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico.
The $100,000 Awards, which were established in 1993 by Teresa Heinz to honor the memory of her late husband, U.S. Senator John Heinz, will be presented at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. on November 15. Cheney and Ellis, at 31, will be the youngest-ever recipients of the honor.
