Tracie McMillan, Author at Tracie McMillan

Special Report: Charity Accountability

January 22, 2025November 1, 2007

Contribute • November/December 2007

Created to alleviate poverty, the nonprofit Miami-Dade Empowerment Trust seemed for nearly a decade to be taking aim at South Florida’s most impoverished neighborhoods by creating new business opportunities and jobs.

As it happened, the organization also had been busy creating wealth for some of its own. The taxpayer-supported agency had lavished money on insider deals, lost money on failed loans, and spent hundreds of thousands on celebrity entertainers. Just one wasteful expense involved a tab of more than $87,000 to fly hip-hop star Sean “Diddy” Combs from New Jersey to Miami on a charted Gulfstream jet. Diddy’s antipoverty mission for the nonprofit? Hosting an MTV awards ceremony.

Q&A: Labor of Lovins

January 22, 2025October 1, 2007

Plenty • October/November 2007

Amory Lovins might not be a household name, but the ideas he’s put forth for the past 30 years have affected virtually every household in America. Increasing energy efficiency, supporting small and local power generation from renewable sources, and building smart rather than big are just a few of the concepts he’s promoted. Lovins started when he was 29, using the energy crisis of the late ’70s to reach President Carter’s ear. This year, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the nonprofit organization devoted to energy research he founded with his wife, celebrated its 25th anniversary with a forum attended by luminaries such as Thomas Friedman of The New York Times and Majora Carter of the nonprofit Sustainable South Bronx. Plenty stole a few minutes of Lovins’s time to discuss ultralight cars, an indoor banana garden, and why efficiency is the best alternative fuel we’ve got.

Inspection Protection: Will New Council Bill Safeguard Workers?

January 22, 2025September 26, 2007

City Limits • Sept. 26, 2007

After celebrating the City Council’s recent passage of a bill upping penalties for employers that lock in their workers at night, the legislation’s backers are faced with a new challenge: enforcement.

The lock-ins bill was designed to clamp down on stores, primarily groceries, that lock in janitors overnight in the hopes of discouraging theft. The bill, passed Sept. 14 and awaiting the mayor’s signature, will dramatically increase fines for violations, from $500 to $5,000 for the first offense, and $20,000 for each additional offense.

Q&A: Mister Bean

January 22, 2025September 11, 2007

Salon • Sept. 11, 2007

Every food has its fans, and with Ken Albala’s new book, “Beans: A History,” the humble legume may well have found its champion. Over a year spent eating beans on a daily basis, from minuscule rice beans to 4-inch whoppers called gigantes, the culinary historian put his expertise — and his stomach — to work, compiling a detailed family history of the world’s edible beans.

But lest that seem like an avalanche of research to pour into a humble subject, Albala is quick to point out that beans are one of the few foods that appear in nearly every national cuisine, from French cassoulets to Filipino bean and fruit desserts. Pairing a foodie’s curiosity with an academic’s knack for detail, Albala carefully charts the food’s historical arc while also offering recipes in keeping with each era.

The Cause Web / Innovators

January 22, 2025September 1, 2007

Contribute • September/October 2007

Contribute’s Tech 10 is not a hot list. It’s a selection not of the most powerful or the most glamorous or the most famous. There aren’t presidents of established foundations, nor celebrities. They’re not even the most vocal. Rather, they are a handful of some of the most influential new leaders at the very front lines of advocacy today, all using the power of The Cause Web to reshape the reach, impact, and experience of what it means to make a difference. They are innovators like Suzanne Seggerman, who founded Games for Change, to use video games to raise funds and awareness for those caught in the crossfire of global strife. Or Ailin Graef, a Chinese-born entrepreneur who is the first philanthropist in the maturing new world of Second Life. Or Charles Best, whose simple online auction model matches specific individuals on both sides of the give-get divide — a Manhattan banker, say, with an impoverished public school teacher in South Central Los Angeles — and completely removes the middleman to more quickly help those in need. But the real magic of our Tech 10 is the array of new technologies they represent. Herewith, our Tech 10:

Restaurateurs-to-Be Look Before Leaping

January 22, 2025August 8, 2007

The New York Times • Aug. 8, 2007

PASQUALE VIGGIANO and his wife, Geraldine, thought they knew the restaurant business. Ms. Viggiano had helped her mother run a cafe in Honduras and Mr. Viggiano had grown up hearing his parents’ fond tales of the luncheonette they opened when they came to Brooklyn from Italy.

“They described how they put the restaurant together and it kind of excited me,” Mr. Viggiano said.

Digging Deeper

January 22, 2025August 3, 2007

Plenty • Aug. 3, 2007

When Will Allen was offered a buyout from his job at Procter and Gamble in 1982, he knew exactly what to do with the corporate cash: Buy a farm. Allen dropped $80,000 on 100 acres south of Milwaukee’s airport, and eventually added a couple of acres within city limits.

Today, the 58-year-old has 25 years of urban agriculture experience under his belt—and he’s put it to good use. As the executive director of Growing Power, an urban agriculture group, Allen oversees a wide array of innovative programs that have made the organization one of the country’s preeminent teaching institutions for city-based, grassroots farming practices. “Our strength is in inspiring people to get up off the planning table,” he says.

Mapping Out Meals

January 22, 2025July 27, 2007

Plenty • July 27, 2007

Two days before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Marnie Genre was putting down roots in the Big Easy—literally. Planting backyard fruit and vegetable gardens in the city’s Hollygrove neighborhood, Genre and her colleagues at the New Orleans Food and Farm Network (NOFFN), a food justice group, were aiming to improve the health of residents in the low-income communities while bolstering local food systems.

Then Katrina hit. Hollygrove sat under floodwaters for days. And when they receded, NOFFN knew that everything had changed—including what they needed to do.

Not Your Average Turnip Truck

January 22, 2025July 13, 2007

Plenty • July 13, 2007

The corner of Market and Brockhurst in West Oakland, CA doesn’t look much like a food mecca. A small church, a low-slung YMCA, and an elementary school occupy three corners of the treeless intersection. On the fourth corner sits the only clue: a two-story house converted to apartments, bearing a colorful, graffiti-lettered sign declaring, “Be Healthy!”

It’s fitting that the offices of the People’s Grocery, an Oakland-based food justice group, offer the brightest sign of fresh food for blocks. Founded in 2002 by Malaika Edwards, Leander Sellers, and current executive director Brahm Ahmadi, the group started with one simple premise: Bring fresh, healthy food to the city.

One Stop Shop

January 22, 2025July 6, 2007

Plenty • July 6, 2007

A couple years ago, Veronica Uy, a staffer for the Philadelphia-based food justice group the Food Trust, got an intriguing assignment: Visit the country’s biggest and best farmers’ markets—and help create something similar in the City of Brotherly Love.

It was a perfect fit for Uy, a Filipina-Canadian transplant to the States who developed a passion for food markets during a trip to Southeast Asia. She’d recently dropped a fledgling career as a computer programmer to work on food issues, and the project came with a double lure. Not only would a flagship market appeal to Uy’s foodie instincts, (she’s an avid home cook) it would highlight the local produce available in the city—and help publicize the fact that in Philly, most farmers’ markets accept food stamps and other government benefit coupons.