January’s installment of Food Tank’s Exclusive Webinar Series will feature John Fisk, Director of the Wallace Center at Winrock International. Fisk will speak on how innovations are spread, replicated, scaled out, and shared among farmers, researchers, and other stakeholders. The event will take place Wednesday, January 14 from 12pm to 1pm ET.
Fisk will give a 30-minute presentation on spreading innovation, followed by a 10 to 15 minute question-and-answer session. Register early, as space is limited.
More about the presenter:
John Fisk, PhD, has an extensive history as a national leader in sustainable and equitable food systems work and currently serves as the Director of the Wallace Center at Winrock International, based in Arlington, Virginia. Under Dr. Fisk’s leadership, the Wallace Center has emerged as a national force in food systems work utilizing a market-based solutions strategy for linking a larger number of people and communities to “good food”— food that is healthy, green, fair, and affordable.
Wallace Center’s strategy is four-fold: develop links within a diverse and growing network; strengthen this network knowledge; prime the pump of change by monitoring the emergence of useful models and helping others adopt or adapt them; and bring financial resources and other capacity building support to good food innovators. Implementation efforts include a market based solutions initiative called the National Good Food Network (NGFN). The NGFN is gaining recognition around the country for connecting leaders of regional food systems to new business models that facilitate the movement of locally produced food into retail and wholesale channels and into communities with limited food access.
Dr. Fisk has presented at several national events and was invited to participate as a member of a food systems expert panel, during a congressional briefing “Leveraging Local Food Systems for Healthy Farms and Healthy Communities” sponsored by Senators Clinton, Specter, Harkin and Kohl, where he presented a case in support of local and regional food systems as a strategy for economic development. Fisk is a founding board member of the National Food Routes Network, a member of the stakeholder advisory panel on corporate social responsibility convened by Ceres for the McDonalds Corporation, and serves as an editorial board member of the Journal of Sustainable Agriculture. He is an active member of the Sustainable Agriculture Food Systems Funders Group and of the Sustainable Food Laboratory, an international consortium of 70 businesses and social organizations whose mission is to accelerate the shift of sustainable food from niche to mainstream.
Prior to joining the Wallace Center, Fisk served as board chairperson and later as Director for Programs and Development at Michigan Food and Farming Systems, a statewide sustainable food systems organization, where he lead work to mobilize values-driven markets for sustainably produced agricultural products. Fisk has provided food systems consulting to several Michigan-based organizations including the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. In his work with the Kellogg Foundation, he provided strategic leadership to the Food and Society Initiative (FAS) as well as grantee support and review and has directed the FAS Networking Conference for six years which has become one of the premiere conferences in the nation for advancing sustainable food systems change.
Fisk is a published author of agricultural research and has written several chapters on sustainable food and farming systems. He has served as a Fellow in the Donella Meadows Leadership Program for Systems Thinking at the Sustainability Institute and was also awarded a C.S. Mott Fellowship of Sustainable Agriculture at Michigan State University. Fisk holds a PhD in Crop and Soil Sciences from Michigan State University, a Masters in Agronomy from University of Missouri-Columbia and a Bachelor degree in Environmental Studies-Agroecology from the University of California-Santa Cruz.
