Sustainability

Circular, Not Circuitous: Catching Up With Erika Allen

I catch up with Erika Allen of Urban Growers Collective and learn that my winding Philadelphia food career was circular all along.

By Harry Hayman 6 min read

Friday before a holiday is usually a dead zone on the calendar, the kind of afternoon everyone spends checking out early instead of getting on a call. That is exactly when I caught up with Erika Allen, and somehow it turned into one of the best conversations I have had all year. No deck, no agenda, just two people who first crossed paths in Chicago years ago, comparing notes now on food, cities, our fathers, getting older, and what we still want to get done before the runway gets much shorter. I walked away from that call holding onto one sentence I cannot put down. Not circuitous. Circular. Erika said it almost as a correction to a story I had been telling about my own career for years, and the more I sit with it, the more I think she was right.

Erika Allen and the Chicago Trip That Started This

If you do not already know Erika Allen, you should. She is the founder and chief executive of Urban Growers Collective, the Chicago nonprofit she and Laurell Sims built in 2017 out of the work left behind when Growing Power, the organization her father ran for decades, closed its doors. Erika Allen had already spent years running the Chicago branch of Growing Power herself, so when that chapter ended, she and her partners kept building the same mission under a new name: urban farms, food access programs, and a hard look at what a city does with the enormous amount of organic material it throws away every day.

I first spent real time with Erika years ago, when a group of us from Philadelphia visited her work in Chicago through the Economy League’s Greater Philadelphia Leadership Exchange, the program most of us just call GPLEX. It sends a group of Philadelphia leaders to another city every year to see how that region solves problems we are also wrestling with here, and Chicago has been on that itinerary more than once, most recently for the program’s twentieth anniversary trip. Wherever exactly my own visit fell on that timeline, what stuck with me was watching Erika and her partners chase down actual uses for food waste, not just talk about reducing it. Grow food. Feed people. Rescue what is still edible. Turn what is left into energy, fertilizer, and jobs. I filed all of it away and went back to running restaurants.

Will Allen’s Long Head Start

Erika did not arrive at this work from nowhere. Her father is Will Allen, the urban farmer who spent years turning a few acres inside Milwaukee’s city limits into a working demonstration of how much food a city block can actually grow, feeding people through Growing Power, the organization he built and later handed off in pieces to people like his daughter. The MacArthur Foundation gave him one of its fellowships in 2008 for exactly that work, and in 2011 the James Beard Foundation gave him its own Leadership Award for it too, the same award Erika herself would win eleven years later, in 2022, for building Urban Growers Collective into something that stands entirely on its own.

That family history came up Friday too, and it is the part of the conversation I keep turning over almost as much as the circular line. Erika told me her father once warned her that this kind of work takes ten years to actually show results. She thought she could move faster than that. She could not, and she said so herself, plainly, the way people only talk about their own timelines once they have lived through being wrong about them. I recognized that shape immediately, because I have lived a version of it myself, moving from restaurants into economic development, into food insecurity work, into policy, without ever picking a straight line on purpose.

What Green Era Is Actually Building on the South Side

Erika and her partners have spent years answering the exact question I am only now getting serious about here in Philadelphia, and the clearest answer sits on nine acres in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. That is Green Era’s campus, built around an anaerobic digester that opened in 2025 as, by most accounts, the first facility in the country built specifically to process packaged food waste at that scale. According to Block Club Chicago’s reporting from the campus, the digester has already kept tens of thousands of tons of food waste out of landfills, turning it instead into renewable energy and compost rich in nutrients, with a vertical farm spanning two acres, run by Urban Growers Collective, planned to grow produce fed by that same compost. The same reporting describes a project built to create local jobs along the way, including for people who have struggled to find steady work elsewhere.

Grow food. Feed people. Rescue what is edible. Turn the rest into energy and fertilizer and jobs. That is the whole loop Erika described to me years ago in Chicago, now standing on nine acres and actually running.

The Question I Keep Chewing On for Philadelphia

Erika and I talked about Chicago and Philadelphia side by side, food waste and food insecurity, agriculture and energy, restaurants and farmers, government and community, what worked and what did not. At one point she just casually dropped it: maybe there could be a Green Era Philly. I have been chewing on that ever since.

Philadelphia already knows it has a problem worth solving here. Food and yard material make up roughly a seventh of what the city throws away every year, and the city has set a public goal of diverting ninety percent of its waste from landfills and incinerators by 2035, a target it is still a long way from hitting through its current municipal recycling and composting programs alone. Parks and Recreation already runs a growing network of community compost sites across the city, and through Feed Philly Coalition, I get to sit with the people and organizations trying to close that gap between food that goes to waste and neighbors who do not have enough of it. None of that is Green Era Philly. All of it is the same underlying question Erika and her partners have already spent a decade answering in Chicago: what do you actually do with what a city throws away, once you decide throwing it away is not good enough anymore.

Not Circuitous. Circular.

Here is the part of Friday’s conversation that actually stuck with me the most. I told Erika that my own career sometimes feels circuitous. Restaurant guy, then economic development, then food insecurity, then urban agriculture, then policy, then waste, then energy. I have wondered out loud more than once how I got from there to here.

Erika corrected me. Maybe it is not circuitous, she said. Maybe it is circular. People come back around. Ideas mature on their own schedule. A conversation in Chicago about food waste and community wealth sits quietly for years and then shows up again in Philadelphia at exactly the moment you are finally ready to use it. We are both, as I told her, somewhere on the back nine now, thinking harder than we used to about what we actually want to do with the years still in front of us. Her father needed ten years to prove Growing Power was more than an idea. Erika needed her own version of that same patience to build Urban Growers Collective and Green Era into what they are today. I am not sure how many years my own version of this work still needs, but I am glad to know now that the shape of it is not a wrong turn. It is a circle, and Erika Allen has been part of mine since long before I understood why.

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