Cruel Blow to Food Movement: Madoff's Ripple Effect

Food activists are likely mourning one of their own this morning: the Fair Food Foundation. The killer? Securities fraudster Bernard L. Madoff.
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Food activists are likely mourning one of their own this morning: the Fair Food Foundation. The killer? Securities fraudster Bernard L. Madoff.

The fledgling grantmaking enterprise sent an email to supporters today:

The Fair Food Foundation is ceasing operation as a grant making foundation. The funds of the donors to the Foundation were managed by Bernard L. Madoff, a prominent financial advisor who was arrested for defrauding investors out of billions of dollars. Due to the loss of funding, Fair Food Foundation is no longer in a position to consider any requests for funding. We will be spending the next few weeks closing down our operation...

The loss of the Fair Food Foundation and the potential financial support it would have provided is a stinging blow to the community of activists, advocates, organizers, and funders dedicated to redesigning our broken food system.

The fledgling foundation just began taking requests this fall, focusing its efforts on food access and urban agriculture in Detroit, MI and Oakland, CA. Headed up by Oran Hestermann, who'd helped push the Kellogg Foundation towards local and sustainable food efforts, Fair Food stood to do what foundations do best: Test approaches to social problems, and model the successes so that government can copy them.

Had Fair Food gotten off the ground, it would have been the nation's first foundation dedicated exclusively to food issues.

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