In a recent Huffington Post piece, “Leading the Way for Food Equity,” Laurie M. Tisch, President of the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, and Rick Luftglass, the Fund’s Executive Director, celebrate leaders named to an inaugural list of 40 Under 40 by the New York City Food Policy Center at Hunter College. The list represents “leaders in the field who are working to transform the city’s food system and are doing so through innovative ideas and new partnerships.”

Among those named to the list is Claire Uno, Assistant Executive Director of Teachers College’s Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy, founded in 2013 as part of a $10 million gift from the Illumination Fund to Teachers College. Five million dollars of the 2012 gift established the Tisch Food Center at the College and seeded TC’s capital projects.

The Tisch Food Center is a flagship component of the Illumination Fund’s five-year $15 million Healthy Food & Community Change initiative, which supports novel strategies to increase access, availability, affordability and knowledge of healthy foods and promote healthy choices. The initiatives target programs in New York City’s high-need neighborhoods, creating hubs of activities and community engagement.

In their Huffington Post piece, Tisch and Luftglass recognize the work of TC’s Tisch Food Center and several other Illumination Fund grantees and partners named to Hunter’s list. “There has never been a time where there have been more passionate, innovative people trying to make lasting change than there are today,” they write. “However, there is much exponential growth that is still untapped and unrealized because we don’t do a better job of connecting our leaders, present and future. Our hope is that by continuing to create opportunities for cross-collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking, we can open up engagement with food to an even wider audience of stakeholders.”

Read the Huffington Post story.

Published Wednesday, Aug 17, 2016