Regeneration International Founding Member Receives Lifetime Ashoka Fellowship
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 15, 2018
Contact:
Regeneration International: Katherine Paul, 207.653 3090, katherine@regenerationinternational.org
Ashoka: Amy Clark, 202.365.3452, aclark@ashoka.org
Regeneration International Founding Member Receives Lifetime Ashoka Fellowship
Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin One of 11 Social Innovators Awarded Prestigious Fellowship in 2018
MINNEAPOLIS – Regeneration International (RI) announced today that Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, founding and steering committee member, has been awarded a lifetime Ashoka Fellowship.
“This award is well deserved,” said Andre Leu, international director of RI. “Reginaldo has developed a unique regenerative poultry and agroforestry system that can used by small scale farmers around the world to take them out of poverty, produce high quality food and improve the environment. We hope that the recognition that comes with this award will assist in the scaling up of these important regenerative farming systems.”
Haslett-Marroquin said: “The Ashoka Fellowship comes at a time when I have personally struggled to find a crack in the wall of systems change, it opens a huge gap in it, sufficiently big to walk myself, my team and partners into a world of new possibilities, with less stress, with a world community and ecosystem of people also bent on changing the world, I feel blessed and fortunate to have this opportunity, I look forward to using it to expanding our collective capacity to draw down carbon, cool the planet, feed people healthy foods, and help bring back some dignity and purpose to the time honored profession of farming.”
Simon Stumpf, Director of Venture and Fellowship at Ashoka, said: “This group of Ashoka Fellows reminds us that even our most complex and tangled social challenges are solvable. Among these new Fellows are innovators transforming our food system, criminal justice system, workforce development sector, even the funeral industry. These people show us how to champion real, transformative change in a world that needs it.”
Ashoka evaluates more than 500 promising nominations every year in the United States and conducts hundreds of hours of in-person interviews before selecting Ashoka Fellows. This year’s Fellows come from small towns and urban centers all across the country. With creativity and commitment, they tackle complex challenges, imagine a new way forward and build it for everyone, for the good of all. They forge partnerships and pathways for everyone—all ages, backgrounds, walks of life—to contribute fully as changemakers.
Haslett-Marroquin is the principal architect of the poultry-centered regenerative agriculture model promoted by the Main Street Project, and which serves as the cornerstone of his work on behalf of RI, He also directs the Regeneration Agriculture Alliance, a platform designed for building regenerative agriculture support infrastructure. A native of Guatemala, Haslett-Marroquin, who lives in Northfield, Minnesota, earned his agronomy degree from the Central National School of Agriculture in Guatemala, and degrees in international business administration and communications from Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the Twin Cities International Citizens of the Year (1996), and the Northfield, Minnesota, Service to Mankind Award (SERTOMA), 2008. He serves on several nonprofit boards, including the Conservation Core of Minnesota and Iowa. Haslett-Marroquin is a founding member of Regeneration International and Regeneration Guatemala. He was appointed to the RI steering committee in 2017. He is the author of “In the Shadow of Green Man.”
The other 2018 Ashoka Fellows are: Brandon Dennison, Coalfield Development, Wayne, West Virginia; Erica Gerrity, Ostara Initiative, Viroqua, Wisconsin; Jess Ladd, Callisto, San Francisco, California; Kara Bobroff, NACA Inspired Schools Network, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Katrina Spade, Recompose, Seattle, Washington; Lam Ho, Community Activism Law Alliance, Chicago, Illinois; Molly Burhans, Goodlands, New Haven, Connecticut; Rachel Armstrong, Farm Commons, Duluth, Minnesota; and Steve Miller, HBCU Truth & Reconciliation Oral History Project, Henderson, Texas.
Regeneration International is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to promoting, facilitating and accelerating the global transition to regenerative food, farming and land management for the purpose of restoring climate stability, ending world hunger and rebuilding deteriorated social, ecological and economic systems. More here. https://regenerationinternational.org/.
For 35 years, Ashoka has pioneered social entrepreneurship, an entire field dedicated to fostering energetic problem-solving right in the communities where the problems exist. Through its time-tested growth platform, it finds, vets, and supports thousands of leading changemakers in the United States and around the world. More here. https://www.ashoka-usa.org