Grace Farms Lectures

Biography

Sharon Prince is the CEO and Founder of Grace Farms, a new kind of boundary-defying public space that advances good locally and globally. Prince commissioned Pritzker Prize-winning SANAA architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa to design Grace Farms, which has become widely known as a global humanitarian and cultural center located in New Canaan, Connecticut.

Grace Farms is the platform for the Foundation and its interdisciplinary humanitarian mission to pursue peace through nature, arts, justice, community, faith, and Design for Freedom, a global new movement to eliminate forced labor from the building materials supply chain. The open, porous architecture of the River building at Grace Farms is embedded into 80 acres of natural biodiverse landscapes. The building, designed to break down barriers between people and sectors, invites all to pause and reflect, while also encouraging engagement with Grace Farms’ work, including advancing gender and racial equity, all of which leads to creating new outcomes.

Since opening, Grace Farms has garnered numerous prestigious awards for contributions to architecture, environmental sustainability, and social good, including the AIA National 2017 Architecture Honor Award and the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize.

Grace Farms is pioneering a new form of philanthropic capitalism with a non-profit owned certified B Corp. Prince is the Co-Founder of Grace Farms Tea & Coffee which offers coffees and teas that demonstrate what the Foundation advocates for: ethical and sustainable supply chains. 100% of the profits from Grace Farms Foods supports the Design for Freedom movement to eliminate forced labor from the building materials supply chain.

After recognizing a void in addressing exploitation in the building materials supply chain in late 2017, Prince launched Design for Freedom in 2020 with a first-of-its-kind publication, a nearly 100-page Report that provides analysis and data on how forced labor is embedded into the very foundations of our buildings. At the inaugural Design for Freedom Summit in 2022, Grace Farms also released the Design for Freedom Toolkit, a practical resource professionals use to implement ethical sourcing strategies into their practices. She has guest lectured about Design for Freedom and Grace Farms to universities and industry associations around the world. In recognition of this impactful work, Fast Company named her to its list of the Most Creative People in Business 2022: For Cleaning up Construction and the AIA NY and Center for Architecture recognized her with the NYC Visionary Award.

At the start of the COVID 19 pandemic, when countries around the world shut down, Prince converted Grace Farms into a humanitarian hub to address two emerging crises: the lack of PPE for frontline health care workers and soaring food insecurity. Under her leadership, Grace Farms became the largest supplier of PPE in the state, securing, donating, and delivering more than 2 million pieces of PPE within weeks to close the acute state-wide PPE gap. She also initiated a critical food emergency program that provided more than 150,000 wholesome meals to neighbors in need. For this humanitarian work, Prince received the CEO Forum’s Transformative CEO Award | Leading through Crisis.

Biography

Professor Volf is the founding Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. His books include Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (1996; revised edition, 2019), winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion and named one of Christianity Today’s 100 most important religious books of the 20th Century; Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World (2016); The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything (2022), co-authored with Ryan McAnnally-Linz; and, most recently, co-authored with Matthew Croasmun and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most (2023).

A member of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. and the Evangelical Church in Croatia, Professor Volf has been involved in international ecumenical dialogues (for instance, with the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity) and interfaith dialogues (including the Muslim and Christian “A Common Word” initiative), as well as a participant in the Global Agenda Council on Values of the World Economic Forum. A native of Croatia, he regularly teaches and lectures in Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, and across North America. Amongst his many invited lectureships, he has given the Dudleian Lecture at Harvard University; the Chavasse Lectures at Oxford University; the Waldenstroem Lectures at Stockholm School of Theology; the Gray Lectures at Duke University; the Stob Lectures at Calvin University; and the Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham. In May 2025, he will deliver the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, UK.

Biography

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals. In 2022, Braiding Sweetgrass was adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith. This new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth’s oldest teachers: the plants around us. Robin’s newest book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (November 2024), is a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

Robin tours widely and has been featured on NPR’s On Being with Krista Tippett and in 2015 addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. In 2022 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.