Sharon Prince is the President and Founder of Grace Farms Foundation, a private operating foundation established in 2009 to advance good through engagement with nature, arts, justice, community, and faith. Prince spearheaded the vision for Grace Farms, a new kind of public space that seamlessly blends architecture, art, and nature together into a platform for people across sectors to convene and activate the Foundation’s initiatives. In 2010, she commissioned the Pritzker Prize-winning firm SANAA to design its accompanying River building.
Since opening in October 2015, Grace Farms, has garnered numerous awards for contributions to architecture, environmental sustainability, and social good, including the AIA National 2017 Architecture Honor Award, Fast Company’s 2016 Innovation by Design Award for Social Good, and the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize from the Illinois Institute of Technology, where Prince participated in the symposium Reimagining the Metropolis. She served on the 2018 AIA Institute Honor Awards for Architecture Jury.
Prince has fought to disrupt contemporary slavery and violence against women on a local and global scale. In 2016, she co-hosted a convening with the United Nations University entitled Fighting Human Trafficking in Conflict, which resulted in a published report to the United Nations Security Council and advocacy for UN Resolution 2331. In 2017, she received NOMI Network’s Abolitionist Award and Auburn Seminary’s Lives of Commitment Award. She holds an MBA from the University of Tulsa.
Unchain: Freedom Needs Fighters, an upcoming media campaign to end modern day slavery, was developed by Grace Farms Foundation in partnership with Geometry Global, J. Walter Thompson, and Shazam.
After recognizing a void in addressing exploitation in the building materials supply chain, Prince formed an expanding working group to initialize a radical paradigm shift towards a slave-free built environment.
The Grace Farms Foundation Architecture + Construction Working Group (GFF A+CWG), a first-of-its-kind initiative, is bringing together an expanding group of construction and design principals, scholars, lawyers, human rights experts, media and industry association leaders to build awareness and support institutional responses, including the development of slave-free specifications and rigorous auditing standards in the procurement of construction materials.
