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, a place of grace and peace for all, 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 a BS/BA and 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. She is a founding board member of Unchain Foundation.
In 2018, Grace Farms Foundation and Unchain entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the country of Georgia to support its commitment to transform its economy to include a regulatory model that will support ethical and transparent supply chains in its commercial sector.
Prince spearheads an effort to illuminate the permanent imprint of slavery in building material supply chains that has yet to be surfaced. Grace Farms Foundation Architecture Construction Working Group convenes industry leaders and principals to address slavery in the built environment and create actionable outcomes.
