Central College is honored to welcome humanitarian Heidi Kühn, 2023 World Food Prize Laureate, to campus 11 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 29, Van Emmerick Studio, Maytag Student Center.
Kühn, founder and CEO of Roots of Peace, is a peace activist who has spent more than 25 years restoring agriculture in former conflict zones. Her farmer-focused development model revitalizes farmland, food security, livelihoods and resilience after devastating conflict. Kühn founded the nonprofit Roots of Peace in 1997 to replace the remnants of war with farmland. The organization also trains farmers in modern agricultural practices, from planting and harvesting to marketing through international exports.
Kühn has grown her business model for peace across the world with the support of governments, international organizations and the private sector. To date, the work of Roots of Peace has impacted over 1 million farmers and members of farming families, spanning 10 countries.
Kühn was raised with the values of respecting the earth and its people, ideals established by her family who were early pioneers in the 1800’s. A fifth-generation Californian, she attended the University of California, Berkeley majoring in political economics, where those core beliefs were strengthened during the peace movement of the 1970’s, setting forth a lifelong commitment to pioneering the footsteps of peace.
During the early 1990’s, Kühn owned her own television news organization, NewsLink International, reporting for CNN and other news organizations in Alaska on the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the melting of the “ice curtain” between the United States and the Soviet Union. Raising her children in Juneau, Alaska, she earned a reputation for bridging borders for peace —reporting for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Nippon Television and other major media organizations.
After overcoming a cancer diagnosis, Kühn further embraced the core values she was raised with when she saw an opportunity to eradicate another form of cancer — that of landmines, which she viewed as a cancer to the Earth. From the basement of her home, she built a vision of turning “Mines to Vines” — replacing the remnants of war with bountiful vineyards and orchards of peace around the world.
The World Food Prize is an international award that recognizes and rewards individuals who address food security by improving quality, quantity or availability of food in the world. Central College has been a proud partner in this mission, hosting the lecture for years in conjunction with the World Food Prize Conference in Des Moines, Iowa.
Central’s World Food Prize Lecture will be recorded and available on the Central Dutch Network.
