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I am in Milwaukee for the 2nd annual GLUE conference. GLUE stands for Great Lakes Urban Exchange – which is a project that was started 2 years ago by Pittsburgh’s Abby Wilson and Sarah Szurpicki of Detroit. The website GLUEspace.org has become a portal for anyone to share information about cities in the Great Lakes watershed. IheartPGH has been a fan of GLUE from the beginning (see the post from April 2008) and thanks to GLUE both great lakes city t-shirts from both IheartPGH and STL-Style made the New York Times last summer.

You can read more about the 2009 GLUE Conference here.

I just wanted to post a quick summary with some links from the first day of the conference.

We started with a tour of Growing Power, Inc. which is an urban farm in Milwaukee that has become a model and a training facility for urban agriculture around the country.  They are doing some amazing work here growing food (and worms) in green houses.

We then headed over to Sprecher Brewery for dinner – which included salad made with greens from Growing Power.

The speakers after dinner were really interesting

• Willie Hines Jr. is the president of Milwaukee Commons Council, he spoke about his experiences moving back to Milwakuee, working in business and government and running for office
• Carol Coletta is president and CEO of CEO’s for Cities – a non profit organization that advocates for cities.  Carol has lots of information and facts about cities and how to improve cities.  The CEO’s for Cities websites has lots of resources for anyone interested in cities. (Carol was one of the panelists at the first CityLive PGH event back in Sept. 2007)

Some related blog posts…

• Conference on Great Lakes Cities – March 12-14, 2009 (progresspittsburgh.net)
• Growing farmers in the inner cities (money.cnn.com)
• Local Agriculture: Healthy on its Own Terms (worldchanging.com)
• Agenda: Urban Farm Dinner, Fortune Cookies, and Tofu Tales (thefoodsection.com)